A few years ago in researching Rebirth of American Industry I read Alfred Sloan’s books and articles in an attempt to understand how the management and employee relationships in this country got so screwed up. Two passages made it crystal clear.
In one, Sloan asks and answers, “What then is General Motors? Is it the 220,000 workers on the payrolls? For me, the essential ingredient – the heart if you please – of our organization is a group of not more than 10,000 workers whose skill in management, engineering and science as well as special crafts make possible the work in which all others are engaged.” In another, he wrote that the worker “accepts the hazards of poor times – the business cycle“.
In the first he makes it clear that it is not the working stiff creating the value, rather it is management. They are the elite group, the special folks. The second passage – the one about workers accepting the hazards of poor times – is absurd, and all the more so because he probably believed it. Where he got the idea that losing one’s job is not as big a deal if you work on the factory floor as it would be if you were in management is an absolute mystery. Lyndon Johnson once said that, “sometimes you just have to hunker down and take it like a jackass in a hail storm.” It is my observation that the average working guy ‘accepts’ the “hazards of poor times” a lot like a jackass ‘accepts’ that hail storm – he hunkers down and takes it because he has no choice – but that doesn’t mean it’s no big deal.
So now we hear a lot about manufacturing suffering from a lack of skilled workers. Lots of reasons behind it, to be sure, but when “Marinette Marine is struggling to persuade people to enter the skilled trades, including welding, pipefitting and electrical work,” it seems that just maybe we are seeing proof of just how incredibly, arrogantly wrong Sloan’s thinking was. “The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported Sunday that the company has reached out to nine schools, but only seven recent graduates have applied for the training program.”
Fellow local manufacturing exec Mark Kaiser, president of Lindquist Machine opines, “It’s a tough row to hoe because the bigger issue is with the parents.” Perhaps that is because the parents have been on the receiving end of layoffs at Marinette Marine in 2010 or in 2008, and Lindquist Machine.
The author of the Journal Sentinel article hits the nail right on the head: “But many parents won’t encourage their children to enter the skilled trades. They’ve seen manufacturers cut jobs and wreak havoc in the lives of people who depended on that work.” Mom and dad may have had to take it like so many jackasses in a hail storm, but they aren’t going to see their kids make the same mistake. They are not about to let their children grow up to ‘accept the business cycle’ and be one of the Sloan’s worthless 210,000.
There are no reasons for the layoffs – just rationalizations that, in the end, fall back on Sloan’s self-serving view of people. Why did Marinette Marine lay off those people? Because they didn’t get a Navy contract soon enough. It’s the Navy’s fault – the devil made me do it, or so they would like to believe. No word of any management people being laid off, however, or of any machines being sold off or buildings put on the market. There are lots of costs at Marinette Marine, so why are the hourly production folks cut and not the rest of the costs? Simply because they can and it is very easy to do.
I have a number of clients in similar boats. A history of layoffs driven by deep-seated belief in Sloan’s view makes hiring difficult. All the platitudes in the world can’t mask a basic belief that management is the heart of the business and production folks have to accept the risks of the business cycle. Culture change is usually a long, tough effort to restore credibility – to have anyone believe the production folks won’t be the first expenses to be tossed overboard when the storm comes.
I suspect Marinette Marine is going to have to go through a number of downturns and lose a bunch of Navy contracts without laying anyone off before the moms and dads in northern Wisconsin start encouraging their babies to be welders.
Original: http://idatix.com/manufacturing-leadership/dont-let-your-babies-grow-up-to-be-welders/
Marc says
These are the sort of problems you have when the shareholders think they own a piece of paper, management thinks they are running a “brand”, and the accountants think they are processing spreadsheets.
Everybody needs to be on the same page and realize they are running a company and selling a product. When you take for granted the people making the product or the people buying the product there will be consequences.
If more in management would follow the “respect for people” principle I doubt you would see so much of the OWS fallout that is so widespread today.
Robert Drescher says
Bill you hit the nail on the head perfectly, Sloan consider non-value adding overhead like himself key to a company’s success, when the reality is that the key to success is the ability of your production workers to produce products with as little support from others as possible. Good workers do not need to be told how to do their jobs nor do you need to have someone stand there to make sure they do it. But when you follow Sloan’s attitude you create the very environment that drives up the need to managers.
I am amazed that anyone would consider that Sloan knew anything, after all he did more damage at GM then he did good. WHy don’t business schools teach the JP Morgan ideas on management (Morgan hated his investment banking staff, and the executives of the companies he owned like US Steel, yet he loved blue collar workers), treat your production workers right and give them the opportunity to improve your production, and when they succeed reward them accordingly, when a manager asks for a raise, tell to be carefull about the door hitting in the backside on the way out. They do not want to teach his beliefs because the professors would find themselves out of jobs, but if people followed his ideas we wouldn’t be in the current mess. He was a man that spent easily on new ideas and on increase production ability, but hated spending a penny on anything that was just overhead.
It is the overhead of our companies that is killing them, and making cuts to production ability just speeds up the process, because you have a constantly narrower base to spread it on.
Tine Goedhart says
Your baby welders made me think about diplomas in technical fields in the netherlands. College exams there are monitored by governmental boards, all studentes make the exams at the same time, scoring is done in à tandem: your own teacher as well as an outsider check the answers and exams are the same nationwide. So far so good.
Then the apprentice at my company (a more than a century old Amsterdam based smitty / steel construction workshop) goes through his final year:
His theoretical teacher gives him his tests and scores them alone. The practical part of the exam is my duty as employer. I can issue my apprentice à commercial job, call it his exam and score it. Yes, we don’t have a language bug: there is no nationwide standard with unison exams for the technical middle streams. No second opinion either.
Furthermore my apprentice has à portfolio of two years which I score as well. So 2/3 of his total depends on the whims of an entrepreneur instead of a trained teaching professional.
How about the emotional value of his diploma compaired to that of à college student. Globalisation? Standard recognition for à diploma? Resilience of an employé in an era without eternal employeship at the same company?
Oh and by the way: in Holland the latter way of education is eufemistically called “competence based learning”
Tony says
The problem Bill highlights is one of the most tragic of these days. It reflects the ill state of society and aggravates that state in a vicious cycle. It is also quite an irony that a culture that was born from defeating a feudal relational society is led by people that are attempting to rebuild those same feudal relations for their own “benefit”. To speak about this probably unconscious and certainly biased attempt to emulate the former “class foes” may seem irrelevant for the issue at stake, but it is not. In fact, this makes the elite of nowadays indeed – but mostly unaware about it – quite shaky about their own role and about having any usefulness to the community. The typical response for that unsecure status is often to exhibit a forceful and dogmatic personality that hides, mainly for the self, any hint of its own uselessness. It is not strange, in this context, to see no change of attitude of management and, instead, to read a bewildering amount of useless explanations about why blue-collar workers are not motivated, how they should be, what they should tell their kids and so on, so that top managers can dedicate their best efforts to play the entrepreneurial “chess” they learn at management schools and around what they tend to believe the world revolves.