Restoring Prosperity:: How Workers and Managers Are Forging a New Culture of Cooperation

Calling themselves industrial anthropologists, UCLA professor Wilms and a team of graduate students embarked six years ago upon a unique study of the changing relationship between management and labor. The study, which involved working as factory hands, focused on four then-floundering companies: Douglas Aircraft, Hewlett-Packard's Santa Clara division and two joint ventures, General Motors with Toyota and U.S. Steel with the Korean steelmaker POSCO. The researchers found the companies transforming themselves in an era of downsizing, robotization and globalization. Managers were listening to ideas from labor; unions were less confrontational. In the case of the two joint ventures, people were overcoming barriers of language and culture. Budgets, employee rosters and inventories were all leaner, as speed and productivity increased. But none of the above was seen as lessening the national trauma of losing millions of factory jobs. Education (after fundamental school reform), says Wilms, now holds the key to restoring prosperity. But will it replace all those jobs? Wilms offers no easy answers. (Aug.)