Work in America: Report of a Special Task Force to the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare ©1973
The New American Workplace ©2006
"The thrust toward 'early' retirement calls into doubt the very meaning of 'retirement.'… [R]ecent analysis of census data indicates that older men increasingly do not and will not want to retire at age 65."
Wow, did we get that right! Americans' deferral of retirement is good news for corporations as we head toward a labor crunch with the aging of the boomer generation. Alas, the willingness of Americans to soldier on is not simply a voluntary response among work-loving men and women who are living longer, healthier lives and want to feel productive. Many workers want to retire, but they are not able to do so "in comfort": Boomers are discovering that the once-prevalent company pension plans that funded their parents' retirements will not be able to pay for theirs.
"As Irving Bluestone of the UAW writes, 'Just as management is beginning to ponder the new problems of discontent and frustration in the workforce, so must unions join in finding new ways to meet these problems.' If new ways are to be charted and accepted, the trade-union movement must be among the initiators of new demands for the humanization of work."
The unions had their chance and blew it. Inexplicably, union leaders did not play a significant role in the efforts in the 1970-1980s era to improve the quality of work life in America. Their failure undercut their power and credibility. It might also be argued that when unions walked away from promising experiments to improve American industrial competitiveness through worker participation in decision making and profit sharing, they contributed to the decline in the number of manufacturing jobs in U.S. Rust Belt industries. And there is no doubt that their failure to respond to their members' desire for improved working conditions contributed to the decline of industrial trade unionism.
"Most of the work redesign effort has confined itself to small work groups. Little of it has embraced the wider implications of the system's viewpoint and involved a plant or a corporation as a whole. The major exception to this trend is a General Foods manufacturing plant that was designed to incorporate features that would provide a high quality of working life, enlist unusual human involvement, and achieve high productivity…. [I]ndustrial engineers had indicated that 110 workers would be needed to man the plant. But when the team concept was applied… the result was a manning level of less than 70 workers…. [And] the major economic benefit has come from such factors as improved yields, minimized waste, and avoidance of shutdowns."
The Gaines dog-food plant in Topeka, Kansas, became the most talked about factory in America since Henry Ford's first assembly line in Dearborn, Michigan. The bad news: Within a few years, General Foods executives decided against applying its high-involvement management approach at the company's other facilities. They then added layers of managers and supervisors in the plant until the productivity of the once-self-managing workers was whittled down to the company average!
The good news: Over the next few years, other companies (most notably Procter & Gamble) copied practices introduced in the plant, including the empowerment of work teams to choose their methods of production, to allocate their own tasks, to set their own schedules, and to recruit new members. Today, many U.S. manufacturing plants and customer-service organizations operate with self-managing work teams, flat hierarchies, and financial-gain-sharing plans.
"So far, we have seen that the redesign of work is feasible, that a careful alteration of jobs can lead to participation in responsibility and profits, and that the precise nature and extent of participation is a matter for experimentation within each workplace. [So] why not simply get out of the way to avoid being crushed in the stampede? The answer is, of course, 'it isn't as easy as it looks.' Single remedies (e.g., 'job enrichment,' 'job rotation,' 'management by objectives') abound for the ills of work. Such efforts have failed because there is no single source of job dissatisfaction. In brief, the bad experiences of employers in the past have led them to ask: 'Whom can I trust?' "
We were naive. We failed to recognize that the greatest obstacles to high-involvement workplaces are the attitudes and assumptions of top executives. Many are still threatened by the prospect of worker participation. And too many leaders of American corporations still believe they have "no choice" but to match the working conditions and employment practices of their lowest-wage competitors at home and, increasingly, abroad.
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