It's Work Rules, Not Pay

There are a lot of people complaining about the supposed differences between the hourly pay of union auto workers with the Detroit 3 and the non-union auto workers at Japanese car factories in the South.  It's tough to get an apples-to-apples comparison due to differences in pensions and such.  And in any case the hourly labor content of a Detroit 3 car is wildly distorted by the silliness of ridiculous "jobs bank" costs... where idled workers are basically paid to stay home and watch Oprah.

I'm not a big fan of unions, but at the same time I believe that unions generally arise as a result of poor management.  The problem is that it's difficult to go back even if and when management improves.  And with the undemocratic absurdity of "card check" legislation eliminating the secret ballot, that is bound to get worse.  The big impact of unions is not pay, it's work rules.  Rules that favor seniority over real experience and knowledge, and rules that often overwhelm common sense.  These nonsensical rules are what kill productivity and create inefficiency, making the Detroit 3 uncompetitive.  Implementing real lean manufacturing in an environment with strict and narrow functional boundaries is basically a non-starter.

Lori Roman over at Regular Folks used to supervise a bunch of UAW workers and tells some great stories of the nonsense of work rules.  But she doesn't just pound on the UAW... she also takes management to task for their lack of backbone to stand up to idiocy when it happens. 

To put it bluntly, the UAW takes the hard earned money of the best workers and spends it defending the very worst workers while tying up the industry with thousands of pages of work rules that make it impossible to be competitive. And the spineless management often makes short sighted decisions to satisfy the union and maximize immediate benefits over long term sustainability.

I've worked in both Teamsters and IEW factories so her accounts don't surprise me, but perhaps they still should.  A couple samples:

I had an employee who punched in his time card and then disappeared. The rules were such that I had to spend hours documenting that this man was not in his three foot by three foot work area. I needed witnesses, timed reports, calls over the intercom and a plant wide search all documented in detail. After this absurdity I decided to go my own route; I called the corner bar and paged him and he came to the phone. I gave him a 30 day unpaid disciplinary lay off because he was a “repeat offender”. When he returned he thanked me for the PAID vacation. I scoffed, until he explained: (1) He had tried to get the lay off because it was fishing season; (2) The UAW negotiated with GM Labor Relations Department to give him the time WITH PAY.

One afternoon I was helping oversee the plant while upper management was off site. The workers brought an RV into the loading yard with a female “entertainer” who danced for them and then “entertained” them in the RV. With no other management around, I went to Labor Relations for assistance. As a twenty five year old woman, I was not about to try to break up a crowd of fifty rowdy men. The Labor Relations Rep pulled out the work rules and asked me which of the rules the men were breaking. I read through the rules and none applied directly of course. Who wrote work rules to cover prostitutes at lunch? The only “legal” cause I had was an unauthorized vehicle and person and that blame did not fall on the union workers who were being “entertained” but on the security guards at the gate. Not one person suffered any consequence.

And we want more of that via Card Check?  Do they deserve a bailout?  And can they really reform those practices in three months?

Comments

[Louis English]

Bravo! Unions are not the problem. Blindly enforced narrow work rules are the problem. Workers are often the first to know and complain about how these narrowly defined rules interfere with lean initiatives and the ability to do CI. Still they provide a blind management and entrenched union leadership the cover they need to resist change by faulting each other. Meanwhile Joe/Jane Six Pack looses their employment and never gets a chance to show their creative potential.

[Rick Bohan]

The proposed loan to the auto companies seems to have started something of an "open season" on auto workers and unions in general. While there is the occasional lip service to "management that shouldn't let all this terrible stuff happen", the picture one gets from all these anecdotes (and anecdotes are all I've seen...not one anti-union pundit or commenter has presented one datum that shows that union companies are any less productive than are non-union companies)is that all this union stuff has been foisted on these poor, long suffering managers and corporate leaders by the passage of some sort of law that they had nothing to do with.

A few points:
I can come up with as many anecdotes of hard working, conscientious, committed union workers as any of you can about lazy, slovenly workers. Probably more. Anecdotes are worthless.

Every line of every contract that ever existed in any union contract was signed by management. In other words, management said, with its signature, "We agree."

In the auto, steel, coal, health care and other industries that I have experience with, unions don't hire the work force, the company does. So the question comes up...how do companies manage to hire people that cheat them? If a company does such a piss poor job of hiring, maybe it deserves what it gets?

No manager I know would read the RV story above and have anything but contempt for the supervisors and managers at that particular site. You can be sure that they aren't the victims but, one way or the other, the perpetrators of that sort of activity. Upper management leaves and a female entertainer comes on the property with no knowledge on the part of any supervisor or middle level manager? Please.

Unions didn't invent restrictive work rules, management did. Work rules came about essentially because managers wanted them back in the days of "scientific management", when it was believed that narrowly defined tasks facilitated productivity. The unions' position was, "You want narrowly defined jobs? Then put it in writing." Managers saw those narrow definitions as the foundation of efficiency. Unions saw them as the foundation of security...and large membership roles.

You can be as anti-union as you want to but at least get the facts right.

[Dan Markovitz]

Bravo to Rick's point that "If a company does such a piss poor job of hiring, maybe it deserves what it gets."

Surely one of the root causes of poor work ethic (as opposed to work quality) -- whether union or not -- is hiring the wrong people. If you hire the kind of people who want to bring a stripper on site, then, who's really to blame? And what needs to change? Not necessarily union rules, but rather, hiring criteria.

[Gary Kerr]

C'mon guys! Why can't we just call it like it is rather than dance around the issue with clever word-smithing and historical re-writes? While my experience stems from running unionized businesses in Australia, the basics are surely the same. It is all about the power imbalance between management and worker. The wider this gap (or perceived gap), the bigger the space for the Union to fill. Unions run, like any business on money. This is about membership. The core competency of the Union is to widen the perceived gap to the max and fill the space. In Australia this is sometimes done through outright lying to the membership about management intent and regularly bullying of the management.
The real issue with the female entertainers on site is that the workers felt safe to participate in an activity that they all must have known was inappropriate on work time. Bad hiring would never have prevented this and we all know it! The Unions also know that strippers on site is wrong and they would not tolerate this waste of productivity in their business offices.
So, what is the cause? In my view, the power-shift that permits a group of people to believe that they are safe from consequences of inappropriate behavior at work. They can understand that if they break the rules outside of work, there are consequences however work is a safe place under the protection of their Union. We call these workplaces "Daycare for Adults".
There are 3 main power players here. The Government wants a strong economy, the Auto makers want a strong and profitable business and the Union want a strong and profitable business. There is a way to meet everyone's needs and this is through 3-way collaboration and genuine cooperation with an unwavering agreement and focus on the objective. The traditional adversarial relationships, unreasonable use of Union power and acquiescence by weak management has clearly not worked well. Throwing the tax payers money into this toxic environment without any fundamental change in relationships looks like the last desperate attempt in an industry that has run out of time.