WORKING FOR THE JAPANESE by Joseph J. Fucini & Suzy Fucini

Author:Joseph J. Fucini & Suzy Fucini
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Free Press
Published: 1990-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

Unlike Denny Pawley, Jerry Healy did not have his departure from Mazda announced at team meetings throughout the plant. Healy, the Grand Rapids skilled trades worker who became a maintenance team leader at Flat Rock, left Mazda quietly on September 1, 1988, the day the plant celebrated the first anniversary of its official production start-up, and a little more than two years after his trip to Japan as one of Mazda’s four hundred original American hirees.

Before he quit, Healy, like the growing number of other American workers who were leaving Mazda, had an “exit interview” with a representative from the company’s labor relations department. Officially Mazda reported that seven out of every hundred workers at Flat rock were quitting, a turnover rate 40 percent higher than the company’s original projection. 7 But in reality, many workers believed that the turnover problem was much worse, especially in physically demanding areas of the plant like the body shop. To learn why the plant’s turnover rate was so high, Mazda began interviewing employees who quit. The labor relations representatives never tried to convince departing employees to stay with Mazda during an exit interview—theirs was purely a fact-finding mission. Why did you decide to leave Mazda? What were the things you liked about working here? What didn’t you like? Is there anything that we could do differently to make this a better place to work?

Healy, a quiet and intense man, answered the interviewer’s questions as honestly as he could. The main reason he was leaving, he told them, was not money, though he would be earning more at his new job with an American manufacturer. Nor was it the hours, even though his new employer did not require him to work the second shift, as Mazda sometimes did. He was leaving, he explained, because his job as a team leader at Flat Rock had “basically changed from what it was originally intended to be.” When he started working for Mazda, Healy thought that as a team leader he would be coordinating the schedules of the workers on his team, assisting in the design of jobs, overseeing the team’s supply of tools and spare parts, and rotating the members of his team into different job assignments. He assumed that as a leader he would be given the power and the responsibilities of a supervisor. For a brief period, this had in fact been the case. But over the course of his two years at the plant, Healy saw supervisory power steadily taken away from team leaders—who, like the workers under them, were hourly employees and members of the UAW—and placed in the hands of salaried (nonunion) unit leaders. Early in the plant’s history, there were only four unit leaders for the entire maintenance department—two on the day shift and two on the afternoon shift. Most of the day-to-day supervision of teams was assigned to team leaders. But the legitimacy of the team leader’s authority was never clearly established by Mazda. Charged with the responsibility of

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