New Speedup in Auto

Kim Moody

IN SEPTEMBER 1987 the United Auto Workers (UAW) signed a new three-year accord with the Ford Motor Company. The union heralded the new contract’s job­security plan, which was supposed to guarantee the jobs of all of the 104,000 workers currently on hourly payroll at Ford. The membership ratified it by a 72% majority.

Of course, the new program, called Guaranteed Employment Numbers (GEN), allowed for layoffs in the event of a decline in the auto market, and the number of guaranteed jobs could fall by half the rate of attrition. The deal did not really prevent contracting out of work previously done within the firm (outsourcing) or technological displacement, but it provided income protection up to $500 million for those displaced-more than twice the protection offered in the 1984 Protected Employee Program (PEP).(1)

The real significance of this contract, however, did not lie in how little or how much the workers had gained in wages or even alleged job security; it lay in what it gave the company.

The 1987 agreement with Ford codified the existing practice of competitive bargaining at the plant level. That is, the contract not only allowed local unions to offer concessions on work rules and other local matters in order to lower labor costs, it actually mandated that each local come up with a joint union-management plan to do so within six months of the signing of the contract. The wording of the UAW’s summary of the contract indicated that the means for increasing “quality and efficiency at the location” would include many of the elements of what had become known as “Team Concept.” The effort to implement this new form of work organization, the union summary stated, “may require change or waiver of certain agreements or practices.”(2)

The efforts to improve efficiency by dismantling the traditional forms of union protection on the shop floor represented the latest stage in the unfolding of competitive bargaining in auto and throughout U.S. industry. Competitive bargaining began with concessions at Chrysler in 1979-1981-the agreement to freeze and later cut wages and benefits in order to “buy time” for Chrysler to become competitive once again.

This act, justified by the genuine possibility that Chrysler would fold, put labor costs on a competitive basis within the industry by breaking the longstanding wage and benefits pattern that covered the Big Three (Ford, Chrysler, and General Motors) and influenced bargaining at many of the major parts suppliers.

What followed, first at Ford, then at GM, was competitive bargaining at the local level. In the first instance, the opportunity for pitting local unions against one another in a bidding war for jobs (a process called “whip­sawing”) was provided by overcapacity. In 1980, Ford announced it would close one of its six stamping plants and asked Local 420 at its Cleveland stamping plant to give up certain work rules in order to stay open. The UAW International urged the local to give in, which it did.

This type of whipsawing has lasted longer at General Motors because of its chronic overcapacity in domestic production, but it was made credible at both Ford and Chrysler by the alternative of domestic and international outsourcing. The competitor, in each case, was any plant on the globe, in or out of the same corporation, capable of producing the same or a substitutable product.

In 1981, for example, Ford won concessions from a number of locals by threatening to outsource work to other companies, including Toyo Kogyo, a Japanese firm that is 25% Ford-owned.(3) This stage of the process was lubricated by the spread of Quality of Work Life and Employee Involvement programs that attempted to tie the loyalty of the workers to company goals.

What comes next appears to be embodied most thoroughly in the totally redefined labor relations practiced at the New United Motors Manufacturing, Inc. (NUMMI) plant in Fremont, California. NUMMI is a jointly owned project of GM and Toyota, formerly run by GM and now managed by Toyota. Toyota has introduced an unmodified version of the type of work organization and labor relations practiced at its plants in Japan.

Known here as “Team Concept,” NUMMI’s organization of production seems to defy most of the traditional and contemporary theories of effective industrial management. It turns Taylorism* on its head to produce the most advanced Taylorization of the labor process ever achieved. It eschews the conventional wisdom about the role of new technology in productivity growth, but lays the basis for a more far-reaching application of technology than the most robotized factory in the GM system has achieved or planned.

Perhaps the most important feature of the NUMMI set­ up, however, is the total marginalization of the union that it has achieved. This is what the new Ford contract points toward.

Whatever NUMMI may mean to the management theorists of Toyota, it is no more the end of the process of change in the auto industry than was concessionary bargaining or Quality of Work Life. Like each of those stages in the advance of the industry’s competitive imperative, it was a means to yet another end-competitive profitability. Like the various corporate strategies that preceded it, some of which have not even played themselves out yet, NUMMI’s Team Concept lays the basis for another stage in the sorting out of a global industry-and the unraveling of a union.

Before examining the current setup at NUMMI and assessing its significance, it is important to look at the strategies that preceded it and the context in which they arose.

Internationalization As Context & Strategy

The internationalization of the auto industry preceded its crisis in profitability. Indeed, it was a consequence of the high profitability of the U.S. industry and the perception of its leading players that this success could be repeated elsewhere. In the 1950s and 1960s, Ford, GM and finally Chrysler moved first into the European market. In England and on the continent, they set up their own subsidiaries or, as with GM and Opel, entered into joint­operating ventures.

Success in Europe led to similar ventures in areas of the Third World believed to have growing markets. During the 1960s, for example, GM’s domestic production grew by one-half, that in Europe doubled, while its production in Latin America and South Africa grew by nearly nine times. The bulk of this production was directed at the market in which it was produced.

In the case of Latin America and Africa, this strategy was still well within the traditions of “Fordism,”** in that it envisioned local or regional integrated mass production tied to the expectation of an expanding middle-class consumer market. For this reason the favored corners of Latin America were initially Argentina and Brazil, while that in Africa was South Africa.(4)

The beginnings of the crisis of profitability in auto, as in the Western capitalist economies generally, both intensified this search for new markets and led to the notion of the “world car” — the first step toward the true internationalization of production. The proliferation of productive facilities by the major auto makers (not only U.S.­ based firms, but European companies like Fiat and Volkswagen, as well) led to the discovery that the basically identical small cars popular in most markets outside the United States could be produced in a variety of plants within the corporation’s international system.

The first experiment in the “world car” concept, the Ford of Britain’s Cortina, was composed of parts made in Britain but assembled and sold around the world.(5) The next logical step was to supplement this idea with multiple sourcing of components, as in the later Ford Fiesta.

Ford’s “world car” began as a European-based experiment made possible by the existence of duplicate plants on the continent and in Britain. The original version developed in the 1970s foresaw a car of uniform design that could be sourced and assembled anywhere. It was essentially a response to the rising threat of Japanese imports in the European, North American and Latin American markets. Ford’s first fully “world car,” the Escort, proved to be a success.

Before the new stage in internationalization could be conceived as a practical approach, the traditional “Fordist” method of dealing with slumping profits or competition had to be seen as a failure. Within the United States and Canada-viewed by the Big Three and, until recently the UAW, as one market-auto production followed the classical “Fordist” precepts. This meant sourcing the majority of components “in-house” or with a limited number of suppliers traditionally tied to one or another of the Big Three.

For purposes of regional distribution, there were often multiple sources and multiple assembly plants. But within the North American market, labor costs were more or less uniform throughout the industry. Competition among the auto makers existed, but was not waged on the basis of labor costs, as such. The pattern agreements that covered all the auto makers and their major parts suppliers precluded competition on the basis of wages or benefits.

The traditional means of seeking competitive labor costs, therefore, lay in the capital-intensive search for more efficient technology-another aspect of traditional “Fordism.” GM became the leading practitioner of this approach in the late 1960s and early 1970s through its General Motors Assembly Division (GMAD) and the introduction of robots. Because this approach increased the technical and organic compositions of capital, it only intensified the declining rates of profits within the industry. Although some would be slower to recognize it than others, “Fordisrn” had exhausted itself in the United States by the early 1970s.(6)

On the one hand, the failure of technology to save the U.S. auto makers from intensified foreign competition, particularly the Japanese, led to .further overseas investment in order to intensify and expand the exploitation of select Third World markets. Between 1960 and 1980 the North American market had slipped from 61% of the non-communist world market to 37%. During those years, the North American market had expanded by 39%, compared to 188% for Europe and 600 % in Latin America. Ford’s Donald Petersen said as late as 1982 that “the highly profitable growth markets in the next decade and beyond will be those outside the United States.”(7)

On the other hand, it also led to the adaptation and modification of the “world car” idea. The concept was broadened from that of a globally-marketed uniform car to the use of competitive multiple sourcing for the purpose of lowering the cost structure of a variety of cars produced for the North American market. Prior to the era of competitive bargaining within the United States, GM attempted this scheme through its “Southern Strategy,” its attempt to build non-union facilities in the South in the 1970s.

This “Southern Strategy” was still within the parameters of the “Fordist” idea of in-house vertical integration within the national market. The next step was to develop internationally based-multiple sourcing for products directed at the North American market.

In the 1980s, the international investment patterns of the Big Three auto makers took a new direction. Increasingly, the Third World investments of the Big Three were directed at the U.S. market. On the one hand, the auto makers began to use new and existing joint ventures with Japanese or European firms to import finished cars (the “captives”) to the United States, thus sharing in the profits of their major competitors. Chrysler entered a joint agreement with Mitsubishi; GM with Isuzu, Suzuki, and Toyota; and Ford with Mazda.(8)

On the other hand, they turned toward building Third World-based plants that produced components for cars assembled in the United States. In the early 1980s, Ford, Chrysler and GM all built engine plants in Mexico that supply their U.S. assembly plants. By the mid-1980s, GM had seventeen plants in Mexico supplying U.S. facilities and was planning eleven or twelve more.9

By 1985, overseas content in cars and trucks produced by the Big Three in the United States was only S%, but all three major producers had managed to introduce a new competitive element within the system of domestic production. Most of these new parts plants are Mexican­based maquiladoras, meaning that they pay no import duties and are nearly as accessible to U.S. assembly plants as many U.S. operations. The dozens of supplier plants that operate in Mexico pay less than $1.00 an hour.(10)

Because these plants are meant to replace operations in the United States, implying potential plant closings, they became one of the levers for introducing competitive bargaining, once that option had been permitted by the UAW.

International outsourcing was a response to the inflexibility of U.S. labor costs, so it followed that once those costs became a declining phenomenon, the strategy of seeking low-cost sources of components within the United States but outside the firm became an additional alternative. While labor costs would still be much higher than those in Mexico, no investment at all was required — simply a purchase agreement. Furthermore, increased domestic outsourcing would allow the companies that pursued this course to reduce their in-house labor force and costs more rapidly than those who had to wait for the completion of new plants abroad.

In fact, it is possible for a corporation to pursue both courses simultaneously: in the short term, creating relative savings by switching to domestic outsourcing and in the longer run, building maquila plants which can ultimately replace both the in-house labor and the relatively more expensive domestic contractors. This would appear to be the course taken by Ford and Chrysler.

GM’s Big Mistake

General Motors appears to have pursued all of the management strategies of the 1980s. It was among the first to build extensively in Mexico and to implement Quality-of-Work-Life programs throughout the country. It went beyond this to introduce the more fully developed form of Japanese work organization, Team Concept, at its new “greenfield” plants in Shreveport, Louisiana, and Hamtramck, Michigan. Like the others it entered into joint operating agreements with Japanese firms, including the NUMMI plant. Yet, the heart of GM’s plan for competitiveness in the 1980s was essentially “Fordist” in conception.

In 1979, GM addressed its profitability problem with an aggressive $40 million program of redesign and huge investment. At a final cost of $60 billion, GM spent eight years redesigning its cars and operating facilities. It put its faith in robots and new computerized technology to cure the problem of slumping productivity. It spent $2.5 billion to buy H. Ross Perot’s high tech EDS, as an aid in improving its own technology (and $700 million to get rid of Perot). Aside from its Mexican plants, it did not emphasize outsourcing, and, hence, it did not reduce its labor force as drastically as Ford and Chrysler.

General Motors continued to produce two-thirds to 70% of its components in-house. Productivity increases were forthcoming, but they could not offset the mammoth cost of the project and the inevitable rise in the capital-labor ratio. By the second half of the 1980s, GM faced a slumping return on investment, a declining pro­ portion of the U.S. market (a function of the look-alike nature of its cars), and persistent overcapacity.(11)

While GM did not accelerate its outsourcing, it did announce in 1986 that it would close nine U.S. plants within the next couple of years. Even before this, it began using its overcapacity to whipsaw locals into accepting Team Concept. In December 1985, GM confronted the local unions at the two plants that produced the Camaro-Van Nuys, California, and Norwood, Ohio. Against considerable resistance the membership at Van Nuys voted for Team Concept, and that local got the work — Norwood was closed.

In similar whipsawing contests, GM imposed Team Concept on its Janesville, Wisconsin, and Arlington, Texas, plants in 1987.(12) What technology and massive investment had failed to do for GM, it now hoped to accomplish through whipsawing its plants into the Team Concept.

Ford & Chrysler: Disinvestment As Strategy

In the early 1980s, Ford and Chrysler were not only experiencing falling profits margins like GM, but losing vast amounts of money. Chrysler, of course, turned toward the federal government to prevent collapse. Because of their cash-poor positions, Ford and Chrysler took a fundamentally different course toward recovery than GM. Rather than emphasizing the traditional means of reducing labor costs through increased capital investment; they sought to trim their workforces and operating facilities.

During the 1980s Ford closed fifteen U.S. plants, while Chrysler closed about twenty-five of its U.S. operations. Chrysler’s hourly workforce fell from 100,000 in 1978 to 70,000 by the mid-1980s, while Ford’s workforce plunged from 190,000 in 1978 to 104,000 in 1987.(13)

The workforce and cost reductions at Ford and Chrysler were due to more than plant closings. Rather than build new plants, as GM did, they outsourced a growing share of their components to domestic and international suppliers. Thus it is estimated that Ford produces only 40% to 50% of the content of its cars, while Chrysler’s in-house content is only about 30% to 35%, compared to two-thirds to 70% for GM.(14)

The cost savings are large because labor costs among the suppliers are considerably lower than those of the Big Three. But additionally, the cash saved by avoiding direct investment in plant and equipment has improved their profit margins significantly. Recognizing this, GM has also shifted its strategy toward outsourcing in the last couple of years, announcing that it will increase its proportion of outsourced production by 10% by the end of 1987.(15)

The 1987 settlement at Ford and, to a lesser extent, at Chrysler of Canada, has to be understood in this context. At Ford, for example, guaranteeing the current level of hourly employment represents little more than a recognition of the drastic workforce reductions of the previous decade and its increased dependence on outsourcing. In all likelihood, the number of workers who will have to be compensated for displacement will be relatively small. An indication that Ford was not worried about the financial burden of the new contract was its announcement, shortly after signing with the UAW, that it intended to spend $3 billion to $4.5 billion over ten years to purchase First Nationwide Bank.

Furthermore, Ford’s dependence on outsourcing has put it in an even better position to whipsaw than GM. One of the provisions of the 1987 pact expands the 1984 definition of what consists of outsourcing. Like the 1984 agreement, however, the purpose of the clause is to give the local union threatened with outsourcing a chance to underbid the potential contractor by conceding still more work rules and moving farther toward a NUMMI-style Team Concept organization of production.(16) While the UAW advertises this as job security, it is, in combination with the more general provision for adopting local operations efficiency plans mentioned earlier, an even greater opening to speedup.

Because GM still produced so many of its components in-house and had not trimmed its operations to the degree that Ford and Chrysler had, it was thought that GM would resist the Guaranteed Employment Number program accepted by Ford. But as the Detroit Free Press revealed, Don Ephlin, head of the UAW’s GM department had met personally with GM Chief Executive Officer Roger Smith to convince him that the deal was a good one for GM.

The plan, known as Secured Employment Levels (SEL) at GM, of course exempted all plants GM had already announced it would close. This would allow GM to reduce permanently its hourly workforce from 335,000 to 280,000. As at Ford, GM could lay off any number of workers in the event of further sales slumps. But even more important was the union’s formal stamp of approval on the elimination of local work rules and on the spread of Team Concept. An unidentified source in GM management told the Free Press:

“There is a lot more flexibility to redesign and downsize the organization [GM] than meets the eye. Ephlin is a bright man and Bieber is a good man, and they understand the situation here. And the last thing those guys wanted to do was put GM in jeopardy. They’re not going to screw up General Motors by providing a contractual agreement that is going to reduce their competitiveness.”(17)

The Team That Always Loses

Though the paths differ somewhat, the workers at the Big Three are being led into a forced march toward the Team Concept. The whip that presses the march forward is the local competitive bargaining that is itself driven at first by overcapacity and now by both domestic and international outsourcing. The direction of this march is not toward labor-management harmony or worker participation, as the public relations for Team Concept often states, but toward a level and intensity of speedup unknown in auto for generations.

As noted, the most advanced application of the Team Concept so far in the United States is at the NUMMI plant in Fremont, California. At NUMMI, Team Concept is an integrated system of production that incorporates most of the better known techniques used in the Japanese auto industry. These include: just-in-time inventory, extensive outsourcing, elimination of job classifications (there is one production classification and three for skilled trades), the blurring of union-management lines in the Team, pay for knowledge (the more jobs you learn, the higher your pay), the reduction of jobs to their simplest form, and peer pressure to reduce absenteeism and in­ crease production speed.

The Team organization of production is governed by what Jane Slaughter and Mike Parker, who are preparing an in-depth report for Labor Notes, call “management by stress.” This means that the assembly system is purposefully stretched to its breaking point. Just-in-time inventory control, for example, removes the slack provided the traditional auto assembly line by the stockpiling of parts.

Under this system, flaws in the assembly line are made visible by the workers’ ability to stop the line, as at NUMMI, or to discuss bottle-necks and difficulties in the Team. With the glitches or rough spots identified, management or the Team itself can remove them, further speeding up production.

The success of “management by stress” is dependent on the cooperation of the union at all levels. As with quality­ of-work-life schemes, the workers are led to identify with the company’s goals. But in the Team Concept this is veiled even more by making the worker part of a new functioning collective — the Team.

At NUMMI, the Team Leader is a union member appointed by management. In other places, the Team Leader is chosen by the Team itself. What is central is that the Team Leader has supervisory authority. Above the Team Leaders are the Group Leaders, who are formally management. Team Leaders and Group Leaders collaborate and the old antagonism between foreman and steward is abolished. Grievances are a thing of the past since problems are supposed to be collectively worked out by the Team.

At the shop floor level this is a step beyond union/management cooperation, QWL, or “jointness.” It results in the obliteration of the union as a distinct organism with a defined function. The union is as much an “outsider” in the system of production as the distant world headquarters of the corporation.

It should be obvious that such a marginalization of the union in the workplace poses a fundamental threat to the existence of unionism itself. With no function in the day­to-day life of the workers, the unions becomes little more than the dispenser of various forms of private social insurance– a vendor, rather than an organizer.

If the company is able to monopolize the role of “organizer” within the labor process, it may well be able to become the “vendor” as well.

Without job classifications, standardized work rules, or functioning shop-floor union organization, the Team becomes subject to a unique form of Taylorism. Taylor, of course, wanted to break down the motions of a job in order to deprive the work group of any independent power. In Team Concept, the Team itself appears to break down the job into its most efficient components as it locates the weaknesses in the production process.

In its most advanced form, as at NUMMI, however, the methods of reducing a job to its fundamental motions is done within a management-defined analytical frame­ work. Measuring the time of each job and the time each worker works on a car, motions can be quantified, picked apart, and restructured to increase productivity, that is, reduce labor time on each car.(18)

As with traditional Taylorism, the nearly mechanical quantification of work within the production process lays the basis for the post-Team Concept stage of development: automation. Industrial engineers create or modify robots or more traditional mechanisms to reproduce the quantified motions formerly performed by human labor. This is the road not yet taken. As we have seen with the GM example, there may be reasons for avoiding this road so long as the productivity of labor grows at a satisfactory rate.

In a period such as this, where large-scale, capital­intensive investment tends to be risky or even counter­productive (by raising the organic composition of capital too rapidly), it is more likely the major auto makers in the United States, both American and Japanese, will pursue the Team Concept road to speed-up. The UAW clearly favors this route. It has praised the NUMMI example in its magazine, Solidarity, and has given its stamp of approval once again in the 1987 GM and Ford contracts.(19) This means that official resistance to speedup will not be forthcoming in the foreseeable future. Accelerated speed­up throughout the auto industry is, thus, a near certainty.

History tends to show that capitalist enterprises possessed of the means to speed up labor do not know when to stop. The UAW was itself born of a speedup that began in the 1920s and accelerated under the whip of the depression, which heightened competition by restricting the market. Growing reports have appeared of frazzled nerves and stressed-out workers in Nissan’s Smyrna, Tennessee, plant and at NUMMI.

So far, the reaction by the workers has been largely restricted to grumbling or quitting (14% at NUMMI between spring of 1986 and 1987).(20) But as the companies pursue speedup through management by stress, they are creating tomorrow’s Lordstowns or even tomorrow’s rebirth of union militancy.

The new system of Team Concept that the Big Three automakers hope to implement in the next few years is a highly vulnerable one. Obviously, an assembly line that is stretched to its limits can be halted by concerted action of almost any “team” along the, way. Similarly, the just-in-time inventory system gives workers in key parts plants the ability to cripple production more immediately than in the past.

Short stoppages are harder to control and defuse than prolonged strikes, particularly if they spring up or rotate around the system of integrated production with be­ wildering rapidity. Ironically, management by stress not only gives the assembly-line workers at the Big Three the potential to halt production, but it bestows new power on the lower-paid workers in the contracting supplier companies. This extends to those plants, in-house or out, in Mexico or other Third World nations, where a supplier plant is integrated into just-in-time assembly plants. The possibilities for new tactics and direct international worker solidarity are tantalizing.

Because capital, as well, must be aware of this potential, union cooperation has been a key element of the whole move toward Team Concept and whatever lies beyond. While the leadership of the UAW willingly volunteered their own cooperation, that of the ranks had to be won through fear. The large margins by which the recent Ford and GM contracts passed indicate just how deep this fear is. The fuel of this fear has been whipsawing and outsourcing, both domestic and international.

The wages of fear have been the weakening of union organization in the workplace-in some cases to the point of near disappearance. With collaboration at the top and disorganization at the base, the crippling of even a highly vulnerable system of production becomes increasingly problematic. Stripped of power by its own consent, the union becomes expendable to the workers as well as to management.

Still, the system of shop-floor unionism that is being swept away in auto at an alarming rate was a deeply flawed one. It rested on no-strike clauses and a system of industrial jurisprudence that was designed to mute and channel conflict. It replaced an older system of direct representation and direct action that was born in the 1930s and took many years to mangle into conformity with the orderly process of grievance bargaining.

That older system grew out of the inhuman speedup of the 1920s and early 1930s. Born of resistance to speedup, the fighters who built the old stewards’ system in auto moved rapidly to end competition among workers by creating a national and then international union, standardizing wages and benefits as it resisted speedup. That was how the UAW was created.

The potential to recreate rank-and-file unionism in auto hangs in the balance of fear, on the one hand, and intolerable conditions, on the other. The dynamic of the last few years has given fear the upper hand. But as capital mistakes fear for complacency and pushes beyond the limits of human endurance, it may make the cost of fear too great. Then, once again, auto workers will seek each other out, test the waters of resistance, find willing leaders, and reinvent industrial unionism.

*The method of so-called scientific management, pioneered by industrial engineer Frederick Taylor, in which the operations of a phase of the production process are broken down into various unskilled jobs and speeded up through the use of time and motion studies. Taylorism remains the basic means by which the labor process in the mass production industry is organized. Its original goal was to remove shop-floor power from skilled craftsmen by deskilling work and placing the definition of each job in the hands of management. In the case of team concept, the teams of workers themselves break down the operations into their basic motions, in effect, doing management’s job for it.

**”Fordism” refers to the combination of mass-production industry and assembly-line technology with the development of a mass consumer base capable of buying the products of such expanded production. The concept was implemented earliest and most thoroughly by Henry Ford in the U.S. automobile industry in the first two decades of the 20th century but was rapidly extended to the production of electrical appliances, home furnishings and other consumer items once available only to the upper classes.

Notes

1. UAW-Ford Report, September 1987, pp. 1-4.
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2. Ibid, p. 22.
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3. Labor Notes, Nov. 23, 1981.
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4. Emma Rothschild, Paradise Lost: The Decline of the Auto Industrial Age (New York, 1973), pp. 222-234.
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5. Ibid, pp. 233-236.
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6. Alan Lipietz, “Towards Global Fordism7” New Left Review, March/April 1982, pp. 35-36.
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7. Harley Shaiken, Work Transformed: Automation and Labor in the Computer Age (Lexington, MA, 1984), pp. 236-237.
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8. John Chowcat, “Ford-Marching East and West,” International Labour Reports, May-June 1985, pp. 20-21.
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9. Michael Moore,  “Made in Mexico,” Multinational  Monitor, February 1987, pp. 3-6; Shaiken, p. 240.
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10. Solidarity, Dec. 1-15, 1986; May 1-15, 1987; Moore, p. 3.
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11. Business Week, March 16, 1987, pp. 103-106; In These Times, Sept. 16-22, 1987.
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12. Eric Mann, “UAW Backs the Wrong Team,” >i>The Nation, Feb. 14, 1987, pp. 172–174; Business Week, Aug. 10, 1987, p. 25; Labor Notes, February 1987; Detroit Free Press, Feb. 12, 1987.
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13. Business Week, Sept. 28, 1987, pp. 78-82; Bill Parker, “Plant Closing and the Alternatives: The Chrysler Experience,” mimeo, April 1982.
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14. In These Times, Sept. 16-22, 1987.
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15. United Auto Workers, “Proposed Resolution 1987 Collective Bargaining Program,” April 1987, p. 17.
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16. UAW-Ford Report, September 1987, p. 6.
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17. Detroit Free Press, Oct. 11, 1987.
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18. The description of Team Concept is drawn from the work of Mike Parker and Jane Slaughter in preparation for a forthcoming manual on Team Concept to be published by Labor Notes. It was specifically drawn from a paper delivered by Slaughter at a conference on Team Concept held in Britain in September 1987.
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19. Solidarity, August 1985, pp. 11-15; UAW-Ford Report, September 1987; UAW-GM Report, October 1987.
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20. Dollars & Sense, May 1987; The Progressive, May 1987; Solidarity, June 1987.
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November-December 1987, ATC 11