Book review: Worker Leadership: America’s Secret Weapon in the Battle for Industrial Competitiveness, by Fred Stahl

Abstract

Fred Stahl Worker Leadership: America's Secret Weapon in the Battle for Industrial Competitiveness, MIT Press, Cambridge, AAA, 2013; 256 pp: 9780262019637, 20.95 [pounds sterling] (hbk) It is widely believed that Barrack Obamas bailout of the automobile industry in Detroit was a decisive factor in his success in the 2012 presidential election. While this probably had more to do with the vagaries of the US electoral system than with the relative importance of auto manufacturing to the US national economy, the intervention was nonetheless loaded with symbolic significance. In contrast to Britain, where the gradual collapse of car manufacturing was met with a characteristically polite fatalism, the decline of the US auto industry has been nothing less than a source of national shame for many Americans. The poignant frustration of Hank Hill, the lead character in Mike Judges TV series King of the Hill, captures the essence of it: in one episode, Hank suffers a profound existential crisis when he borrows his neighbour's Japanese-manufactured lawnmower and realises it is, without doubt, much better than his own, domestically-produced one. In Worker Leadership: America's Secret Weapon in the Battle for Industrial Competitiveness, Fred Stahl argues that progressive industrial management holds the key to restoring the USA to its former glory. At its core is a paean to the methods and pioneering spirit of Dick Klein, general manager at the Illinois-based agricultural equipment manufacturer John Deere & Company. The story of Kleins success in turning around a number of seemingly moribund factories-starting with the firm's Ottumwa plant in the late-1980s, moving on to the Harvester Works at Moline--makes up roughly two-thirds of this mini-treatise. Stahl, a former Boeing Company executive who has examined Klein's techniques at first hand, believes that they offer nothing less than 'a revolution in production, in labour relations, and in industrial competitiveness'. For over 200 years since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, bosses have fixated on concentrating the division of labour at the expense of the capacity for individual initiative. This reached its apogee with Henry Ford's conveyor-belt system, and modern industry hasn't looked back since. Managers inspired by FW Taylor's doctrine of 'scientific management' have sought in vain to mitigate and manage the alienation of the industrial worker, whose work had become commensurately duller, more repetitive, and more mind-numbing. Psychotherapy and psychology were enlisted to help workers adjust: the eccentric theories of industrial psychologists like Elton Mayo were just the tip of a vast 'human relations' iceberg. The goal of Dick Kleins 'worker leadership' is to reverse this historic process of de-skilling. Rather than trying to 'fix' unhappy employees, Klein recommends that managers look at what they can do to organise the technical aspects of work in such a way as to make jobs as fulfilling as is realistically possible. Mayo's Human Relations Movement proclaimed that a happy worker is a productive worker; Klein is effectively turning that on its head, arguing that a productive worker is a happy worker. Klein's 'worker leadership' is essentially a progressive version of the lean manufacturing practice that had been imported to North America from Japan with mixed results in the late-1980s. Just as top-down control of a national economy is notoriously inefficient, says Stahl, so operational control remote from the workplace inevitably leads to waste. To this end, Klein advocates substituting Toyota-style 'just-in-time' production for the inefficient and wasteful 'big-batch' method that is still prevalent in most factories. The reduction of inventory to an absolute minimum serves to free up capital and compel managers and workers to fine-tune their production systems. Klein's factories were redesigned on the basis of'one-piece flow', locating machines close enough together so that a worker could hand a part to the next operator. …