Overview
These are troubling times in the American workplace. Despite assurances from economists and politicians, job insecurity and corporate weakness are on the rise. We don't read about companies hiring; we read about companies firing, American corporations, bruised by international competition and rapidly changing markets, are fighting furiously to survive. At a time when unions seem powerless and irrelevant, and when management seems convinced that employees should be treated as costs instead of assets, a new economic vision is desperately needed. Restoring Prosperity provides that vision, a provocative new economic model that offers hope for a unified workplace and a second industrial revolution. The product of a massive, first-of-its-kind study conducted at the University of California at Los Angeles, Restoring Prosperity looks at four companies and their struggles to succeed in the new economy. Wellford Wilms, a professor of education at UCLA who has spent his career studying the relationship between education and economic productivity, and his team of graduate students didn't just occasionally visit these companies. For five years, armed with employee badges and notepads, Wilms and his team worked in the steel rolling mills at USS-POSCO, built Geo Prizms and Toyota Corollas at General Motors and Toyota's NUMMI plant, worked the assembly line at Douglas Aircraft, and joined design teams at Hewlett-Packard. Each of these companies was attempting to transform itself in order to survive, and each had dramatically different results. With uninhibited access to all levels of company management and labor, and with the sort of personal trust gained only after several years of working side by side with fellow employees, Wilms and his researchers were able to carefully discern the human side of the trauma of change and define a set of counterintuitive rules to govern workplace reform. Wilms enriches his analysis with the voices and personalities of those engaged in the efEditorials
Publishers Weekly -
Calling themselves industrial anthropologists, UCLA professor Wilms and a team of graduate students embarked six years ago upon a unique study of the changing relationship between management and labor. The study, which involved working as factory hands, focused on four then-floundering companies: Douglas Aircraft, Hewlett-Packard's Santa Clara division and two joint ventures, General Motors with Toyota and U.S. Steel with the Korean steelmaker POSCO. The researchers found the companies transforming themselves in an era of downsizing, robotization and globalization. Managers were listening to ideas from labor; unions were less confrontational. In the case of the two joint ventures, people were overcoming barriers of language and culture. Budgets, employee rosters and inventories were all leaner, as speed and productivity increased. But none of the above was seen as lessening the national trauma of losing millions of factory jobs. Education (after fundamental school reform), says Wilms, now holds the key to restoring prosperity. But will it replace all those jobs? Wilms offers no easy answers. (Aug.)Library Journal
Wilms (Graduate Sch. of Education and Information Studies, UCLA) indicates that management theories such as total quality management (TQM), reengineering, and sociotechnical systems (work design) in themselves do not solve complex union, business, and labor-management problems. In this industrial anthropology, he has generated or evolved a set of workplace rules for reform and a better future. The author and a research team of graduate students analyze four companies including Douglas Aircraft and a division of Hewlett-Packard in terms of the company's history and the events leading to the problems, obstacles to success, and corporate actions and their results. In the concluding chapter, the author discusses how these particular companies' experiences can be applied to other circumstances. Similar works include Michael Hammer's Beyond Reengineering (LJ 9/15/96) and David I. Levine's Reinventing the Workplace (LJ 4/1/95). This is an important book for the transformation and reeducation needed (with no magic elixir) to move us out of the defunct mass-production era.Joan A. Traugott, Amityville P.L., N.Y.Barbara Jacobs
About every 12 months, after most American corporate annual reports have been issued, much fuss is raised by the media about CEO compensation. What the furor reveals is not only the financial gap between top executives and frontline employees but also the social and psychological work-related disparities. The erosion of trust, loyalty, and commitment, in sum, is the root of America's business problems today. UCLA professor Wilms, in a groundbreaking study conducted over six years, documents the rise and fall and rise again of divisions of Hewlett Packard, McDonnell Douglas, U.S. Steel, and GM/Toyota. Three of the four engaged in acrimonious labor-management relations for several years; one company had simply lost sight of customer needs. All four struggled to regain business primacy and discovered that such touchy-feely goals as establishing a climate of security and fairness helped launch and continue positive, sometimes dramatic change. These four case histories reveal real people making real progress in the world of work.Kirkus Reviews
Wilms, who teaches at UCLA's Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, looks into the future of American manufacturing and concludes it could be made to work again in certain circumstances.Convinced that a strong manufacturing sector is an essential ingredient of domestic prosperity, Wilms has little patience with analysts who laud a postindustrial economy's promise. He nonetheless argues that the age of mass production is over, making it vital for management and labor to develop a new, appreciably less adversarial modus vivendi if they are to survive, let alone thrive, in the face of increasingly intense competition in outlets for capital and consumer goods throughout the Global Village. Over a span of more than five years, the author enjoyed apparently open access to four major California enterprises in various stages of reorganization or reform. Interviews were conducted at all levels of the corporate hierarchies and also on the assembly lines. His case studies encompassed the Douglas Aircraft subsidiary of McDonnel Douglas; a joint venture of South Korea's Pohang Iron & Steel Co. and US Steel, at the latter's Pittsburgh works; a passenger-car plan allying General Motors with Japan's Toyota; and Hewlett-Packard's Santa Clara division in the heart of Silicon Valley. Drawn as they are from firsthand observations, the author's findings carry considerable weight. Aware that the attitudinal changes required can be wrenching for all concerned, he goes on to address the new, more cooperative roles that could be played by employers and unions alike. High on his list of priorities is a mutual commitment to an in-house system of continuous learning, which can help a workforce adapt to the technological, financial, and market changes that may bring hard times overnight, even to companies long deemed world-class.
Uncommonly sensible and convincingly documented perspsectives on the import of human resources in an era that places a premium on flexible, street-smart manufacturing.