“You intend to give these workers the right to stop the line?”
Some GM managers put that question to Toyota while the two companies were setting up a joint car plant in Fremont, California. John Shook, who helped design the training on Toyota’s side, recalls the answer: “No, we intend to give them the obligation to stop it.”
These were workers GM had given up on. At the old GM Fremont plant, absenteeism routinely ran over 20 percent. Grievances piled up by the thousands, and strikes, some of them wildcat, came often. Some workers sabotaged the cars, dropping bottles or loose bolts inside door panels so they would rattle. One inspector found that a worker, angry at being suspended for drinking, had left loose bolts on the front suspension of about 400 cars. Bruce Lee, who ran the western region of the United Auto Workers, said it was considered “the worst workforce in the automobile industry in the United States,” and that the reputation was well earned.
GM had one rule everybody knew: never stop the line. “You saw a problem, you stop that line, you were fired,” Lee said. A longtime GM manager explained the logic: give workers that power and they would stop the line to sit and play cards. Monte Carlos left the line with Regal front ends and were fixed out in the yard.
GM closed the plant in 1982. When it agreed to reopen it with Toyota, Lee demanded to hire the first 50 people himself, and he picked the same union leaders who had fought GM. “I believed that it was the system that made it bad, not the people,” he said. GM objected. Toyota agreed. Over 85 percent of the new workforce were old GM Fremont hands.
In the spring of 1984, Toyota started flying them to Japan in groups of 30 to work beside their counterparts in a Corolla plant. There they met the andon cord. A pull brings the team leader. If the problem can’t be fixed in time, the line stops.
One worker, at GM since 1964, pulled it for the first time that year. He was nervous. On the line in Japan he watched them stop for a single bolt that had gone in wrong, ream the hole and put it back, rather than send it on with other parts piled on top, to be torn out and repaired later. “One bolt changed my attitude,” he said.
The trainees, Shook writes, kept naming the same thing they wanted to take home: solving problems without hunting for someone to blame. “Here it’s ‘five whys.’ Back home, we’re used to the ‘five whos.’”
The first car, a yellow Chevy Nova, came off the line in December 1984. Absenteeism fell to a steady 2 percent. Within a year, by Shook’s account, quality went from GM’s worst to GM’s best.
GM wanted that everywhere. Everyone NPR’s Frank Langfitt talked to for This American Life said it took about a decade and a half after NUMMI for change to even begin to take hold. Jeffrey Liker, a University of Michigan professor who studied NUMMI, remembers a GM vice president ordering a manager to photograph every square inch of NUMMI and make his own plant match. As Liker tells it, the manager knew at once that you can’t take a picture of employee motivation, or of a decent relationship between the union and management.
The first round of changes put andon cords into GM plants. In some, workers who pulled the cord got yelled at. A few plants cut the cords down.