When Good Jobs Go Bad

Jeffrey S. Rothstein

• Editorial: Rutgers University Press
• Año: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780813576077
• Categoría: Economics
• Categoría: Labour Economics

From Chinese factories making cheap toys for export, to sweatshops in Bangladesh where name-brand garments are sewn—studies on the impact of globalization on workers have tended to focus on the worst jobs and the worst conditions. But in When Good Jobs Go Bad, Jeffrey Rothstein looks at the impact of globalization on a major industry—the North American auto industry—to reveal that globalization has had a deleterious effect on even the most valued of blue-collar jobs.   Rothstein argues that the consolidation of the Mexican and U.S.-Canadian auto industries, the expanding number of foreign automakers in North America, and the spread of lean production have all undermined organized labor and harmed workers. Focusing on three General Motors plants assembling SUVs—an older plant in Janesville, Wisconsin; a newer and more viable plant in Arlington, Texas; and a “greenfield site” (a brand-new, state-of-the-art facility) in Silao, Mexico— When Good Jobs Go Bad shows how global competition has made nonstop, monotonous, standardized routines crucial for the survival of a plant, and it explains why workers and their local unions struggle to resist. For instance, in the United States, General Motors forced workers to accept intensified labor by threatening to close plants, which led local unions to adopt “keep the plant open” as their main goal. At its new factory in Silao, GM had hand-picked the union—one opposed to strikes and committed to labor-management cooperation—before it hired the first worker.    Rothstein’s engaging comparative analysis, which incorporates the viewpoints of workers, union officials, and management, sheds new light on labor’s loss of bargaining power in recent decades, and highlights the negative impact of globalization on all jobs, both good and bad, from the sweatshop to the assembly line.  

1

Introduction

Three Auto Plants in the Global Economy

In the early 2000s, sport utility vehicles (SUVs) were among the most popular and profitable cars in the United States, and the bigger they were the better. To keep pace with demand, General Motors (GM) assembled its array of full-sized SUVs at three different North American factories, one in Mexico and two in the United States. In each plant, the chassis would pass down one assembly line where the engine, transmission, axles and tires—most of the parts of a car that actually make it go—were installed. The body of the car, where passengers sit, was welded together in a body shop before moving on to the paint department. The painted bodies then made their way through final assembly, gaining seats, dashboards, carpets, trim, and all the components we expect to find in a new car. Eventually, each chassis was “married” to a body and the final parts added. While each small truck traveled from one end of the plant to the other as it took shape, each of the several thousand assembly-line workers at each plant stayed in one place, performing a specific set of tasks over and over. At the end of the line, one of those workers would drive a shiny new GMC Yukon, Cadillac Escalade, or Chevy Suburban, Tahoe, or Avalanche off the assembly line and out the door to await shipping.

In Mexico, Héctor1 woke early in the morning and slipped into his GM uniform—a pair of black denim jeans, work boots, and a blue polo shirt with GM’s logo embroidered over the left breast. After a bite to eat and a cup of coffee, he walked to the nearby bus stop to catch the GM employee bus that transported him from his home in Irapuato to the auto plant a little over twenty miles away in Silao, a small city in the central state of Guanajuato. Héctor returned home about twelve hours later, after a full day of work that mostly required him to follow a carefully choreographed routine to repeatedly place a small series of parts on a partially built vehicle passing before him.

Héctor was lucky. GM’s plant in Silao offered among the best blue-collar jobs in the region. Héctor had been working there since shortly after the factory opened in 1994. In his early thirties nearly a decade later, Héctor’s pay of U.S. $175 for a five-day, forty-eight-hour work week was more than he could earn elsewhere, and steady enough to qualify him for a government-sponsored, low-interest mortgage with which he purchased the small house he shared with his wife and two boys. Still, Héctor envisioned more. He dreamed of sending his children to college, and thought GM could afford to help him do so, if the automaker would pay him even a fraction of what his counterparts earned in the United States.

More than two thousand miles north, in Janesville, Wisconsin, Linda likewise awoke early and dressed, typically in blue jeans, a comfortable T-shirt she didn’t mind getting dirty, and a pair of running sneakers that cushioned her feet during the long day ahead. She grabbed a bite to eat before hopping in her car for the short drive down to the plant. Linda trusted her teenage daughter to get herself up and off to school. They would see each other later, after Linda’s shift. Linda worked ten-hour days, Monday through Thursday, and on Friday if GM needed the extra production. Working Friday was a mixed blessing. It paid time-and-a-half, but meant another whole shift doing the monotonous and repetitive work she hated. Like many of her coworkers, Linda felt trapped by the assembly line and the income it provided. She earned over $25 an hour, which, like Héctor in Mexico, made her among the highest paid unskilled blue-collar workers in the region and the country. She had landed the job in 1996, ostensibly on a temporary basis. But seventeen years later, and now a single mom in her forties, Linda worried that GM’s Janesville plant, the automaker’s oldest assembly facility, would close before she got the thirty years’ employment she needed to collect a full pension. Then she would be faced with a dilemma many at GM have faced: whether or not to uproot her daughter and move away from family and friends to stay employed by the company.

Such a move might take Linda to Arlington, Texas, where John had relocated more than a decade earlier. Originally from Flint, Michigan, John graduated from high school there and followed his father into the sprawling complex known as Buick City. As GM shuttered the facility, John became one of a growing number of so-called GM Gypsies2 who exercised their right under the labor contract to maintain their employment with the automaker by transferring to a different location. After a couple such moves, John, his wife, and son wound up in Arlington. Like Linda, John woke early and drove himself to the plant for a long day on the assembly line, repeatedly performing a small series of tasks. He continued to do so to support his family, understanding that a man with his education was lucky to have such an income. Well into his fifties, with almost thirty years working on assembly lines, John looked forward to retirement. He was proud to be among the many in his family to have made a career in the auto industry. But times had changed and John expected his son to go to college.

While at different stages of their careers, and at three different factories in two different countries, these three workers echoed a refrain I heard time and again over the course of this research. On the one hand, all three recognized they had among the best blue-collar jobs available—good enough to warrant moving cross-country. On the other hand, these jobs no longer seemed to offer what they once had. For Linda and John the work itself had become more demanding as GM sought to keep them in constant motion by standardizing work routines. GM’s benchmark was to keep each worker moving for fifty-five seconds of each minute. For Héctor, there was a sense that his job would not fulfill the middle-class aspirations so often attached to work in the auto industry. Something had changed. And whether autoworkers were taking advantage of a new opportunity in Silao or were struggling to maintain their standard of living in Janesville and Arlington, almost all the workers attributed their situation, at least in part, to the globalization of the economy.

Three Cases of Globalization

Concerns for labor in the global economy typically focus more on sweatshops than on auto plants. A fire in a Chinese factory making toys for export to the United States or a building collapse in Bangladesh where name-brand garments are sewn makes headlines that draw a direct link between consumers in the West and exploited workers halfway around the world. Retailers and branded marketers scramble to control the damage to their image, pointing out they do not own and operate the factories, and assuring the public of their commitment to fair pay and decent working conditions. They promise to redouble their efforts to vet contractors to ensure such tragedies never happen again. Scholars, too, have shined a spotlight on sweatshops to analyze and understand why they seem such a persistent problem and what we might do about them. Supply chains have been traced, enhancing our understanding of the ways global markets place downward pressure on wages and working conditions. Likewise, the efforts of activists to raise wages and working conditions, often through consumer-based campaigns to hold retailers accountable, have been studied and critiqued for their effectiveness.3

Yet the impact of globalization on work extends far beyond the sweatshop. In fact, it can be argued that almost all workers are affected in one way or another by the opening and integration of national economies, the expansion of trade, and the ensuing economic restructuring that takes place. Not all workers will be subject to overt exploitation. But for many, the nature of their work, the availability of jobs in their industry, and the wages and benefits they receive will be impacted by the globalization of the economy. So just as understanding the reasons for the persistence of sweatshops offers insights into the worst consequences of globalization, teasing out the dynamics by which other types of employment are shaped by globalization furthers our understanding of the global economy.

How has globalization affected auto work? What dynamics of globalization are responsible? And what can the experience of autoworkers in the global economy tell us about labor in the global economy more broadly? This book explores the effect of globalization on North American autoworkers like Héctor, Linda, and John through a comparison of the organization of work and labor relations at the three GM assembly plants where they worked, and by linking their conditions of employment to the broader dynamics of economic globalization. The analysis demonstrates that the globalization of the North American auto industry has compromised job quality in the industry. The pace of work has intensified even as pay and benefits have dropped. Yet North American autoworkers have what remain among the best blue-collar jobs the global economy has to offer. If studies of sweatshops expose just how low unregulated labor conditions can be driven by global competition, this study of the auto industry shows that the negative impact of globalization on workers is much broader. Even the “good jobs” are getting worse.

At first blush, the plants in this study appear to be on different trajectories in the global economy. Héctor’s workplace in Silao was a “greenfield site,” a brand-new, state-of-the-art facility, built in a previously unindustrialized area. A direct consequence of the globalization of the North American auto industry, the factory and its workforce appeared to have a bright future. By contrast, Linda’s workplace in Janesville, Wisconsin, was GM’s oldest operating facility, dating to 1919. Its days were seen as numbered by management and labor alike; it closed at the end of 2008 when demand for SUVs declined and GM’s bankruptcy hit. The third facility, where John worked, in Arlington, Texas, was midway between the other two, both geographically and in terms of age. Its future was neither as secure as Silao’s nor as imperiled as Janesville’s. Yet, in spite of their different fortunes in the global economy, the factories bore striking similarities in the manner they assembled GM’s full-sized SUVs. At each facility, the automaker’s Global Manufacturing System (GMS) required assembly-line work to be organized into carefully choreographed routines. This similarity reveals a common underlying trajectory of declining job quality within the auto industry, even among plants with such different histories and divergent futures.

Silao—Globalization as Opportunity

Opened in 1994 on the outskirts of Silao, a small city of sixty thousand residents located in an agricultural region roughly 225 miles northwest of Mexico City, the first plant in this study was quintessentially greenfield. Lured by state policymakers determined to bring economic development and jobs to a region previously known mostly for the quality of its strawberries, the arrival of GM and other factories that followed transformed the area in and around Silao into the industrial and export center of the state of Guanajuato. Some of the other new manufacturers were suppliers to GM that the automaker needed nearby. Others, such as Case and Weyerhauser, were taking advantage of the attractive business environment, upgraded highways, and new international airport, which state policymakers had promised GM in order to woo the automaker.

At its inception, the Silao factory assembled small pickup trucks for the Mexican market. However, the facility was built with the U.S. market in mind. As full employment and manufacturing capacity was reached, production shifted to the assembly of SUVs for export to the United States. By 2003, when my research at the plant began, a combination of 820 Chevy Suburbans, Chevy Avalanches, and Cadillac Escalade EXTs, among the largest and most profitable of the fifteen models of SUVs GM offered, rolled off the assembly line each day. Ninety percent of the vehicles were loaded onto trains destined for the United States, where the base sticker price for an Avalanche exceeded $32,000 and a fully loaded Escalade could fetch over $60,000.

In planning their operations in Silao, General Motors seized the opportunity presented by a greenfield site to start afresh—to shape an entire industrial culture and establish production, employment, and labor relations norms. Those lucky enough to land a job working at the new auto plant joined a workforce considered a blue-collar elite within the area. In fact, because the automaker offered steady work and the best pay in the region, GM received far more applications than it had positions to fill. If lucky enough to pass GM’s scrutiny and gain employment, a fresh hire began a new job that one of them described as “like entering a different world.”

That new world meant joining the assembly line, where line operators clad in identical uniforms worked in teams of six, rotating their jobs throughout the day. Each work station was equipped with a cord workers could pull if they were experiencing a problem. Doing so triggered the Andon system. The team’s alphanumeric code flashed on overhead screens throughout the plant while the musical jingle the team was assigned began playing at their work station, so that visitors to the factory might suddenly find themselves serenaded by the theme songs to The Simpsons or The Newlywed Game television shows, or the “Hallelujah” chorus from Handel’s Messiah. These broadcasts alerted all the team members to converge on the site of the problem to resolve the issue before it forced a stoppage of the assembly line. All manufacturing problems were to be resolved “in station,” meaning that no team should ever pass a defective product to their coworkers further down the line.

During their daily half-hour meal break, workers dined in the plant’s cafeteria, which offered them, their supervisors, and senior management an array of entrees, side dishes, and desserts, the nutritional value of which was posted on a table near the serving area. The centerpiece of each circular dining table was the plant’s daily news bulletin, a two-sided flyer including statistics on production goals, productivity, and safety, as well as employee birthday notices, reports on the latest bonuses paid to employees for their cost-saving suggestions, and other relevant plant news. Motivational banners adorned the walls. One included a picture of a pouncing lion over a caption urging workers to help GM become “king of the automotive jungle.” Another was a collage of children’s smiling faces over the caption “Sí se puede, papa!”—an appropriation by GM of the rallying cry of the United Farm Workers union and other Latino social movements in the United States for the purpose of motivating assembly-line workers.

This different world of work extended beyond the plant walls, permeating nearly every aspect of the workers’ lives. In hiring workers who lacked any industrial experience, GM employed many from agricultural backgrounds. The steady income workers earned offered their families previously unimagined opportunities, such as home ownership and education for their children. But the opportunities were matched by challenges. In addition to the long workday, many of GM’s employees commuted on the company’s buses up to an hour each way from their homes in the nearby cities of Irapuato, León, and Guanajuato. For many workers, the long hours away from home compromised their image of family life. Even the meal they ate at work represented a cultural shift, often replacing the traditional family dinner that shut many area stores from 2:00 to 4:00 in the afternoon. Such were the changes and challenges that accompanied the new opportunities in Silao.

Union officials in Silao explained that assisting workers in adapting to factory work was one of their primary functions. Workers at the plant were represented by the Union of Workers of the Metal-Mechanical, Automotive, Similar and Connected Industries of the Mexican Republic, known as SITIMM, its Spanish acronym. Even before GM hired a single employee, the automaker had chosen SITIMM to represent their workers. Upon our introduction at SITIMM’s regional offices, union officials informed me that “we are not corrupt,” and that I was welcome to hang out whenever I wanted and to ask them anything. SITIMM was not one of Mexico’s many absentee “ghost unions” with which employers sign protection contracts to prevent workers from organizing their own unions. Rather, SITIMM was an active union, but one that espoused a philosophy of labor-management cooperation and explicitly renounced strikes and other forms of labor militancy.

Technically, SITIMM negotiated with GM over wages, but even the union’s leaders acknowledged that they had little bargaining leverage with GM. Instead, the primary function of the union was to provide the support workers needed to hold on to the best blue-collar jobs in the area, a goal that paralleled GM’s need to maintain low turnover rates and stability within the work teams at the heart of the production process. At times functioning almost as an extension of GM’s human resources department, and with offices immediately next door, SITIMM’s elected officials assisted employees in managing their incomes by helping them open bank accounts and apply for the government-subsidized home mortgages for which they qualified due to their stable employment. SITIMM also provided social support for workers with problems outside the plant by making hospital visits, organizing and paying for funerals, and even serving as ad hoc marriage counselors on occasion. Union leaders claimed to provide these services to ensure that workers’ personal lives did not compromise their performance at work, so they did not lose one of the best jobs the local economy had to offer a young man with a ninth-grade education.

Janesville—Globalization as Doom

Unlike GM’s model greenfield site in Silao, the two plants in the United States were well worn, with experienced workforces. The first, in Janesville, Wisconsin, employed 3,600 hourly workers, including 500 skilled tradespeople whose job it was to keep the assembly line and the plant’s more than 600 robots running. The factory assembled almost 1,200 SUVs daily, a combination of Chevy Suburbans and Tahoes, and their GMC counterparts, the Yukon and Yukon Denali.

Janesville, like Silao, is a small city with a population of roughly sixty thousand people. As in Silao, GM offered workers in Janesville the best unskilled blue-collar jobs in the area, but had been doing so much longer. The plant in Janesville dated to 1919, when GM selected the site for its production of Samson Tractors, some of which were steered with reins rather than a steering wheel in order to appeal to farmers accustomed to working with horses. Over more than eight decades after GM discontinued Samson Tractor in 1923, as models and production needs changed, the plant grew from 122,000 to over 4.5 million square feet. GM’s property holdings nearly tripled to 137 acres. Much of this expansion came from purchasing the homes and businesses that once stood across the street from the factory, leveling them and paving parking lots for the workers’ own SUVs and pickup trucks. Almost all workers drove GM products, which they purchased at an employee discount. For those who did not, or more likely guests to the plant, a sign at the entry to the parking lot ordered all “vehicles not assembled in the U.S.A. or Canada by union workers should park in lot #11,” the farthest from the plant.

The lone holdout resisting GM’s accumulation of real estate was Zachow’s Bar, which sold cans of beer and mixed drinks. Though on private property, Zachow’s location created the appearance that GM had a bar in the middle of their parking lot. The bar’s slogan, “a little bit of heaven on the gates of hell,” was printed on the free matchbooks Zachow’s distributed and regulars at the bar often repeated it. Local GM management and union officials preferred not to discuss Zachow’s. Much like “Packer Monday,” the day that the Green Bay Packers appearance on Monday Night Football allegedly forced a halt to production due to excessive absenteeism, from time to time Zachow’s presence became a metaphor in the press for everything outdated about the Janesville plant. Rumors swirled as to how much money GM had offered to buy and destroy the bar. But Jim Zachow, whose father had opened the place, said the automaker did not offer enough to compensate him and his wife, Mary, for the brisk business they did during lunch break and shift ...