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Home Articles from Tom Clason Unions vs. Management – Who is the “Bad Guy”? - Integrated Work Teams

Here is the problem with this concept when it comes to unions: Unions are dedicated to providing more jobs for their members and integrated teams require fewer employees. In the minds of the UAW leadership (at that time), productivity was trumped by job security. Ironically, it was rules like this that helped to ensure the lack of job security over time.

If unions stick to ensuring that their members are paid fairly and enjoy fair benefits, they provide a useful service. Paying fair wages and benefits to employees is not what brings a company down. Every job has a different value to the company. A single engineer is worth more to a company than a single assembler and is paid more for the increased value that the engineer brings to the table. The worth of an individual is directly proportional to the training involved to prepare oneself for the job. Experienced engineers are worth more than rookies and talented rookies with excellent grades are preferred to those that struggle in school.

The same is true with laborers. Talent and knowledge and the ability to perform are more valuable than inexperience and the amount of training required to “learn the job” and do quality work is important to a company. If you can hire someone off the street to do a job with little or no training, that job is not as valuable to the company and the worker will be paid less because they are easily replaced.

Every job is important, but one cannot exchange the word “important” with the word “value” when it comes to individual contribution and worth. The total work force is every bit as important to the company as the engineering department, but each can be overloaded with too many people and overpaid, and as such, will be more costly to the company than they should be. When an individual’s pay exceeds the worth of the contributor, the company will lose money. If that condition continues and/or worsens, the company could find itself in serious trouble.

Many companies put more value on their executives than they are worth. This is apparent in the amount that some companies are giving with their bonuses and salaries. They are paying exorbitant amounts to executives that often make decisions that could be made by a student. They hire too many people when their product is hot and then find out later that they have to let them go. They don’t place a lot of importance on productivity although they are very good when it comes to understanding buzz words.

I visited a company whose plant manager proudly boasted of having set up electronic Kanbans. When I asked how the upper and lower limits of the Kanbans were determined, I was faced with a blank stare. Their “Kanbans” didn’t have upper and lower limits, which meant that they weren’t Kanbans; they were merely product queues that were not controlled or monitored. He had no idea what Kanbans were, but sure knew how to pronounce the word.

When I told management at another company that they had too much WIP on the floor, the plant manager sent out a memo to all department heads to “Reduce the WIP immediately”. He had no idea how that was going to happen, but with this promulgation, it would solve the problem. He had no clue how it would be done, and it didn’t dawn on him to ask.