Last summer my brother's crew wanted to change to work 4 tens instead of 5 eights. It worked better for everyone. The main thing was each day they had to travel to work site and secure the tools & supplies. Someone on the crew suggested it and the rest agreed, the company was ok with it.

The union said no, it had to be negotiated. It was fine if they were paid overtime for two hours each day, or 5 tens was OK (with proper overtime pay).

So, no change was made.

"Is it any wonder the Japanese cleaned Detroit's clock for two decades?"

It's nearly criminal that the reason for this is all but unknown: one person, the person being W. Edwards Deming.

Deming showed the Japanese that those in charge of designing the production process were actually in command of everything about the plants that were built and operated, from the quality of the output to the injury rate. Within two years of his addressing the zaibatsu, every nation on Earth doing business with the Japanese was clamoring for trade protection.

This isn't a fairy tale. This isn't a case where you're at work and somebody is mouthing "total quality" or "Six Sigma" or some other snappy slogan. It shows that if you plot the path of every molecule, human and otherwise, through your process and figure out what is really happening rather than sit and hope your lawyers and advertising program can fake people out, you win.

To give you an idea how far gone the American auto industry was - Deming was hired to make a presentation to Ford Motor Company in the late 70's. He has an exercise he puts managers through in front of the auditorium full of people, to subject them to the same pressures their workers go through when dealing with a fixed system of low quality - but that's not the high point of his visit to the Dearborn office.
Deming will tour the factory floor. Since every bigwig and hanger-on is there, a crowd follows him. Ford is proud of their safety programs, and so one of the first things they encounter is a poster of legs and feet slipping on a puddle - the caption is, "Don't slip on an oil slick."
Deming turns to the president and CEO of multinational Ford Motor Co., and asks the question that freezes a hundred people right there: "Why do your factory floors have oil on them?"
The emperor is naked. They have no answer. In a week, Ford' "Quality Is Job One" program is started, and every molecule is now tracked through the Ford plant.

This wasn't the result of Union action. Just like government agencies, the first task of a union is to preserve its own existence. If your goals aren't the same as its goals, well, too bad for you!

One of Deming's principles was "Ask why five times." A demonstration of how this works was provided by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos when he visited a fulfillment center and found that an employee had injured a finger on a conveyor belt. Someone who was there told this story:

"He got up, walked to the whiteboard and began to ask the 5-why’s (I quote the below from memory):

Why did the associate damage his thumb?

Because his thumb got caught in the conveyor.

Why did his thumb get caught in the conveyor?

Because he was chasing his bag, which was on a running conveyor.

Why did he chase his bag?

Because he placed his bag on the conveyor, but it then turned-on by surprise

Why was his bag on the conveyor?

Because he used the conveyor as a table

So, the likely root cause of the associate’s damaged thumb is that he simply needed a table, there wasn’t one around, so he used a conveyor as a table. To eliminate further safety incidences, we need to provide tables at the appropriate stations or provide portable, light tables for the associates to use and also update and a greater focus on safety training. Also, look into preventative maintenance standard work."

Ten minutes, genuine problem-solving and also modeling for others as to how to do the same. Real management.

http://www.shmula.com/jeff-bezos-5-why-exercise-root-cause-analysis-cause-and-effect-ishikawa-lean-thinking-six-sigma/987/

I'll grant that the UAW is now one of the more progressive unions, as unions go (that's really damning them with faint praise). After all, they did go along with the "shirt pocket contract" that made it possible for Saturn to exist. However, that's only been true since about 1990 or so -- and by that time, most of the damage had already been done.

One thing that's often not mentioned is that, from the end of WWII through to the early '70s, the UAW constituted an automotive manufacturing labor cartel. Oh sure there were non-UAW companies in places like the UK and France, but none of those companies did anywhere near the volume that Detroit did. (And anyway, they had their own union problems.) If you were in the automobile or auto parts manufacturing business, your choices were to play ball with the UAW or go out of business. Our not-so-distant automotive past is littered with the bodies of those who didn't or couldn't play ball: Crosley, Packard, Nash, Hudson, Willys, Studebaker. Some of those corpses are still rotting away in Detroit today.

People who weren't around then don't realize how devastating the UAW strikes were. There were times when either the whole industry or just one automaker were shut down for months at a time. Plus, the UAW worked closely with the United Steelworkers, and a USW strike would also shut down the auto factories due to not being able to get steel. I think it was in 1970 that a USW strike idled Detroit for about four months; the UAW workers were able to collect welfare benefits while supporting the strike of their USW brethen. Whenever there was a strike, it put tens of thousands of people out of work. Parts suppliers had to lay off their workers (assuming they weren't also being struck) because there were no orders. Dealerships had to lay off their workers because they had no cars to sell and no parts with which to make repairs. (Or the UAW would just send pickets to the dealership and shut it down.) If your car broke down during one of these strikes, you couldn't get it fixed -- and remember that most families only owned one car back then.

One other thing about unions. I have some relatives who work in a unionized plant in an industry that is still pretty heavily unionized, at least in the U.S. It's often said that union pay scales disincentivize the worker because pay is only a function of seniority. Actually, it's worse than that, from what they've told me. What happens is that the highly complex contracts and work rules open a door for people who know how to game the system. It's the people who are good at office politics, rulebook lawyering, and sucking up who get the highest-paying and cushiest jobs. The thing is, these also tend to be the people who are the laziest and least skilled at the actual work. So the union factory Dilbertizes itself -- the worst employees are rewarded and the best are encouraged to go elsewhere.

When the Japanese car companies first built plants in the US, they expected them to be unionized. They were surprised to find workers who did not want unions. They have continued to do well and even ship cars back to Japan while GM and Chrysler became government appendages.

"the United Auto Workers, is one of our best. It's democratic. It's not corrupt" This was one of the funniest things I have read in some time.

Good stuff.

Cousin Dave, you reminded me of a story a guy who I worked with back in the early 90s told me.

He said that several years before, he had worked as a stockboy for Kroger, which had the UFCW for its employees. He said that one of the ways he got extra money was to show up in the middle of the night so he could catch them having a bagger stocking shelves, so he could lodge a complaint, which then required them to pay him for the shift that the other guy "took" from him, because the bagger wasn't allowed to stock shelves.

Unions have done a lot for this country; they were especially important when giant employers tried to take advantage of a harsh economy in the last century, not only to keep down wages but to speed up assembly lines and, worse, force workers to risk their lives and health. If you think about it, unions have been the opposite of selfish.

I won't disagree with that. Then the government created the NLRB, OSHA, BWC, EEOC, etc. for those that aren't unionized (and those that are).

What needs to happen is to get the layer out of the way and put it back to judiciary.

Forgot to mention -- as I understand it the UAW in Dayton (Moraine's Blazer plant) stayed on strike for an extra week because GM had painted the bathrooms/showers green instead of blue.

I can't source it other than word of mouth, but have heard about it from several people.

But it doesn't matter because the bathrooms are now in a totally empty building.

My very first job (food service at the San Diego Zoo) was a union job. As in, you join the union or you can't work here. It was the Teamsters in fact. I was young and naive and figured whatever.. I want to work here.

The main thing I learned from my 2-1/2 years there is that I will NEVER voluntarily join a union again. All it did was promote laziness (people doing only the bare minimum required) and the rules did far more to hurt employees in the long run then help. We did not make more then a few cents an hour more then the same job elsewhere but the contract did make it impossible to actually be rewarded for being a good or hard worker.

There was a period of time where a friend and I were the sought after team for closing down food stands because we did the job fast, properly (vs everyone else's 1/2-assed job) and we didn't whine and complain the whole time. We got nothing more then a pat on the back from the leads that we worked for... no raises, no bonus, nothing. Since we were in school we were season employees as well... boy did we get screwed. Even if we had days where we could work due to a school day or or short day, we weren't allowed to. It didn't matter that it was busy and they could use us.. the contract didn't allow it. You were either a full time employee available basically 24/7, or seasonal which could only work summers, holidays and weekends.

Man I hated the union by the time I left there.