Fremont, Calif. Hands Across The Workplace

By MARGUERITE MICHAELS

"What we're looking for is good kaizens."

"Watch that muda."

"We have to nemawashi this."

Those are American autoworkers talking about building a car. You know, blue collars with tattoos on their forearms and nicknames like "Animal." They talk like that because they work for the Japanese, who now have more companies in America making cars than America does.

What they're saying is, let's discuss (nemawashi) how to keep making improvements (kaizens) and avoid waste (muda). And that's what they're doing. This is not how they talked -- or worked -- when GM ran this factory six years ago.

At the time General Motors closed its plant in Fremont, Calif., in 1982, the factory had one of the worst labor-relations records in the country. "We were fighting with GM all the time," says United Auto Workers committeeman Ed Valdez. "The product was going down the line with no one paying any attention to it. 'Ship it! Ship it!' they said." Today, working for New United Motor Manufacturing, Inc., a joint venture formed by GM and Toyota in 1983, the same workers are producing almost defect-free Chevrolets and Toyotas with a higher efficiency rating than any GM plant.

The difference is that two very dissimilar cultures have come together -- and sometimes have not come together -- to produce what has been hailed as "a new kind of workplace." Back in the early '80s, Toyota's president said the company would never operate a U.S. plant organized by the U.A.W. For their part, more than a few U.A.W. people said they'd never work for "the Japs." Five years later, the effect the two cultures have had on each other can be summed up in one sentence: the Americans are working better, and the Japanese are enjoying life more.

Toyota's task within the joint venture was to implant its efficient, low- cost production system in GM's Fremont factory. GM is represented by 17 management-level employees at NUMMI, while Toyota has 36, including the president and executive vice president. One of the first things the Japanese did was eliminate executive perks such as reserved parking places and a separate cafeteria. Then they turned the top-down style of American management -- the tradition of the industrial engineer as the first and last word on how a car is made -- on its head. As NUMMI president Kan Higashi says, "The person who does the job knows it best."

The envied Japanese production system is based not just on high-tech robotics but also on sweetspeak. An employee is a "team member." A foreman is a "group leader." Teams in the plant consist of six to eight team members who rotate jobs, with each team headed by an hourly team leader. Three to five teams are led by a salaried group leader. They are to work together in an atmosphere of "mutual trust."

"The main reason American industry has lost competitiveness," Higashi observes, "is because of distrust. I said to American management on this we must go down the stairs to the people. They won't come up to us."

Since NUMMI was established, every one of its 2,500 employees has had hundreds of hours of training. Nearly 500 of them were sent to Toyota City in Japan. They are not learning how to make cars. They are being taught how to work together more efficiently. More kaizens, less muda. "NUMMI is different," says assembly-line inspector Martha Gendel, "because the worker is being treated differently."

"U.A.W. workers are thirsty to be treated as intelligent," says former personnel coordinator "Nate" Furuta. But Furuta was discouraged at first -- and American executives are still embarrassed -- by the average lack of basic educational skills among U.A.W. workers, especially in the area of simple math.

While the NUMMI plant is considered better than some Japanese factories in Japan, it is still less efficient than Toyota City. The team leaders who were sent to Japan took one look at the "young wiry kids" working at 350 m.p.h. on the line and said, "No way."

"Japan was scary," says Ed Valdez.

"We work to live," says assembly-line worker Jackie Romero. "They live to work."

At NUMMI the Japanese do not come to work late and will stay past quitting time unquestioningly if there is a job left undone. But they have "loosened up," says assistant plant manager Jesse Wingard. "You can get them to break for a cup of coffee, and there's a lot of joking on the line." Furuta's successor, "T.J." Obara, thinks his compatriots have learned something from the Americans. "It is more cheerful here than in Japan," says he. "It's phenomenal." Executive vice president Osamu Kimura feels this is a valuable lesson. "Current way is not good one. We need more dynamic, creative society. So we tell our colleagues here from Toyota City to work hard and enjoy California. Almost all people enjoy suggestion."

Most of the Japanese at the plant operate in determined and effective, if imperfect, English. And they get around. Kimura, when he has the chance, "goes around landscape" with his family a lot. The popular spots are Napa Valley, Monterey, Carmel, Arizona's Grand Canyon and Reno. But for the Japanese, nothing vies with golf. In California, with greens fees for 18 holes less than half what they are in Japan, and good golf equipment a fraction of the price there, everybody is playing the game.

NUMMI's influence on the lives of its people has been immense. NUMMI's influence on the auto industry has been more limited. It is not yet a profitable business, at least partly because of competitive tension between GM and Toyota at the corporate level. Although GM has sent thousands of visitors through NUMMI, the reactions to it "vary plant by plant," according to GM's highest-ranking executive at NUMMI, John Arle. "GM is a big ship to turn around."

So is the U.A.W., for that matter, but Higashi's criticism is reserved for American management. "They have these big offices that they like to stay in. How can you make improvements if you are not watching people work? They understand this, but they don't want to change."

And Toyota, points out GM in quick rebuttal, is not as comfortable as it says it is with the U.A.W., because when Toyota opened its own U.S. plant late last year, it avoided the union by choosing a site in Kentucky. Says Furuta, who works in Kentucky: "We need a free hand to choose people. Fifteen percent of our team members here have college degrees. That was true of only 1% in California."

There is a lesson in NUMMI that not one American involved has failed to learn, and there is no sweetspeak to it. "We have to regroup," says Wingard, "and come out fighting to regain our share of the market." Such a transformation, all agree, will take years to accomplish. In the meantime, says a NUMMI vice president, Bill Childs, there's an ironic parallel trend. "Look to the younger Japanese. They don't accept authority automatically any longer. They are more like us. They are our only hope."