Here in the automotive heartland, Mazda teaches Ford how to make cars while Ford teaches its workers how to read.
Such is the critical condition of the once-mighty U.S. auto industry.
Japan is on the verge of becoming the industry`s dominant player. Japanese automakers outsell General Motors in California, the nation`s largest car market and a bellwether of national trends. Honda this year will likely sell more passenger cars in the U.S. than beleaguered Chrysler.
Detroit now acknowledges that it must scrap the system of manufacturing that has served it so well since the 1920s and embrace the new methods perfected by the Japanese.
But some experts question whether Detroit will be able readjust in time to regain the ascendency it enjoyed for more than half a century. Change proceeds at a glacial pace at the Big Three. General Motors Corp., Ford Motor Co. and Chrysler Corp. are saddled with large bureaucracies, worn out plants and an aging, poorly educated work force.
Nowhere is Detroit`s painful transition from a fading yesterday to a brave new future illuminated in more striking relief than at Ford`s Integral Stamping and Assembly Plant in Wayne, Mich.
Here, a few miles from where Henry Ford perfected his assembly line, the auto industry`s past and future are linked by a 687-foot conveyor belt. On one side is a traditional assembly plant, where Ford workers put together the new Escort. On the other is a state-of-the-art Japanese stamping plant, where the Escort`s body parts are stamped out of coiled steel.
The new stamping facility was designed by Mazda, which is 25 percent owned by Ford. The plant`s major tooling and heavy machinery were imported from Japan, and the car being built here was engineered, in large part, by Mazda.
The workers are American, but the ambience is Japanese.
Under a remarkable new union contract, more than 20 job classifications in the stamping plant have been compressed into 1. Hourly workers, who once dressed as they pleased, wear neat gray uniforms, as do their bosses.
”Mazda copied Toyota in the mid-`70s and now Ford is trying to learn from Mazda,” said James Womack, research director at the International Motor Vehicle Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
”The Detroit guys get madder than hell when you say they copied-they`d rather reinvent the wheel-but this is the way they`re going to have to make cars if they want to stay in the game,” he said.
Much is riding on Ford`s innovations at Wayne. The Escort was the No. 1 selling car in the U.S. for two years running until 1989, when it was nosed out by Honda`s Accord.
Despite the Escort`s enduring popularity, industry analysts say Ford loses money on each one it produces. But Ford still needs to sell half a million Escorts to meet federal guidelines for corporate fuel economy averages. More important, Ford needs a successful Escort line to introduce first-time car buyers to American products.
In its bid to catch up with the Japanese on quality and productivity, Detroit has endured a decade of trial and error in the 1980s. Each of the Big Three has tried to graft elements of the Japanese system onto its own, with varying degrees of success and enthusiasm.
New United Motor Manufacturing Inc., or NUMMI, GM`s joint venture with Toyota in Fremont, Calif., has shown that workers with Big Three backgrounds can adapt to the Japanese model. The plant has been in production for five years, but GM has been characteristically slow in applying the lessons learned at NUMMI elsewhere in its system.
The United Auto Workers` growing frustation with GM is expected to come to a head in contract talks this fall.
”I think everyone now realizes you have to reach beyond form to the substance. If all you do is put people in teams and uniforms, you get nothing. What you need is the whole package,” said Maryann Keller, a leading industry analyst and author of ”Rude Awakening” (Morrow), a new book that explores GM`s recent problems.
Ingrained habits die hard. For more than half a century, the Big Three have been fine-tuning a production process that breaks down each job so it can be performed with minimal brainpower. It does not place a high premium on the individual worker.
”It assumes that the only way to manage people is to give them extremely narrow tasks and tell them to get going,” said M.I.T.`s Womack, who has studied auto plants around the world.
”What you get is a rigid class system inside the plant-a wall separating the blue-collar Joes from the bosses and necktied engineers,” he said. ”The biggest kick the workers get is to see the thing screw up so they can go behind a pillar and laugh.”
By the late 1970s, Detroit`s chain-gang approach to labor was epitomized by the practice of borrowing prisoners from the county jail to beef up assembly lines.
The Japanese, meanwhile, studied this model and quickly grasped the wasted potential. They realized that resources could be stretched and quality enhanced if workers were given more autonomy and responsibility.
”The idea was to get the guys on the line into the process of problem solving instead of staring at the floor and thinking about punching out after 30 years,” said Womack.
At Wayne, Ford has latched on to this idea with the unabashed zeal of the newly converted. For David Noble, a veteran production worker at Wayne, the transformation has been a revelation.
”When I first got here, it was push `em out the door. All they wanted was the numbers,” said Noble. ”If you pointed out a problem or asked a supervisor about something, he`d say, `Hey, you ain`t the repairman, don`t worry about it.` Now, it`s do it right before you push it out.”
Under the new labor agreement, team leaders have replaced foremen and team members receive pay incentives to learn as many jobs as possible. Teams vote on how they will divide work.
The elimination of rigid work rules has smoothed out the production process. It no longer takes a day to change the 30-ton dies that stamp out metal parts. Workers now do it in 10 minutes-about as long as it takes in a Japanese plant.
The transformation at the Wayne plant didn`t occur overnight. Ford has worked hard to gain its workers` trust. But the payoff has been handsome. Quality and productivity have climbed steadily while grievances and absenteeism have declined dramatically.
Though Ford has borrowed freely from the Japanese model, UAW officials say their members have not become carbon copies of Japanese workers.
”We don`t worship the emperor or George Bush,” said Jeff Washington, president of the local that represents workers at Wayne. ”But if we`re going to compete with the brothers from Japan, this is the way we are going to have to do it.”
Indeed, there is a noticeable difference in attitude between Nissan`s American workers in Smyrna, Tenn., who vehemently rejected UAW organizing efforts last year and seem almost militant in their loyalty to the company, and the workers at Wayne, who are groping toward a pragmatic partnership with Ford while retaining a primary allegiance to the UAW.
”The union is my bargaining agent,” said Noble. ”Any man who goes into court without a lawyer is a fool, and it`s the same for any man who works in an auto factory without a union.”
Noble has been an eager participant in the changes at Ford, including training sessions in kaizen, the Japanese principle of continuous improvement. But as far as Noble is concerned, continuous improvement ends where another man`s job begins.
”If I come up with an idea that eliminates your job, it`s no good for you or me,” he said. ”The fewer people it takes to build a car, the closer to the door you get.”
For its part, the company has involved production workers in the design and development of the new Escort. Some even went to Mazda facilities in Japan.
”We`re asking the right guys the right questions,” said Jim Padilla, manager of the Escort program. ”Nobody knows more about the product than the guy doing 73 jobs an hour.”
Ford is spending $22 million to train employees at Wayne, a far cry from the previous generation when workers were shoved onto the plant floor and told to sink or swim.
The company and the union also have joined with local schools in a high-profile remedial and continuing education program. Many workers in the Wayne plant do not know how to read or do basic arithmetic.
By some estimates, 20 to 30 percent of all U.S. workers are functionally illiterate. Ford officials are reluctant to say how extensive the problem is at their facilities, but Noble remembers the day in 1974 when he hired in.
”They had 20 or 30 of us in a room to fill out applications, but only a few people knew how. I did the applications for six or seven guys that day,” he said.
The Japanese transplants, by contrast, require high school diplomas of all applicants and put prospective employees through a battery of pencil and paper tests for math and reading skills.
The transplants enjoy other advantages as well. Their workforce in younger by an average of 12 years to 15 years. Their plants and technology are newer and their costs and taxes are generally lower.
Can Detroit catch up? Some analysts estimate that it will be at least two or three decades before those disparities even out. Others suggest that Japan`s supposed advantages may be overrated.
”It`s not a matter of high-tech or IQ. That`s not how the Japanese built a better car,” said M.I.T.`s Womack. ”It`s a matter of plugging away at it.”
