Like many assembly line workers for Motorola Corp. in the early ’80s, Vickie Terrill thought her high school education would be sufficient. It helped the Wauconda mother secure a low-skill job assembling radios and telephones, a position she has held with the Schaumburg-based electronics giant for 15 years. By the mid-1980s, however, Motorola was making some changes.
Management informed Terrill and her colleagues that their future would look nothing like their past. Executives told Terrill she would have to interpret information, be part of a group that makes decisions on products, inspect for quality and solve problems on the spot.
Computer screens, robots, complex operational manuals and bar charts would be part of her life, she was told. The ability to calculate math problems, read quickly and write well would be included in her job description.
“A lot of workers felt threatened,” and that their jobs were in jeopardy, Terrill said. But for her, the choice was clear: Get more training or run the risk of becoming expendable. “There are so many people out there who want jobs,” she said. “Motorola could hire anytime, anywhere.”
It is a harsh new reality that millions of American workers face in jobs that previously have required little if any special skill, and it’s a reality that corporations across the country are trying to deal with by retraining their labor forces, even with helping them learn basic math and language skills.
In Motorola’s case, the electronics maker was repositioning itself for the future, trying to remain competitive in a global marketplace. To do so, it was asking its employees who once did the muscle work to read, write and compute. Motorola, like other big corporations, felt its survival depended on cutting costs, becoming more efficient and upgrading its plant technology. All of these changes would require more company-provided training for the hourly worker, if management intended to meet its goals.
“An awful lot of industries are downsizing, and the (remaining) workers are doing the jobs of four and five people,” said Larry Mikulecky, professor of education at Indiana University in Bloomington, a specialist in workplace literacy. “The workers let go must retrain for high-performance jobs,” which are the only ones available. “If you don’t change, you are unlikely to make a living in developed nations. There just aren’t that many McDonald’s.”
But a recent federal report on adult education raises doubts about America’s ability to retrain its blue-collar work force. The problem, according to the report, begins with the lack of a decent basic education. The Department of Education tested more than 26,000 Americans in a representative sampling over four years and found that nearly half of America’s 191 million adult citizens cannot write a simple letter or calculate a basic math problem. The implications are grim, if not frightening, academic and business leaders say.
A low-skill worker who cannot read or who is not retrained for constantly changing work demands will be lucky to be flipping hamburgers at retirement, they say. For a high-tech manufacturing company like Motorola, if it cannot recruit highly skilled workers, it will move elsewhere or go out of business, according to Mikulecky.
“It means a lot more investment (by companies) of training on the job,” Mikulecky said, or industries will move to other regions. “You can (operate) somewhere else at lower costs, or you can upgrade productivity in the skills of workers in high-performance workplaces. Companies in the United States have used both options.”
The findings of the federal study also suggest that America’s public schools and community colleges have a long way to go to meet these new demands. According to some education experts, school reform is still far off.
Even the newest school curriculums have little connection with the kind of reality-based math required for many work tasks today, admitted Roy Pea, dean of the School of Education and Social Policy at Northwestern University in Evanston.
“There have to be ways found to move into the classroom the kinds of situations and tasks in which people need to read and handle arithmetic in the everyday work world,” he added. “Much current instruction is based on abstract principles with little chance to see connections in the real world.”
In the real world, Motorola executives realized they would need to retrain their workers from the ground up if they hoped to make the company’s new Libertyville plant a success. It was inside that sprawling, campus-like setting of eight separate factories where the future of the cellular phone division would be decided. Motorola’s Libertyville plant would be the key player in the company’s effort to remain the worldwide leader in the manufacture and sale of cellular phones, according to David Pinsky, Motorola spokesman.
For Libertyville and Lake County, the stakes were equally high. The 1.2 million-square-foot factory brought 4,000 high-paying jobs to the area when it opened in 1992. And with the opening of the plant came a new hourly worker retooled and retrained. But first came the basics.
To find out where everyone stood, management in 1985 gave all 21,000 hourly workers standardized math and English tests. Half of them scored below the 9th-grade level in both subjects.
“We were shocked,” said Jim Frasier, manager of educational research at Motorola University, the training and educational arm of the giant company, with 107,000 employees and 1992 revenues of $13.2 billion. “We set targets that would make our employees read at the 9th-grade (level) and compute at the 8th-grade by the end of 1991.”
Terrill, 34, took the exams and did well on her English. But she scored low on math. She took the basic math course the company offered to its employees. It also offered a basic English class.
“It refreshed my memory in a lot of math,” said Terrill, who had until then spent more than 10 years on the assembly line. Today as a materials analyst, she uses math all the time. She must make sure the assembly lines never run out of materials for the cellular phones. On any given day, she communicates with line workers and supervisors about possible shortages or surpluses, making daily material counts and writing summaries.
“The product itself is more complicated today,” Terrill said. “You do have to have some more knowledge.”
Myriam Nielsen, 52, has been with the company for 20 years. The Hoffman Estates resident is an assembly line worker. But the definition of her job, she said, has changed profoundly since she first started. In the old days, she remembered, the line workers were kept in the dark. She never knew what she was assembling or why. She learned much later that for one five-year stretch, she had been installing a single part for a police radio.
“You didn’t know where it went or why,” Nielson said. “If you don’t know what you’re making, you don’t care.” But that has all changed.
Now, as an assembly-line worker making the company’s flip phones, she is responsible for hourly yield reports that determine the number of phones to be shipped. She tests the phones for defects and logs the information on computers. She must make written reports, train new employees and be able to learn several different line positions so she can fill in anywhere. She is expected to suggest ideas to improve efficiency. If engineers find they are good ideas, they will make the changes. She is also responsible for fixing any breakdown of the equipment at her station.
“When (the factory) first opened, we were a little scared,” she recalled. “We didn’t know what to make of it.” But soon she found the work to be more stimulating.
“The old was very boring . . . and uninteresting,” Nielson said. “The new is involved, it’s educative, you have a sense of self-respect, and it feels that you are part of a big company that recognizes you for your efforts.”
None of this comes without a cost. Motorola spent $8 million over eight years to raise the basic academic level of its hourly employees, Frasier said, but the costs paid off. Nearly all of the workers who scored low have graduated from the company-sponsored basic courses, and Motorola remains the worldwide leader in cellular phones, he said.
Even so, companies shouldn’t have to shell out money for basic academic retraining, Frasier said. For the moment, Motorola sees no alternative until schools graduate better-educated workers, he added.
“People have got to be able to read to the 9th-grade level and compute to pre-algebra level in order to hold down a job in this decade,” Frasier said. “If they can’t do them, we can’t build a product that will satisfy our customers, and we’re out of business.”
Over the long haul, the schools have to reform themselves, Pea and Frasier said.
Both suggest that schools and businesses form close partnerships so educators can create curriculums that reflect the actual demands of the workplace. Businesses and the federal government also should form partnerships to create adult-retraining centers, according to Frasier. Companies cannot afford to wait forever, he said, because the stakes are too high.
