Honda Discord

A spat over union hats

In Japan, where loyalty to the corpo ration is almost a state religion, every factory employee from the manager on down puts on a uniform bearing his firm's logo before checking in each day. The aim is to make workers feel like members of a team, on the theory that this boosts productivity. Unlike many Japanese ideas, however, the notion of mandatory company duds may not be all that exportable.

The concept worked fine for a while at the 13-month-old Honda motorcycle plant in Marysville, Ohio, where all 200 employees wear the company's white overalls. But on May 16 a maintenance man decided to embellish the standard wardrobe with a United Auto Workers baseball cap. Plant officials promptly made him remove it and issued a flat ban on noncompany hats on the ground that allowing them would impair "the Honda working environment." Union buttons were forbidden too because they might damage production-line paintwork.

The episode enraged U.A.W. officials, who have been frustrated in their efforts to organize workers at other Japanese facilities in the U.S. The U.A.W. complained to the National Labor Relations Board, charging that Honda's dress code was being used to block union organizing efforts. The U.A.W. also objects to Hon a's habit of calling its employees "associates," complaining that this is intended to blur labor-management distinctions in the workers' minds.

Honda executives say they are not antiunion.

They point out that auto plants in Japan are fully unionized and that Japanese assembly plants in other countries are usually organized. Says Marysville Plant Manager Shige Yoshida: "We are not violating any laws or interfering with our associates' rights. We simply want to maintain the quality of the products."

Perhaps, but U.A.W. officials believe that the Japanese are determined to keep their U.S. plants nonunion, fearing that organization might make Honda's management style unworkable. The U.A.W. and Honda are not taking the hat-and-button battle lightly, nor is the NLRB, which is trying to mediate the dispute. The outcome could affect the U.A.W.'s hopes of unionizing a much bigger prize: a 2,000-worker plant to be built in Marysville, where Honda aims to turn out 10,000 Accords monthly by 1983.