Fremont, Calif. Hands Across The Workplace

"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."