I just read an editorial in the Monday, February 7th, 2022 Oakland Press by Henry Olsen of the “Ethics and Public Policy Center” on page 5 that encourages the Republican Party to get behind a bill proposed by Marco Rubio. Mr. Olsen states :

“The proposal — called the Teamwork for Employees and Managers Act, or Team Act —aims to address one of the major problems with the modern U.S. economy: the lack of employee voice within a business”

Mr. Olsen sees this as an alternative to unions and predicts unions will be against it.

Maybe.

I have some direct experience in this area at the unionized Toledo Plant of Dupont where I worked from 1974 to 1992. I was at first a coatings chemist, then Quality Control and Assurance Laboratory Supervisor and then assigned to the Plant Manager on an assignment helping with employee involvement, planning and communications projects. This last assignment came after all of us in management went through a very non-traditional 3-week Management Training Program sponsored by and mandated by some enlightened top management of our division.

One outcome at Toledo Plant, was that we developed methods for our employees (International Chemical Workers Union) to have a voice in how work was done. The results were many cost savings and productivity improvements. It never crossed out minds that we needed a federal law to allow this. We got no objections from our union. Of course we were small, about 500 employees. And a key human resource person was well-trusted and had been, when an hourly employee, one of the organizers of taking the old “company union” to a national union in 1968.

One example. Every year there was competition between departments on the plant site to be awarded capital money. The awarding of capital money had become a secretive political-influence process, not an open, logic process. Most went to advanced engineering automation and computer control systems in the polymer manufacturing area. The less glamorous and less high-tech areas got little to no capital money. Much of paint-making is a relatively unglamorous process of dumping materials from 55 gallon drums or 50 pound bags into tanks ranging from 150 to 5,000 gallons and mixing them up. We had a least 700 different raw materials stored in several areas of the plant, including outdoors, as seen in the aerial photo above. Waiting for materials to be delivered often held- up production, but we in management did not realize how serious this problem was. We had no real data to highlight this issue.

In the first year that a system of “Area Improvement Teams” was established to start the process at the the bottom of the org chart to identify capital neeeds, hourly workers identified a single unrealiable fork-truck and freight elevator as the major bottlenecks in moving paint formula ingredients in 55 gallons drums from outdoor storage to areas on the circ 1919 three story brick plant where they were needed. A new forktruck and rebuilt elevator did wonders to speed paint batch production.

This effort was not simple. We had to learn to run a meeting of a large number of people that stayed on the subject and was organized. We had to steel ourselves for the initial negative comments from each group to the effect that ” This was a B.S. effort for show and we would ultimately not listen to them”, and a long recap of past examples of not listening. Once they were allowed to purge all of this we could get to work gathering their ideas and have an engineer help them to prioritize and assign estimated costs and benefits. Then mangement worked on these lists in meetings whose outcomes were communicated widely to reduce the list to conform to maximum allowed capital budget for the year. Many impediments to smooth, efficents production were identified and corrected.