Empire of Illusion (22 page)

During the 1980s American automobile corporations used this tactic of labor-management cooperation to compete with what was seen as the Japanese economic juggernaut. “ . . . [T]his can be seen, for example,” González recounts, “in the charts at the Chevrolet Gear and Axle plant in Detroit, which lists the sales figures of various American and Japanese cars. Next to these lists is a sign that reads, ‘You are entering the war zone, Quality and productivity are our weapons.'”
¹⁹

Workers at GM were arranged into “self-managed” “quality circles,” or teams of workers who form an identity. These teams competed with other teams to increase their productivity. “We and they” mentality is reduced and collapses into a collective “we.” Quality circles at GM gave themselves names such as “Joe's Trouble Shooters,” “Positive Approach,” and “Loose Wires and Stripped Nuts.”
²⁰

“Any status symbol that ferments class consciousness is removed from the workplace,” noted Robert Ozaki in his book
Human Capitalism
in an observation of a GM-Toyota plant in California. “There are no parking spaces or toilets reserved for executives. Managers and
workers dine in the common cafeteria. . . . Production workers are called ‘associates' or ‘technicians' rather than ‘workers' or employees.'”
²¹

Prestige systems, like those in the military, were employed at the Toyota plant at which Satoshi Kamata worked in the 1970s. He recalled how hats of different colors and stripes were used to distinguish rank: “ . . . two green stripes stand for Seasonal Worker; one green stripe, Probationer; one white stripe, Trainee; one red stripe, Minor; a cap without any stripe, Regular Worker; two yellow stripes, Team Chief. . . .”
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“At the same assembly plant,” González continued, citing Kamata's book
Japan in the Passing Lane: An Insider's Account of Life in a Japanese Auto Factory
, “Good idea suggestions” were elicited from workers, and the number submitted by each worker was posted in the locker room.
²³
Similarly, one of Kamata's closest friends boasted about the number of pieces he could produce in a work day. Production became a source of identity and prestige .
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Any incident or act that disrupted production was condemned. When a worker in Kamata's quality circle was injured on the job, all members were forced to wear a “Safety First arm band.” This saw them stigmatized by others in the plant.
²⁵
Low prestige was attached to the arm band. Peer pressure--from a worker's own team-- formed a strong disincentive for anyone to report a job-related injury to avoid having to wear the arm band.

González in
Brave New Workplace
described a long and double-edged history of attempts to reconcile workers' interests with those of corporations. It dated back to the “scientific management” methods of Frederick Taylor, who, in the name of efficiency, “‘streamlined' assembly plants by conducting time-motion studies of each worker, breaking down each movement into a number of discrete steps, and then reorganizing them in a more efficient sequence by eliminating all unnecessary movements.”
²⁶
This dehumanization led Taylor's disciples to take another approach. While some conservative followers focused solely on “productivity and efficiency,” liberal “business leaders, bankers, politicians, trade-union leaders, and academic social scientists” during the 1920s “tried to forge a viable corporate order.”
²⁷
They sought to establish a stable corporate state by implementing worker “uplift” programs, such as collective bargaining, profit-sharing, company magazines, insurance, pension plans, safety reform, workmen's compensation, restricted work hours and the “living wage.” The idea that “better living
and working conditions would render him [the worker] more cooperative, loyal, content, and, thus, more efficient and ‘level-headed' . . . also carried over into such aspects of the industrial-betterment movement as gardens, restaurants, clubs, recreational facilities, bands, and medical departments.”
²⁸

“Since at least a century ago, a number of engineers, businessmen, and scientists realized that technology was no longer the limiting factor of production; now, it was man that could be engineered, and made still more efficient, given the right motivation,” González wrote, quoting from historian David Noble's book
America by Design
.
²⁹
“However there are two aspects of today's industrial relations that are genuinely new: first, the specific psychological techniques used to motivate workers; and, second, the increased number of companies willing to experiment with these techniques.”
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Toyota pioneered the new approach. “Toyota City” was built by the corporation to completely encapsulate and control the lives of its employees. “Total control over the social environment is an important component of thought reform programs,” González wrote.
³¹
“At Toyota City, thousands of young men were housed in military-style dormitories, surrounded by a fence and a guardhouse.” He also describes how, “during the time Kamata wrote his account, visitors—including family members—were not allowed to enter the dorms to visit temporary workers. Roommate assignments often grouped men from the same town together,” because, “according to Kamata, ‘it helps them adjust to the new environment and stay put during the employment period.'”
³²

These techniques were adopted by “U.S. bureaucracies and corporations, such as supermarkets, schools, banks, and government offices, including the Pentagon.”
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During the 1990s, American and Japanese automakers began pursuing what they called the Southern Strategy. They set up factories modeled on Toyota City in Tennessee, Ohio, Kentucky, and Indiana, where, they believed, a lack of unions and rural insularity made for a fertile environment .
³⁴

González quotes Kamata's personal account of Toyota City in the 1970s as an example of how emotional stress and sheer fatigue can create bewildering confusion and despair reminiscent of the experiences of those who are inducted into a cult. “When I come back from work,”
Kamata recounts, “I do nothing but sleep. I try not to think about the job; even the thought of it is enough to make me feel sick. Mostly, I feel too tired to think about anything.” Several weeks later, Kamata slips into trancelike states on the assembly line:

This peer group approach replicates the techniques used in coercive influence and control programs in Communist China, the Soviet Union, and North Korea. In these programs, the target subject “would become emotionally attached to the peer group members, who ‘came to know the target's personality and history exceedingly well.'”
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“ . . . [A] prisoner in Communist China would develop a circle of friends among his jailers,” explains González, “who could reward or sanction him according to whether or not his behavior fit their standards. Eventually, his behavior could be conditioned through peer pressure.”
³⁷

Similar processes occur in the cooperative work groups. Kamata explains: “If Fukuyama, the worker on my right, falls behind, he'll pull me behind, since I barely keep up with the work myself. Even if Fukuyama finishes his job in time, should I take longer on my job, then the next worker, Takeda, will be pulled out of his position. It takes enormous energy to catch up with the line, and if things go wrong, the line stops.”
³⁸

Anthropologist Alejandro Lugo, who worked at a
maquiladora
plant in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, describes a similar experience. He dropped behind many times in his first few days of work, and writes that “the pressure would be almost unbearable” as members of his work group would shout at him for not keeping up.
³⁹

When a temporary worker at Toyota City was injured and forced to quit, he told Kamata: “I'd have quit a long time ago. But I came here with Miura, so I can't let him down.”
⁴⁰
Reflecting on these statements, Kamata argues that the “work here is so difficult that people try to support and encourage one another, especially the ones who come here together. We feel it's not fair to drop out and go home alone.”

“Circle leaders often learn a great deal about team members' personalities and histories, sometimes for the purpose of manipulation,” González writes.

For example, at an assembly plant jointly owned by General Motors and Toyota in Fremont, California, a management handout, entitled “Facts a Group Leader Must Know,” implored team leaders to learn the birthday, marital status, anniversary, number of children, and hobbies of each circle member. Furthermore, “team members are encouraged to help each other deal with personal problems.” At a Toyota plant in Japan, team chiefs even used team members' birthdays to calculate biorhythm charts, so that an individual's “bad days” could be anticipated by the quality circle.

At a General Motors plant, 22,000 employees partook in weeklong “family awareness training” aimed at “establishing a family atmosphere within the division,” where managers and workers did interpersonal activities.
⁴¹
“One of the exercises worked at developing trust,” González summarized:

“A recent scandal in the federal government illustrates the dangers posed by coercion masked as harmony,” González concludes.

In May 1995, a Congressional subcommittee was stunned by the bizarre testimony of many witnesses who told of being “psychologically abused” and subjected to sessions resembling “cult programming” during management and diversity training sessions sponsored by the Federal Aviation Administration. According to witnesses, men were fondling women, blacks and whites were urged to exchange epithets, and co-workers were tied together or disrobed for hours at a time during the weeklong training courses, which the FAA subcontracted to various management consultants. One consultant, Gregory May, received $1.67 million in government contracts. According to some witnesses, May is influenced by a West Coast “guru” who occasionally contacts a 35,000-year-old spirit named Ramtha.
⁴³

In Britain, coercive persuasion techniques were among the blunt instruments used to undermine the strong shop-stewards organizations in well-organized plants such as Unilever and at Rover in Cowley (in the greater Oxford area), with the promise of “jobs for life.” Many trade union officials were initially seduced by this illusion of corporate and worker harmony. General Motors' Saturn car was built in plants that adopted the Japanese industrial relations model. This experiment, which soon became very unpopular with workers, lasted until 2004, when the union at the Spring Hill plant in Tennessee challenged the GM management and voted to restore the traditional United Auto Workers' contract.

Corporatism, aided by positive psychology, relies on several effective coercive persuasion techniques, similar to those often employed by cults, to meld workers into a “happy” collective. It sanctions interpersonal and psychological attacks and lavish praise to destabilize an individual's sense of self and promote compliance. It uses the coercive pressure of organized peer groups. It applies interpersonal pressure, including attacks on individuality and criticism as a form of negativity, to ensure conformity. It manipulates and controls the totality of the person's social environment to stabilize modified behavior.

Anthony Vasquez is a student at Berkeley. Sitting on the steps of Berkeley's Kroeber Hall on a sunny evening, he describes his experience with positive psychology at FedEx Kinko's, a photocopy and printing store. He has hazel eyes and messy black hair, and he is wearing
corduroys and a brown mountaineer jacket. He worked at FedEx Kinko's for about two years and was “always called negative, a com plainer, and not a team player.”

Vasquez recalls that his store's slogan was “Yes We Can.” “It meant that if a customer asked us to do a job for them, no matter what it was, we were to say, ‘Yes We Can!'” Posters of the slogan were posted near telephones and around the back room. Corporate auditors would phone the store to make sure employees said, “Yes we can!” to every request. Employees would be punished as a group for failures, and individuals could be fired. Other slogans included, “Winning by engaging the hearts and minds of every team member” and “I promise to make every FedEx experience outstanding.”

Vasquez tells about the scandal that ensued when his trainee, Sam, was fired. The store managers did not announce the dismissal but kept Sam on the schedule to make it appear that Sam was skipping work. The managers then used this as grounds for Sam's removal. After two weeks and several conversations with Sam, Vasquez wrote “Fired” in pencil under Sam's name on the schedule. The store managers were outraged. They called Vasquez into the office and reprimanded him with a “Positive Discipline Documentation Form.” He was charged with defacing company property and slandering Sam.