One subject that has come up in this election cycle is the purportedly Great Age of American Manufacturing and Middle Class Jobs that prevailed back in the 1970s. But what was it actually like back then? I recently did some work in Detroit on an inter partes review. One of the Detroit-based patent litigators with whom I was working was on the scene in the 1970s with summer jobs in two Ford plants. Other than pride in having built a lot of Fairmonts, what does he remember? “You couldn’t be fired unless you hit someone. You didn’t have to do anything. The worst that could happen to you was that you’d be reassigned to a different job.” When experts came in to evaluate how fast the line should move, everyone was told by union bosses to slow down. “They saw everything in slow-motion,” he said.
Meanwhile, what does it look like now that we’re getting our cars from factories in the South, in Mexico, and in Asia? Here’s a photo of peak morning rush hour traffic in Southfield, a suburban business hub:
“The fish stinks from the head.”
Of course our legal system contributed to Detroit losing control of its factories to the UAW and the unions (almost) killed the goose that laid the golden eggs. But management contributed too – they really didn’t give a damn about cost or quality or technical innovation when the market was shared among the Big Three. They all had identical wage structures and had to contend with the same union, so all they had to do was compete as to who had the biggest tail fins that year or whose seats were made of “rich Corinthian leather”. And when cars came off the line poorly assembled, they shipped them out anyway. And the UAW didn’t cause Detroit cars to crumble into rust piles in a few short winters.
I’m working this week for a startup just down the road from this hotel. I only wish traffic were that light on all the surrounding highways.
I had a similar experience working a union job – the union protected dead weight workers who were frustrating not only to management but to their coworkers as well. My uncle was a union steward and he ended up quitting because he spent most of his time defending the same few lazy people who were not worth defending. I don’t know why unions would or should tend to do that, but there’s probably some iron law of something in there somewhere.
Another consequence of this is that management has to be very careful about who they hire. Management at my job was allowed to fire for any reason in the first 90 days, and they would do so at the slightest hint that a worker was lazy or slow (this actually worked pretty well – there weren’t that many dead weight workers. Lazy people are generally not capable of simulating non-lazy people for 90 days). They also had no leverage over their workers other than to call them into the office and yell at them (unpleasant even though they ultimately can’t do anything), so the nastiest managers tended to succeed.
I work for Walmart now as a manager and it’s becoming the same way in an effort to head off unionism, to the extent that I was forbidden to write people up for failing to meet metrics by my manager, and that we’ve introduced the trial period fire for anything process recently – the idea is that we have to act like we’re a union shop so the workers won’t vote to make it an actual union shop. I’ll bet this is going on everywhere due to new laws in the past few years that make it much easier to unionize.
Could be a motif for teacher unions. When dating after 40, you encounter a lot of women employed as teachers. They’re definitely not pressed for time like private sector workers. At the same time, you can reverse engineer the most basic Chinese camera gimbals to find they use a remarkable level of multivariable calculus & code obfuscation which Americans are completely unaware of.