It seemed as if the miserable test might be forgotten. But with only a few months to go until GM and Ford would pass a verdict on Gel, his bosses weren't taking any chances on Beeler or anyone else losing interest in SPC. So last summer, after the classes were finished, they took a step that Beeler describes as "a goddamn joke."
You're all going to have evaluations, his supervisor warned, to tell you how well you're doing your jobs. Big deal, thought Beeler. After all, at $14 an hour, he was $4 above any of the other machinists.
It wasn't the best way to introduce what turned out to be a thorough revision of the compensation system. One by one, machine operators were called into their supervisors' offices and handed four sheets of paper. Each operator was ranked in different categories, then assigned a final number. Operators were categorized as class one, two, or three, depending on such skills as eliminating "red-tag" parts, adjusting the machine, and using SPC methods. From now on, supervisors told them, your raises will depend on improving your score through more training. Beeler, who ranked high as the only class-three machinist, was stunned. Important skills, such as setting up, were left out. People who did completely different jobs were rated on the same skills. "It created bad feelings," he says.
Did it ever. One employee spit on his supervisor and marched out the door. Another spent a week fuming before exiting. Beeler had no trouble understanding why employees were so irate. "Here you were running a machine, probably for 10 hours a day, producing mostly 'green-tag' acceptable parts," he says. "Maybe you're just learning to grind tools because you've only been at it for six months. Then you get called into a room, and you're told that you're a 20. What does that mean? you ask. Well, they answer, a 21 means you shouldn't even be here." Beeler shakes his head. "It's not right," he says.
Management was hurting its own cause. Workers who feared for their jobs couldn't concentrate on making better parts, Beeler says. Those who got bad evaluations figured they shouldn't care about quality, since they were going to be fired anyway. Even those like Beeler who got good evaluations were frustrated by the unfairness of it all.
Where will the sacrifices stop? Beeler had to wonder. What wouldn't Gel take from him in its scramble to win GM and Ford's love? Recently, Ken Walkerdine, Gel's vice-president of operations, issued a memo about work habits on the factory floor. Among other things, it asked that machinists like Beeler not wear wedding rings, which could get caught in machines. Beeler was furious. Finally, Walkerdine agreed to let workers cover their rings with masking tape. But the steel-toed shoes Beeler has to wear make his toes ache. And the side shields are a nuisance. What can he do? "This is a dying trade," he says softly. "I know I have to make this transition."
Beeler knows, for instance, that Gel must earn Ford's Q1 rating by the 1990 model year. "Getting that means we're still in business," he says. The stakes are very high. If Beeler were to take a drive down I-90, he'd see at least one supplier's Q1 flag flapping in the breeze, right beneath a U.S. flag. If he were to stop in and visit a few suppliers -- he'd have an estimated 15% fewer to choose from than he would have had five years ago -- he might stumble on the $20 million plastic molder who failed to pass GM's Targets for Excellence evaluation program. He'd see a man scrambling to save his company, spending his last $35,000 to build samples and prototypes for industries he knows nothing of, like aerospace and defense.
He doesn't even have to go that far to feel the squeeze. At 1:00 on a recent Monday afternoon in Gel's conference room, Ken Walkerdine was updating the supervisors on the company's doings, as usual. Through the first half of 1988, sales hovered around $900,000 per month. Now, though, $800,000 months are becoming the norm. The car companies, it appears, are starting to buy their turn signals as part of larger assemblies from bigger suppliers. Walkerdine suspects that business is gone forever.
We'd better start contemplating a layoff, he tells his managers.
This is not the world George Beeler expected to live in. "I've lived through some of the best years, when jobs were plentiful," he says. "My father had such pride in his work. How can we leave to our kids a nation that has fallen apart?"
Beeler is sitting in a restaurant booth having dinner with his son, John, as thay do most nights. "I worry more about him than me," he says, pointing to John, who is wearing a Harley-Davidson T-shirt and a scraggly beard. John earns $5.25 an hour churning out car parts on a screw machine at a small shop five miles away. "There won't be many of us left, but I'm going to be one of the chosen few," John says. "You've got to have a fighting attitude. That's what my dad always says."
The shop where he works, like Gel, will be evaluated in the next few months. "If Ford pulls out work, we're gone," says John. His father can only sympathize, nodding behind a cloud of cigarette smoke. He feels like a tiny part in a giant machine; he can't even tell who is running it anymore. Detroit? Washington, D.C.? Tokyo? Still, if the machine goes down, it will take him with it -- his job, his family, his neighborhood.
"We're all under the ax right now," Beeler says. "You drop that ax on these companies, and you're dropping the ax on a whole damn world. That's the world of my father and my son. That's my world."
