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Talk to men who worked in the body shop then, and they'll say they remember clearly the day their boss stood up in front of them, pointed at some numbers, and told them that from this day forward the company would never be the same. Gary Cremeans, a longtime veteran of Graley Autobody, remembers hearing about lots of changes -- a new computer system, better advertising, profit sharing -- and frankly, he remembers being scared to the quick.
Jim's profit-sharing scenario worried him most. The way Cremeans understood it, he would give up turning hours and take a pay cut with the promise of splitting 50-50 any operating profits over 40%. The problem was, the Graleys were forever complaining about paltry profits, so what would there be to split? As Jim laid it out, profit sharing would encourage a higher level of efficiency on the shop floor, better-quality work, and a keener eye for waste -- all of which would ratchet up profits. But how would employees know if the company had indeed made a profit if management controlled which numbers were made public? "I wasn't sure we had the kind of trust that would convince me to take a pay cut," Cremeans admits.
Still, though Cremeans and others were nervous about Jim's profit-sharing ideas, they were more than willing to put those fears aside, knowing that Graley Autobody was a good place to work, "like a family," recalls John Jerrell, another veteran Graley body man. There were no time clocks, and it wasn't uncommon to see one worker drop what he was doing to help out another struggling with a problem. In a business where it's not unusual for a body man to work at a different shop every two years, half the men at Graley's had been there eight years or more. But as the Graley transformation began to take shape, so too did ever-so-subtle signs that life there would never be the same.
Sure, the men were pleased about all the new work the shop was attracting. But some couldn't help but think Jim was going a little too far. For instance, neatening up the shop felt like a waste of time and energy. As for targeting women, that was fine, but it wasn't so fine to be getting marching orders from a woman with little experience in auto repair. As part of the effort to hire more women in the shop, Jim put a woman in charge of quality control -- making sure the cars were completed quickly and on time. "I'll listen to anyone who's got a better way," says Pete Stymiest, a longtime Graley employee. "But I won't be bossed by a woman who doesn't know a taillight from a watermelon."
At first, the men say, it seemed as if well-intentioned plans were souring on the carry-through. Take the staff meetings. "Jim talked about working together like a football team," recalls Gary Carmon, an hourly worker. "He called a 'team huddle' twice a day to talk things over." But the huddles quickly digressed into one-way lectures. "Jim talked, we listened," Carmon and others say. "And lots of times Jim didn't even come to the meetings. Gradually, fellows in the shop gave up going at all."
While Don scurried to keep up with the higher volume -- shuttling from wreck to wreck, radioing in appraisals to the front office over his walkie-talkie system -- Jim worked equally feverishly in his back office, sketching out big plans. "It was clear Jim didn't care much what we thought," Jerrell says. "He was too excited about all his big ideas." Take all the money spent on new technology -- technology meant to make work easier for the men in the shop. "Some of this fancy equipment didn't work the way it was supposed to," Jerrell says. New prep stations heralded for creating bubblelike jet streams that kept dirt away from a car while it was being worked on actually sucked dirt to the car, according to Jerrell, making the job harder. "Jim wasn't working in the shop at all anymore," Jerrell says, "and yet he made us feel stupid if we offered suggestions."
Jim admits he liked being out from under greasy car engines. "I like wearing a neatly pressed white shirt to work," he confesses. "I never felt comfortable being dirty all day." And he loved his computer -- trying new programs, looking at his business from any number of angles.
But to Jim's body men, all that time at the keyboard meant their boss knew less and less what the day-to-day operation of the "new Graley's" really meant. Chuck Thompson, a body man, says that the pressure for speed, volume, and profits -- a key part of Jim's management mantra -- meant corners were cut. "We started cheating the customer and then the insurance agency," he claims. "We'd say we were putting a new fender on a car, but instead we were using cheap aftermarket parts." Because these parts were not made for the car, Thompson alleges, they had to be ground paper-thin to make them fit. Not only did he worry that the cars were unsafe, but it made his job harder. After his complaints went unheeded, he quit in 1987 after eight years with Graley's. Thompson later won unemployment benefits when an administrative-law judge ruled that Graley Autobody had required Thompson to participate in "a fraud on both the customers and the insurance carrier." Jim maintains he lost the decision only because he hadn't taken it seriously enough to bring a lawyer with him to the hearing.
Not that most of the body men were particularly bothered by the Graley-Thompson showdown. Much more nettlesome were the subtle, more demeaning changes happening around them. Into a shop that had once prided itself on a family atmosphere, Jim installed time clocks and a closed-circuit-TV monitor. Under pressure to increase speed and volume, "99% of the time I couldn't even break for a lunch hour," says Gary Carmon. "Then they had the nerve to put up monitors to see if I'm having a Pepsi on their time." Sure enough, Jim admits he occasionally used the monitor "to catch employees loafing around."
