Fascinating Program Re- Management v. Labor and Making Things Work

The This American Life episode at http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/561/nummi-2015 :

561: NUMMI 2015
Jul 17, 2015
A car plant in Fremont California that might have saved the U.S. car industry. In 1984, General Motors and Toyota opened NUMMI as a joint venture. Toyota showed GM the secrets of its production system: How it made cars of much higher quality and much lower cost than GM achieved. Frank Langfitt explains why GM didn't learn the lessons—until it was too late.

You can't stream it now, but I believe it will become available at 7PM CDT.

For me, one interesting take-away was that the Japanese methods focussing on quality rather than quantity, encouraging innovation and a non-hierarchical relations among workers ("teamwork&quot , resulted in higher quality products and much greater efficiency, but also had the effect of undermining worker solidarity, as well as eliminating jobs.

Re- the undermining of worker solidarity, as I understood, that had to do with the fact that, if you're being evaluated based on your team's performance, a tendency arises to want to report to management on/eliminate fellow team members who are perceived as weak links. The program didn't explain further.

If as I gather the teams were defined sub-groups within the company and if in fact they were encouraged to compete against one another, it seems to me that this strategy would indeed serve managements' interests well, effectively fracturing a labor force that might otherwise unite against management. However, I'm not sure how directly this follows from the team structure; it seems to me that U.S. companies manage to foster plenty of dog-eat-dog among workers as individuals, without dividing them into teams. Maybe it has more to do with eliminating seniority as the basis for advancement?

Another alternative, of course, might be to define the "team" as the whole company, competing against competitor companies. Then, the main beneficiaries of the competition could be shareholders and consumers, rather than management. I think, e.g., of worker-owned companies such as the Mondragón cooperative (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation ; see also http://www.yesmagazine.org/new-economy/mondragon-and-the-system-problem , re- challenges from competitors in China and other super- low-wage countries).

It's a very complicated picture, worth understanding better.