Gainsburger via CatKB.com wrote:
Management Bites Dog Food Factory
A story of management resistance to
employee involvement and self-direction
by Art Kleiner
It started out as an experiment in workplace democracy and set
performance
records. So why did the bosses want to shut it down?
This is the story of an idea so powerful that management couldn't
kill it.
An idea rooted in a factory that four different companies have owned,
enjoyed great results from, and then tried to shut down---only to
have the
idea bite management back.
The idea is self-governing, high-performance teams---the stuff of the
now-
back-in-vogue socio-technical movement. The place is a dog food
plant,
where the idea was first tried, flourished, and then went through
successive owners who couldn't decide which side of the idea they
were on.
The story dates back to 1966.
One morning, in an isolated warehouse at a Gaines dog food plant in
Kankakee, Illinois, a 20-year-old nightshift worker was found bound
to a
column with packaging tape. He was unhurt, but he couldn't get free.
Once
discovered, he was immediately cut down. The question was: What to do
next?
The workers who'd assaulted their colleague couldn't be punished
because of
union rules. And Lyman Ketchum and Ed Dulworth, the two senior
managers in
the plant, didn't want to punish them. Labor-management relations
were
already on the brink of explosion, in part a result of the unexpected
success of Gainesburgers, which had pushed the decrepit facility to
operate
at three-times capacity. Instead of "kicking ass and taking names"
as some
supervisors suggested, Ketchum and Dulworth opted for a more
radical---and
more productive---course: a sociotechnical pilot project.
I know this plant. The workers used to grab stray dogs and throw them
into the meat grinders, alive, for fun. And I suspect the guy tied to
the post was black, the perps, white. Not a pretty place,
what-so-ever...
-L.
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