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End of the Road: After Detroit, the wreck of an American Dream

In Georgetown, Kentucky, the Toyota curriculum is taught to students k-12 in the county schools, providing a seamless path from Kindergarten to work.A terrifying example is provided in this excerpt.

Excerpt

by Ben Austen

Ten years ago, officials from Toyota and Scott County Schools together developed a course of study, called Quest, that was based on the car company’s problem-solving methods and "lean thinking." This Toyota curriculum is now taught to students in the county's public schools, kindergarten through twelfth grade, and juniors and seniors can learn about the efficiencies of Toyota’s production system in the high school's Manufacturing Academy. Toyota and the school district also helped bring a technical branch of Bluegrass Community College to Georgetown. Although its permanent home has yet to be built, the college is currently offering industrial-maintenance classes at the Toyota plant, in a hangar that houses the automaker’s own training facilities. Any student who passes the Manufacturing Academy class earns a full two-year scholarship to the technical school. Gene Childress, a Quest developer who previously oversaw Toyota's evaluation of job candidates, led me on a tour of the schools that use the Toyota curriculum. Childress now works at the Center for Quality People and Organizations, a non-profit Toyota created to administer Quest. For Toyota and CQPO, Childress told me, it was all about building pathways for students, "a total package," so that they could travel seamlessly from the lower grades, to high school, to the Manufacturing Academy, to the technical college, and thereafter into work.

When Toyota created Quest, it believed that the Georgetown plant would soon face a shortage of qualified workers. The first employees it hired at the plant would be retiring in the near future. And when the facility last expanded its operations, in 1996, the carmaker had determined that just one of every one hundred applicants seemed likely to fit into the Toyota culture. But the company also assumed that Quest would serve the public good. According to Toyota philosophy, a problem can be solved properly only after a team member first takes time to identify its nature. One of the many student handouts that Childress gave me included a quote from Taiichi Ohno, the father of the Toyota production system: "No one has more trouble than the person who claims to have no trouble." Quest ostensibly provided a formal process for children, whether six-year-olds or teenagers, to define troubling issues and resolve them collectively. In this respect, the program could be seen as doing more than preparing students for work at Toyota. By learning the car company's best practices, students would become better thinkers and more adept at working in teams. Quest advocates contend that the county's children are being prepared for any job or challenge. "I think it leads to better Americans," Steve St. Angelo told me.

In a fifth-grade classroom, I saw students using Quest to figure out how to handle a hypothetical bullying issue. A boy, with marker-stained hands and an I GOT OUT OF BED FOR THIS? T-shirt, asked the other members of his group, "What should be happening here?" By defining the norm, I was told, the students could figure out what needed to be accomplished. Another Taiichi Ohno aphorism from the student handouts reads, "Where there is no standard there can be no kaizen." Dianne Lloyd, the teacher who was leading the class, said to me, "They've done bits and pieces of Quest since kindergarten. They pull it all together in fifth grade." Lloyd ended the lesson with a review of the roles and responsibilities of Quest problem-solvers. A girl, out of breath in her excitement to answer, explained that a facilitator must remain neutral, so is not like a boss. When Lloyd asked who were team members, the entire class answered in one voice: "Everyone's a team member!"

At Scott County High School, Chip Southworth, the director of secondary education in the district, told me that Toyota's presence in the schools was subtle, "not something you actually see." Southworth was wearing a pullover adorned with the insignia of the Toyota Classic, the school's annual basketball invitational, at which a Toyota car or truck is raffled off each year. The high school itself was built when Toyota agreed to advance the district $8 million in scheduled annual payments, after a bond issue to fund construction was rejected by voters. The school's principal, Frank Howatt, surmised that more than half of the student body had a parent or close relative who worked for Toyota or one of its suppliers.

Initially, a few teachers in the district were concerned that a private company, particularly one as influential as Toyota, would have a hand in shaping curriculum and inserting its own ideas into lesson plans. It didn't help matters when teachers were first trained in Quest and all the sample problems dealt exclusively with scratched doors, improperly sealed moon roofs, and other car-related complications. Although Quest in many ways seemed simply to be Toyota jargon for brainstorming and group work, the lessons still presented Toyota as an ideal to be emulated and admired. "The Toyota way is very impressive," the labor historian Harley Shanken told me. "But if you replicate the model in the community, that has many names, and democracy isn't one of them."

I wasn't able to find anyone in the county who was critical of Quest. Most people I spoke to thought it could only be beneficial to share in the practices of a company as successful and innovative as Toyota. Jack Conner, the head of the area's chamber of commerce, rhapsodized to me about the virtues of the curriculum. "This shows what could happen when you use private-sector thinking in public-sector situations," he said, clapping his hands in affected amazement. "Could you imagine what would happen if the private sector took over Washington? There would be an andon cord right there on Pennsylvania Avenue. You'd just pull it, and everything would stop!"

Gene Childress picked up a six-inch Toyota Land Cruiser and displayed the plastic contrivance before eighteen juniors and seniors. "This is what your final product looks like. It's got a chassis, wheels, and all that good stuff." Childress flipped a switch under the chassis and the little car began to whir. A boy reached for one of the vehicles and said, "Oh shit, that’s tight." Childress snatched the miniature Land Cruiser from the student's grip. "These are not toys," he scolded.

The gathered students were part of Scott County High School's Manufacturing Academy, and they had been excused from their regular classes to build the Land Cruisers on an assembly line. Spread out over several grouped tables were the vehicle’s individual components, each marked with its stage in the assembly process: BODY PREPARATION, GLASS, ACCESSORIES, FINAL Childress explained that the students' job was to deliver a completed car every ten seconds over a four-minute shift. At this rate, they could produce a total of twenty-four Land Cruisers. More important, Childress would be calculating the average amount it cost the students to build each unit, taking into account expenditures for labor, parts, and finished vehicles with defects. The big semester exam, on which students could earn extra credit by defining such Japanese terms as jidoka and _kanban, was still two weeks away. But today's lesson was the crucial test. Childress told me that the simulated assembly line was the culmination of everything the students had learned in the Manufacturing Academy, as well as over the many school years that they had worked with Quest: they would actually be applying Toyota concepts to reduce production costs. Two nine-person assembly lines would run concurrently, competing for the lowest cost per vehicle, with the winning line entitled to first dibs on a pasta lunch.

While Childress issued instructions, a curly-haired boy at the "wheel/axle assembly" table readied himself by organizing his parts into neat groups of four knobby tires and two silver rods. At "accessory," a student practiced clipping plastic bumpers onto Land Cruiser bodies. But the vast majority of students did not busy themselves with preparations. Many of them spent the time before the onset of production reaching beneath the tabletops, pulling phones from pants pockets, then reading and sending text messages. After a few moments, they would repeat the process. Others simply sat impassively, their blank stares as unchanging as masks.

The chaos and inefficiency of the first four-minute run was all but intentional. A boy in a Scott County Cardinals Tennis sweatshirt ran from station to station delivering completed parts, while a burly student, designated the "dealer," rang a bell every ten seconds and shouted for either a red or a blue car. One of the two girls in the class fumbled with a double-A Energizer battery as she tried to put together the motorized chassis at the required pace. "There’s not enough time," she cried out to no one in particular. The glass-assembly technician, a solemn bespectacled boy, paused to study the stations around him. He saw that he and "wheel/axle" were the most backed up, and then he stolidly got back to snapping tiny windshields into place. "This is pitiful, y'all," the dealer said as the four minutes wound down. The tennis player, now a bit winded, volleyed back, "You're pitiful."

Classes in the Manufacturing Academy are taught by employees of CQPO, the non-profit funded by Toyota, not by district teachers, and the second assembly line was being overseen by Carl Morse, a local farmer who left the fields in the 1980s to join Toyota. The biggest difference between farming and building cars, he told me, was the monotony of the latter—that and having to work indoors. He was now retired from the plant, and he occasionally helped Childress with CQPO assignments. Morse assessed the low yield of the students in his group, the numerous cars they had in the pipeline at various stages of incompletion. "I worked at Toyota seventeen years," he said to the teens. "You don't see this at Toyota. At GM, Ford, you see this."

When the students were brought together to review the process, Childress told them, "It doesn't make any difference whether you're working at McDonald's, or at school, or at a factory--your job is always to reduce waste." Some students were unable to complete their tasks within the allotted ten seconds; others were done with time to spare. "If it takes you only five seconds to do it, what do we have?" Childress asked rhetorically. "We have waste." The students needed to redistribute the work more evenly among fewer people.

Although all the students had played their parts in the simulation, it was hard to imagine them fretting over a few moments not maximized for greatest efficiency. It seemed even less likely that these teenagers would care how five unproductive seconds could be redirected and better used elsewhere. Up to this point, had anything in their lives demanded such discipline, such fixation on time and output? Even the manufacturing class, taught by two experts in Toyota's lean production system, did not demand this. Childress went off to punch the cost-per-vehicle numbers into a computer, leaving the juniors and seniors unattended and unoccupied. During the lull, many of the students brought out their phones again, now placing them on their tables and engaging in lengthier exchanges. Others returned to gazing ahead blankly, each successive ten-second interval dissipating into unproductive oblivion. One boy, whose shaggy hair was gelled forward as if blown by a ceaseless tailwind, chanted some self-promoting boast to a group of boys seated behind him. "You can't creep like me. You can't expand like me. You can't rush like me." I understood what he was talking about only after he answered another student's question about this professed prowess. "You have to bring those two to the front car, then you start killing them," he explained. I wondered if hours spent mastering a first-person shooter game were considered muda.

For the next four-minute assembly-line shift, students were expected to kaizen the process. Both Childress and Morse extended the word into three syllables, far more central Kentucky than Aichi Prefecture: kai-ZAH-un. The students quickly discovered they could move their tables closer together, thereby cutting down the amount of time it took to pass along completed parts. The reconfiguration also allowed them to eliminate a conveyance job, significantly lowering the cost of production. The groups were told that Toyota often had vendors deliver parts pre-made, so fewer workers were needed on the assembly line. Could they think of any work to outsource? The students whose assembly jobs were made obsolete became, in this exercise, quality-control managers, who would study the system and suggest further improvement. "Look at this real heavy and see if we can combine three jobs into two," Morse advised them. When one of the newly minted quality experts suggested that an idle worker could help out at chassis assembly, where the task seemed more complex, Childress dismissed the idea. "Adding more people is never the first solution. We always want to operate with the fewest number of people."

On the second run-through, both assembly lines improved dramatically, with one team slashing its costs by nearly half. But to trim more, the students were sent back to their groups to perform the scientific management techniques of Frederick Taylor. They were told to run time-and-motion trials on one another, to see exactly how long it took them to complete each task. The student doing the timing was also instructed to look for any nonessential movements that could be eliminated. Ideally, the work would be performed not only more efficiently but also identically each time, Childress explained. As an illustration, he showed one group how lifting a car right-side up with his right hand and then turning it over as it was passed to the left hand wasted valuable seconds. He grabbed the Land Cruiser upside down with his left hand to make his point.

Even as more students lost their jobs on the assembly line, as the remaining workers were forced to take on additional tasks at greater speed, and as the tasks themselves became more routinized, the juniors and seniors were never asked to consider their own interests in this simulation. Instead, they remained singularly focused on the game of reducing production costs. A girl proposed that her teammates on the line work the entire time standing up, since that would allow them to move faster, and Morse had to explain why over eight or more hours this would become physically difficult. When a boy in a Louisville University T-shirt suggested how his team might shed another worker, Childress said, "Exactly. One less person to pay."

Standing nearby, the student with the tousled Caesar-style hair pantomimed pulling back the biggest bow and arrow ever shot on Kentucky soil. He strained, squinted, took aim at the student who had just kaizened out a classmate. It wasn’t clear whether the bowman imagined himself to be an original native of these parts setting his sights on white interlopers, or an HR executive lowering the boom on surplus stock, or simply his creeping and expanding video-game avatar. With a whoosh of sound effects, he released an arrow the size of a surface-to-air missile. His target, a mere five feet away, threw himself backward with the force of the imagined shot, stumbling dramatically. As the student mock-struggled to prop himself up against one of the assembly-line stations, he reached for the wound. He placed a hand on the invisible arrow in his heart.

There are Toyota workers who still hope to form a union at their Georgetown plant, and I talked to a group of them at the second-floor office that the UAW maintains in a strip mall less than a mile down the road from the factory. In one room, all four walls are lined, floor to ceiling, with the names of all full-time employees at the plant and whether they had been asked about their union leanings; the UAW told me it is in regular contact with about 150 workers there. Nevertheless, the project of unionizing the plant is certainly daunting. With the auto industry in free fall and overall unemployment higher than at any time since 1983, most workers do not want to appear critical of their employers. The plant would not say how many hourly workers accepted Toyota’s buyout package this spring, but any replacements will likely be young and therefore less concerned, at least at this point in their careers, with retirement or the long-term effects of laboring on the line. And today, fair or not, making the argument against a union at a factory like Georgetown’s has become as easy as pointing north and saying, “Look what the UAW did to Detroit.”

The workers I spoke with at the union office—one had been at Toyota for a decade, all the others for more than twenty years—enumerated their grievances against the plant: the professed commitment to workers was belied by the company’s relentless pursuit of profit; the team concept was a ploy to reduce the workforce, speed up lines, and use peer pressure to enforce management’s interests; there were high rates of injury, large numbers of exploited temps, rising health-care premiums, leaked plans to cut wages, the constant raising of the bar for performance pay. The workers said they had listened, wide-eyed, to a company claim that their 401(k) accounts would each top a million dollars by the time they retired. As these workers recounted the perceived wrongs, as they imagined how having a contract and some guarantees would change life at the plant, the improbable task of unionizing Georgetown became for them a matter of sheer necessity. "Toyota, Honda, Nissan, Kia, Hyundai, BMW, -Mercedes—they have ridden the backs of the UAW members," Tim Unger said. "We've ridden their backs, and they can't carry us anymore. We've broken them down." James Skipper, who as a Republican said he was an unlikely union supporter, described telling a young colleague on the night shift that if they didn't act soon, they were eventually going to be earning $15 an hour, their bodies worn down by overwork.

"I don't think people in industries that have nothing to do with auto realize how our earning this wage helps them," Skipper said.

Unger added, "This whole fight begins and ends really here in Georgetown. It really does."

"That"s why I call it the Alamo," Skipper said.

This entire article is available online to Harper's subscribers.

— Ben Austen
Harper's
2009-08-01
http://www.harpers.org/archive/2009/08/0082595

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