Stocky and plain-spoken, Tom Lesch has been a union
man in a union city for more than a quarter century.
For much of that time he's watched the role of organized
labor in the economy erode. But here in the most
unionized corner of one of America's most unionized
states, Lesch, director of International Association of
Machinists District 10 in Milwaukee, is in the thick of an
effort to reverse that decline. He and others are writing a
new chapter in labor-management relations that is turning
traditional adversaries into allies.
For the last six years, Milwaukee-area unions and
companies have joined hands in the Wisconsin Regional
Training Partnership (WRTP) to promote company-based
training for industrial workers -- veteran employees
as well as the next generation graduating from high
schools and the welfare rolls. Through WRTP, labor and
management are building high-performance workplaces
that feature highly trained work forces, team-based organization,
and secure, well-paying jobs.
"The workplace environment has changed," says
Lesch, who is secretary of WRTP. "The days of just fighting
with an employer and saying they're doing the
wrong thing are over. Involvement and decisionmaking--
having the knowledge the employers have being
shared with employees -- gives people the feeling of
ownership."
Startling words from a union leader? Not really, says
Lesch. He sees WRTP as a natural extension of a union's
mission to represent the best interests of its members.
Other Milwaukee unions and employers clearly agree:
The partnership has nearly doubled in size in the last
three years, to 38 companies and their union counterparts.
Another 80 organizations -- companies, unions, or
both -- participate less formally. Rhandi Berth, WRTP's
full-time executive director, says most of those 80 are
companies or unions that "can't bring the other side yet,
or they're afraid to sit down together."
The partnership includes both unions that have taken
a hard line toward employers and those that have enjoyed
more cooperative relations. In a New Economy
marked by fierce global competition, WRTP teaches important
lessons about the future of labor-management
relations.
"If we're going to compete in today's world, there's
got to be ongoing training of workers," says Bob Glaser,
a regional official with the United Steelworkers union.
And "most of the time," he adds, "if there isn't union involvement,
there isn't going to be the participation that
companies want."
Unions must change, too, he notes, and cajole their
members to keep up with the times. "We want to encourage
older workers to get training," Glaser says. "We
need them to understand that the one job they've always
done might not exist a few years from now."
For their part, employers view WRTP as neutral turf
where they can exchange information with unions and
other companies about gaining an edge in a relentlessly
global economy.
"They are good for us as a benchmarking forum, a
clearinghouse for other companies engaged in similar
initiatives," says Darlene Rindo, manager of training
and development at Harley-Davidson Inc.'s Powertrain
Operations plant in the Milwaukee suburb of Wauwatosa,
which has built a reputation for strong labor-management
cooperation and joint decisionmaking.
WRTP is helping Harley advance its goal of becoming a
"learning organization," with everything from work-place
education centers to an alliance with Marquette
University in which Harley employees can attend classes
at the factory and earn a bachelor's degree.
Milwaukee is one of the nation's most manufacturing-intensive
metropolitan areas, ranking only behind Detroit
and San Jose, Calif., says Bill Luker, an economist at the
Center on Wisconsin Strategy (COWS), a University of
Wisconsin-Madison think tank that promotes reform in
labor and industrial relations and in trade unions. With a
concentration in metalworking, fabricating, and machining
that rivals Silicon Valley for computers, Milwaukee
has come a long way from the economic devastation it
experienced a decade ago.
"What you've got in Milwaukee is a world-class manufacturing
locus," Luker says. And WRTP is "in a very
pivotal position. It has spearheaded a movement toward
workplace education and training that has resulted in
the formation, building, and construction of dozens of
on-site workplace learning and education centers."
WRTP grew out of a series of state studies in the early
1990s warning of an impending shortfall of skilled
workers. For example, a 1991 commission appointed by
Republican Gov. Tommy Thompson surveyed state com-
panies about their workers' skills. Half reported their
workers couldn't use algebra, one-third said they had
trouble with fractions, and one-fourth said they had
trouble reading.
Meanwhile, research by COWS director Joel Rogers
and his colleague Wolfgang Streeck, both sociologists at
the University of Wisconsin-Madison, found that employers
were barely investing in the training of hourly
workers. When companies did seek better-skilled workers,
"they were poaching them from the company down
the block," recalled the late Carl Weigell, a Milwaukee
industrialist who had chaired the governor's commission
and was instrumental in establishing WRTP, in an
interview three years ago.
Union leaders, meanwhile, were grappling with two
problems: hordes of laid-off members with outdated
skills, and employed members who were unprepared for
new job responsibilities such as working in teams and
using statistics in quality control. "It didn't take very
long before we realized that something should happen
pro-actively rather than just reacting," recalls Phil
Neuenfeldt, a former machinist then running HIRE, a
training center for dislocated workers at Milwaukee
Area Technical College.
Recognizing a rare convergence of labor and management
interests, COWS encouraged the formation of
WRTP in 1992 with equal representation of unions and
company officials. Weigell, who died in 1997, co-chaired
the partnership with the then-president of the Wisconsin
AFL-CIO, Jack Reihl. Neuenfeldt was named the group's
first executive director. Funded by a combination of gov-
ernment and foundation grants, the partnership
now has a permanent headquarters
in Milwaukee and a staff of five
full-time and two part-time employees.
Neuenfeldt, who was elected secretary-treasurer
of the state AFL-CIO in 1994,
now serves as the labor co-chair of the
partnership.
WRTP focuses on three broad issues:
Plant modernization, including the
introduction of new manufacturing technologies
and workplace organization
schemes;
Worker education and training in
basic skills and new modes of work;
Future workforce development,
which encompasses both school-to-work
programs for high school students and
programs tied to Wisconsin Works or W-2,
the state's work-based replacement for
Aid to Families with Dependent Children.
Training veteran workers is the partnership's
oldest franchise. In the late
1980s, a handful of employers, with union assistance, set
up work site centers where employees could brush up
their skills -- sometimes significantly. A troubling number
of hourly workers, many with a decade or more on
the job, were arriving at the centers with poor reading
and math skills at the very time when new work operations
and shop floor reorganizations were stretching
their abilities.
WRTP has helped spread the establishment of such
centers. In 1992, Waukesha Engine, a unit of Dresser
Industries in the Milwaukee suburb of Waukesha,
opened a workplace learning center at the behest of
union leaders. The center gave the union and the company
"an opportunity to cooperate on something that is really
one of those few win-win opportunities," says Dean
Smith, the company's director of industrial relations. It
gives the employer assurances of adequately trained
workers, he notes, and the union and its members assurances
of good wages and job security.
The movement toward workplace education "is a
fundamental turning away from the last strongly held
vestiges of Taylorism -- the reduction of the manufacturing
worker to simply a cog in the wheel," says Luker at
COWS. A new kind of manufacturing worker, autonomous
and entrepreneurial, is emerging, he adds,
one "who understands that learning is a lifelong proposition"
and essential to better pay and greater job security.
Some companies, with or without union contracts, are
even starting to tie pay increases to training that employees
get at work.
Waukesha Engine and its union didn't stop after creating
their workplace learning center. Within two years,
the two sides were working on a broader partnership in
the operation of the plant, building on the trust that the
training center project fostered.
Even companies with strong records of labor-management
cooperation have found WRTP useful. In a plant
north of Milwaukee, John Deere and members of the
Machinists union have been pursuing a joint quality initiative
since the day in March 1991 when the plant shut
down for a daylong quality seminar. The Deere plant,
which makes lawn mowers, garden tractors, and related
products, wasn't in a crisis then, says Chuck Evans, its
human resources manager. "But we saw that if we did
not change and begin to prepare for the '90s and beyond
...we would not be successful 10 years down the road."
Steve Kovalaske, president of Machinists Lodge 873
at the Deere plant, says communication is the biggest
change. "We actually talk to each other," says Kovalaske,
a welder. "We don't yell at each other." Both sides "play
their cards face up," Kovalaske adds. "I can deal with
that a lot better. I can deal with the tough decisions if we
know them up front. I can't deal with them if we're
blind-sided by them."
Working together, the union and Deere have expanded
employment at the now 700-employee factory,
adding more than 200 union jobs in the last three to four
years. More recently, the company, union, WRTP, and
two local high schools have begun a trial school-to-work
program at the plant. Students now visit regularly to
learn about manufacturing and to develop skills ranging
from using computers and instruments to working in
teams.
For a company and union that face the retirement of
up to 30 percent of the plant's workers in the next five
years, says Kovalaske, "we're pretty concerned, are we
going to find the people we need with the skills we
need?"
At Eaton Corp.'s Navy Controls Division in Milwaukee,
WRTP and the Milwaukee Jobs Initiative, another
COWS-sponsored project, have helped the company
start a 14-week training program for mothers making
the transition from welfare to work. Graduates are
promised a job at Eaton in either assembly, testing, light
machining, or custodial work. All but one of the first
dozen trainees joined the company in February, and
more rounds of training are scheduled for the coming
months, says Ed Nicely, the human resources manager
at the Eaton operation.
Through the Eaton project and others like it, says
WRTP co-chair Neuenfeldt, "we've already moved more
than 50 people from the central city into jobs that pay
more than $12 an hour."
The training partnership pointed Eaton toward resources
it otherwise might have overlooked. "They
brought us to the table with the right people," says
Nicely. "They've also helped keep us on track."
According to Nicely and others, the dual involvement
of management and labor groups is the linchpin of
WRTP's success. "You need both parties there to make
things happen," he says. Companies bring their training
needs to the table, while unions bring both an understanding
of what it takes to motivate the membership
and a vehicle through which employees can participate
in setting up the program.
That buy-in is crucial to the success of a training program,
agrees Smith of Waukesha Engine. "Our skills enhancement
center is really managed by the employees,
the union, and Waukesha County Technical College.
Management's input is primarily to manage the budget."
Putting the union virtually in charge enhances employees'
trust in the training program, as does having
specially trained hourly workers as peer advisers to the
training center, Smith says.
Not every WRTP-related project has a happy ending,
however. Only a few years ago, Johnson Controls' valve-manufacturing
plant on Milwaukee's north side was a
widely touted success story. With a workplace learning
center and a conversion to team-based operations, the
plant boosted productivity and actually brought work
back from Mexico. In late 1996, however, the company
announced it would shut the plant and move all the
work to Mexico -- a move that embitters Machinists official
Lesch, whose union represented the plant's workers.
"Johnson Controls used to be a place where they fought
tooth and nail," he says. "They turned that totally
around to working with the employer." The plant closing
"is the biggest black eye to the efforts that were put
in, not only at that company, but by many companies
and labor unions" trying to work together.
Even when cooperative programs succeed, they
aren't always harmonious, add Evans and Kovalaske of
John Deere -- nor should they be. "Do we have our arguments?
You're goddamn right," Kovalaske says. "But if
you scream and holler and shout at the next guy, does
that solve your problem? No."
"It's like a marriage," Evans says. "Couples have
fights and you don't get divorced because you have
fights....There's no partnership in existence today in
the world where there's not differences of opinion."
Meanwhile, WRTP's efforts to help companies and
unions find their way around differences has caught the
attention of some non-union companies. Custom Products,
a Milwaukee-area non-union manufacturer, recently
met with WRTP representatives to learn more about
creating networks of peer advisers to encourage employees
to use the company's workplace training centers.
David Schuckert, corporate quality training manager at
Custom Products, says the discussion was enlightening
and jibes with the company's own commitment to training --
which is so deep that it pays workers for the jobs
they're qualified by training to do whether they're actually
doing them or not.
WRTP's future agenda includes a survey -- an update
of one conducted three years ago -- to determine what
companies need in the way of skills training and work-force
readiness. In addition, Neuenfeldt says, it also
wants to help revive moribund manufacturing apprenticeships,
abandoned more than a decade ago when
companies were laying off too many people to even consider
training entry-level workers. Yet another goal is to
establish a more readily available resource, networking,
and technical-support center for area manufacturers.
In the end, Neuenfeldt says, WRTP's method represents
the high road on a split path for employers -- and
that's why unions support it so strongly. "There are options
that corporations make about being productive,"
he says. "One is to pursue some sort of high-performance
path. The other is to move jobs out. While nobody
can take a cookie cutter approach and have a
utopia, there are a lot of ways people can learn from one
another."
