Workers' Hands Bound by Ties to Past
In all the hundreds of books, articles and speeches on American competitiveness -- or the lack thereof -- work rules and job restrictions are rarely mentioned. Such rules forbid a foreman to do any production work, whether taking the place of a worker who goes to the restroom, repairing a tool or helping when the work falls behind. They forbid electricians to straighten a stud when installing a fuse box. They forbid workers' moving from one job to another, thus restricting them to narrow, repetitive tasks, e.g. spray-painting the door panel of a car. And they narrowly restrict what a worker may be trained for. Yet all available evidence indicates that work rules and job restrictions are the main cause of the "productivity gap" of American (and European) manufacturing industry.</br></br>To be sure, productivity is not the sum of competitiveness. But when it comes to making things, productivity is the foundation. And it is precisely those American and European industries in which making things is most hedged in by work rules and job restrictions -- steel, automobiles, consumer electronics, rubber and so on -- that have done the poorest against the competitors from East Asia.</br></br>The best evidence for the effect of work rules and job restrictions is found in America's building industry. It alone of all major industries anywhere has -- working side by side -- union shops with tight job restrictions and non-union shops without them. Both shops are often owned by the same company -- it's called "double-breasting" in the industry -- with the same people running them. The time it takes to do an individual job, e.g. connecting a drain pipe, is exactly the same in both. Yet the crew working under work rules and job restrictions needs two-thirds more people to do the same job in the same time.</br></br>A "double-breasted" contractor recently ran a study on two nearly identical projects done by his company, one by a union crew, the other by a non-union crew. The non-union crew worked an average of 50 minutes out of every hour. The union crew worked 35; the rest of the time it was forced to wait -- for someone to come back from the restroom or for a journeyman to become available to do work an apprentice could easily have done but was not allowed to touch. The unionized crew also had to work short-handed for 40 minutes until a man qualified to drive a truck had come back from the shop with a replacement part. When that happened on the non-union project, the foreman ran the errand and the work continued.</br></br>The result: The unionized crew required a crew of eight, the non-union job was done by five workers. Interestingly, the large Japanese contractors who are considered models of efficiency work with roughly the same productivity, all observers agree, as American non-union contractors.