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Arguably, the forced regimentation and rigor of the assembly line had the single most profound effect on the workers' sense of their relation with the company. An RCA worker's every motion on the line had been broken down into its smallest elements by a sophisticated version of Taylorism known as the work factor system, developed at RCA Camden and exported to the other shops. The system, based on extensive research designed "to eliminate human judgment in setting output rates," classified the distance any part of a worker's body needed to move, the body part or parts used, the type and degree of manual control involved in each motion, and the weight or resistance encountered in the operation. Each motion segment had been quantified into a "work factor unit" that equaled 1/10,000 of a minute. Using an intricate formula that compensated for the time required for a worker's body part to change directions, the time necessary to synchronize different motions, the degree of visibility of an operation to the worker, the amount of control and dexterity required, and the amount of "mental process" involved, the manager could "objectively" determine the time required to complete any task from values derived from reams of tables without recourse to a stopwatch. The time required for a given movement could vary with the obstacles or cautions involved. All of the work factor calculations for each movement in the assigned job could then be added up to a single aggregate amount of time, or "work process." The assembly of the entire television set consisted of hundreds of separate processes performed by each operative.
Even though the work factor system had supposedly eliminated the need for a stopwatch, the minutes of Local 1424's monthly meetings reveal an obsession with ensuring that each shop steward had one to keep the pace of the line from being pushed above "objective" limits. Stewards had to circulate every hour to time the lines to prevent the company from raising the rate. The former business manager Bob Norris recalled, "If you didn't watch the company, they were constantly pushing that lever"-the one that controlled the speed of the line. If a worker managed to find a shortcut that allowed her to perform a task faster than the time-study engineers had calculated, the experts came in to reevaluate the process. "That was one of the problems we'd have with this work factor study," explained a process engineer, "trying to figure out where'd I goof? How come they can beat that rate so much? So you'd go back in and reanalyze and see what you'd done wrong." The dehumanizing aspect of the system frightened even the time-study engineers. Working there "would kill me, those rates-maybe fifty an hour, seventy an hour, hundred an hour," said a plant engineer. "To do the same thing a hundred times an hour for an eight-hour day would drive me nuts, putting the same parts in, and you just keep going and going and going. Ugh!" And the line stopped for nothing.
Despite high expectations, RCA's presence in Memphis started and ended in labor controversies. After trying and failing to block organizing efforts in Camden and Bloomington, RCA immediately conceded the unionization of the Memphis plant in order to make sure the workers would choose the union of RCA's choice, the International Union of Electrical Workers (the union launched as an anticommunist answer to the UE), rather than risk having both the Memphis and Bloomington assembly plants organized by the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. In the advent of a strike at one of the plants, the operations in the other would continue unaffected. As the International president of the IBEW explained in a letter to the International president of the IUE, "The cause of our present problem is, of course, the Company's massive effort to separate the Home Instrument Division for bargaining purposes so that in the future they can whipsaw us against one another to their advantage and to the disadvantage of our collective members." Despite such clarity of vision as to management's intentions, each union baited the other into an ugly jurisdictional dispute that gave the company the upper hand.
damn, brilliant
Little more than two months after the slaying of Dr. King, Virgil Grace, IUE Local 730's black president, penned a manifesto that reflected the new militancy. "This Local Union has, for almost a year and a half," he wrote, "explored every avenue searching for evidence to substantiate the theory that the management of RCA Memphis is even remotely interested in the individual employee, his problems or his welfare." Unable to "uncover even a shred" of evidence to substantiate this idea, the local leadership found management to be "masters of deception'' who "have been weaving tangled webs, trying desperately to thwart the responsible efforts of the IUE Local 730 to prevent our members from being raped of their dignity and pride." The membership had ordered him to tell the company that the "day of reckoning is at hand." He took the company to task for violating not just the spirit of the contract but the fundamental rules of human decency as well:
The days of slavery and all its attendant misery was abolished a century ago. We will not allow RCA to institute it all over again. RCA must realize that our foreman is not our lord and master and the Corporation does not own us body and soul. We have stood by too long and watched the grievance machinery choke up with garbage, which should have been settled without a grievance. We have been content with crumbs, when the whole cake was rightfully ours. We are not convinced [that] the no strike clause in our National Agreement prohibits this Local Union from taking action against a Company who would not stop short of anything in their mad dash to attain the almighty production quota and, in many cases, more .... We do not hold to the theory that a Company can, because of a no strike clause, do anything it wishes without regard for contractual obligation, moral obligations or the basic principles by which all members of society are governed.
In contrast to the swift shutdown in Memphis and the rapid exodus of consumer electronics from Camden, however, Bloomington's television production simply drifted slowly away. "I think the first move was to Tennessee in a very small way," said the RCA worker Elizabeth Shelton in 1979, "but the rumors started as long as twelve years ago that eventually RCA in Bloomington would be reduced to just more or less a shipping point or a final assembly [operation]. And it all happened gradually over a ten-twelve-year period." Although marked by occasional large-scale layoffs, the decline in receivermanufacturing jobs took place over the course of a generation as employment reductions combined with the early retirement of workers to eliminate 7,000 positions between the late 1960s and the mid-1990s. Judy Cross explained, "We had eight thousand people working here and all the chassis went .... [Then] we lost our tuners, we lost our pre-amp, we lost our remote control." Even after the television chassis started arriving from Mexico in the mid-1970s, the Bloomington workers at least performed the tasks of attaching equipment to the core of the set, but then the chassis began arriving in Bloomington with all the components already in place. In sum, according to Sandy Anderson, rather than laying everybody off at once, "they just sort of snuck it out one line at a time." The Bloomington workers were actually more fortunate than many U.S. workers in the consumer electronics industry, for RCA kept some production in the country longer than many of its competitors did.
this is kind of funny
Indeed, many critics pointed to the cheaper labor employed by Japanese firms as the factor behind the relocation of jobs in the consumer electronics sector, but by the mid-1970s the Japanese advantage in labor costs had almost disappeared. In 1963, U.S. wages were six times higher than those in Japan, but by 1977 the difference between the two had shrunk until U.S. wages were only 1.5 times those of Japan. As early as 1966 Television Digest declared that Japan's rapidly developing economy was no longer the "low-cost, high-laborcontent bargain basement of [a] decade ago." In 1973 Sony could even claim that the two countries' wage costs were about the same once the elaborate system of Japanese fringe benefits was calculated into the equation. The "Japanese cheap labor" argument for moving U.S. production abroad held what little merit it could claim only until the mid-1970s, when it became clear that the Japanese government's investment in industrial policy, in the form of subsidized and targeted development strategies under way since the 1950s, was what was really paying off. By that time, however, the foreign labor against which U.S. workers competed did not belong to foreign firms but could be found on the payrolls of their own companies. Every U.S.-owned television manufacturer had become a transnational manufacturer by 1977.
The 1970s were difficult times for the company as the combined effects of the recession, foreign competition, and poor management eroded RCA's competitive position. After a dramatic sixty-year history of expanding sales and product innovation, Fortune magazine pronounced the corporation one of the worst-managed companies in the United States. Investment in research declined precipitously, a string of relatively short -lived CEOs followed Robert Sarnoff's resignation after his short but disastrous reign, and the company, burdened by nearly $2.9 billion of debt, finally divested itself of its various subsidiaries. "I am anxious to get back to the roots of this company," announced Chairman Thornton F. Bradshaw, who was imported from Atlantic Richfield to restore order to RCA. "We'd like to spend more on our production lines to bring them up to the Japanese level of investment." Some observers believe that if the company had been investing in its productive cap abilities rather than buying other companies and searching out cheap labor, both the workers' and the industry's future would have been quite different. By moving production abroad so early in the face of international competition, the industry made an implicit decision to embark on a long-term strategy that would eventually end domestic production. "A decision to battle imports with automation and radical technological change" earlier on, argues one industry analyst, "could have resulted in a dramatically different outcome.
Few things demonstrate the process of silent integration more effectively than the fact that about 75 percent of the Bloomington RCA jobs had been lost before the acronym "NAFTA" even entered the political discourse. Indeed, the threat of capital flight had hung over all labor relations at the plant since the late 1960s, but by the 1990s, with global pressures increasing and labor law turned against the workers, it became a weapon wielded aggressively against the dwindling numbers of RCA employees. In 1991, during standard contract negotiations between the Bloomington union local and the company, for instance, RCA-Thomson demanded a wage cut of $2 an hour or it would relocate all of the 20-inch sets, one of the factory's staple products, to Mexico, where it could save nearly $80 on every set produced. Rather than submit to extortion and surrender 20 percent of their members' paychecks, the union representatives decided to call the company on their threat. Their response clearly demonstrated the distance the Bloomington workforce had traveled since the early days. "We caucused back in the room," reported an exasperated Bill Cook, and decided, "Fuck it! Move 'em! And they did."
The union made its bold decision to call the company's bluff in the context of events it had closely observed unfolding at Zenith's operations in Missouri. Their competitor had followed a similar migratory path, moving from industrial Chicago to Springfield, Missouri, and finally to Matamoros and Reynosa, on the Mexican border. Having just witnessed the Zenith IBEW local make painful concessions on the promise that the workers would get to keep what remained of their jobs, only to see them transferred to Mexico six months later, the RCA local was not in the mood to offer much in the way of concessions. "The story going around the [Zenith] plant was, if you didn't give them the wage concession, they were going to move to Mexico," explained a former Zenith employee who had worked at the plant over twenty-four years. All of the concessions they granted to keep the plant open, however, "just gave them an extra five years to finalize their plans to move. We just helped pay for it." [...]
Before the company made its demands, events may have led the employees to believe that their jobs were safe for at least a little while. Two years earlier the city of Bloomington had granted the company an "enterprise zone" status that had already saved it over $1 million in taxes. As one city official remarked in the wake of the threat to relocate, however, "You don't buy loyalty when you buy a company through tax breaks." In addition, Thomson had announced substantial profits just the day before the meeting in the parking lot and had recently committed $10 million to have the name of the Indianapolis Hoosier Dome changed to the RCA Dome for the next ten years. The company, however, still talked tough about the need for "bold actions to cut costs" and argued that it had to "think and act globally." RCA-Thomson managers announced that their actions would be "swift" because their options were "limited" and their time "short."
motherfuckers
In the first recorded labor skirmish at RCA, workers tried to break through the turnover system. In the spring of 1977 the employees publicly condemned the company's policy of forcing workers to resign when they reached the age of twenty-five or accumulated five years on the job. The "mass demonstration," however, was quickly and efficiently defused and defeated. RCA's systematic manipulation of turnover clearly indicated that it preferred to absorb the substantial costs of rehiring and retraining personnel rather than allow wages to rise to market levels or allow workers to acquire inefficient habits and "dangerous" levels of commitment to their jobs.
sounds extremely familiar