[PEN-L:276] Corrected Scientific American article

[boddhisatva <kbevans@xxxxxxxxx>]

		To whom...,



	Sorry, technology fever got they best of me and I forwarded an
article to the list that was rife with computer-driven errors.  Here is the
cleaned-up version:



	





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		"Look for the Union Label:

	 new analysis of economic data shows that
 	unionization could maximize productivity"




	After nearly a century of union-management warfare in the U.S., a
series of nationwide surveys showing the union shops dominate the ranks of
the country's most productive workplaces may come as a surprise.  In fact,
according to Lisa M. Lynch of Tufts University and Sandra E. Black of the
Federal Reserve Bank of New York, economic Darwinism: the survival of the
fittest championed by generations of hard nosed tycoons-may be doing what
legions of organizers could not do: putting an end to autocratic bosses
and regimented workplaces.

	American industry has been trying to reinvent itself for more than
20 years. Management gurus have proclaimed theories X Y. and Z, not to
mention Quality Circles, Total Quality Management (TQM) High-Output
Management.  Only in the past few years, however, have any solid data
become available on which techniques work and which don't.  Businesses do
not always respond to surveys, and previous attempts to collect data ran
into response rates of his low as 6 percent, making their results
unrepresentative.  Enter the U.S.  Census's Educational Quality of the
Workforce National Employer Survey to, first conducted in 1994, which
collected data on business practices from a nationally representative
sample of more than 1500 workplaces.

	Lynch and Black correlated the survey data with other statistics
that detailed the productivity of each business in the sample.  They took
as their "typical" establishment a nonunion company with limited
profit-sharing and without TQM or other formal quality enhancing methods.
(Unionized firms constituted about 20 percent of the sample, consistent
with the waning reach of organized labor in the U.S..).

	The average unionized establishment recorded productivity levels
16 percent higher than the baseline firm, whereas average nonunion ones
scored 11 percent lower.  One reason: most of the union shops had adapted
so-called formal quality programs, in which up to half the workers meet
regularly to discuss workplace issues.  Moreover, production workers at
these establishments shared in the firm's profits, and more than a quarter
did their jobs in self-managed teams.  Productivity in such union shops
was 20 percent above baseline.  That small minority of unionized
workplaces still following the adversarial line recorded productivity 15
percent lower than the baseline-even worse than the nonunion average.

	Are these productivity gains result of high-performance management
techniques rather than unionization?  No, Lynch and Black say.  Adoption
of the same methods in nonunion establishments yielded only a 10 percent
improvement in productivity over the baseline.  The doubled gains in
well-run union shops, Lynch contends, may result from the greater stake
unionized workers have in their place of employment: they can accept or
even proposed large changes in job practice without worrying that they are
cutting their own throats in doing so. (Lynch tells the opposing story of
a high-tech company that paid janitors a small bonus for suggesting a
simple measure to speed nightly office cleaning -and then laid off a third
of them.)

	Even if a union cannot guarantee job security, she says, it
enables workers to negotiate on a more or less equal footing.  Especially
in manufacturing, Lynch notes, unionized workplaces tend to have lower
turnover. Consequently, they also reap more benefit from company-specific
on the job training.

	These documented productivity gains cast a different light on the
declining percentage of unionized workers throughout the U.S..  Are
employers acting against their own interest when they work to block
unionization? Lynch believes that a follow-up survey, with initial
analyses due out this winter, may help answer that question and others.
Economists will be able to see how many of the previously sampled firms
that have traditional management-labor relations managed to stay in
business and to what extent the "corporate re-engineering" mania of the
past few years has paid off.  Most serious re-engineering efforts-the ones
that aren't just downsizing by another name-lead to increase to worker
involvement, Lynch argues, if only because they require finding out how
many people actually do their jobs. Armed with that knowledge-and with the
willing cooperation of their employees-firms may yet be able to break out
of the productivity doldrums.

		-Paul Wallich


	(reprinted without permission)

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		Peace