Another One Bites The Dust: Nummi Gets Tossed

Think back to the late 1970s and the 1980s when we were hearing about how productive the Japanese were and how we needed to import their managerial and production concepts. Suddenly team building, labor/management committees, "win-win" and horiziontal organizations became the mantras. I heard this at work and then I heard it in church. Lee Iacocca was the hero of the day. Ross Perot followed vaguely in his wake. Both have been sent to the outer reaches of the American political landscape with the kind of dispatch which commentators usually attribute to Stalin or Kruschev, but they once promised a leaner and meaner productive America. Their velvet fist replaced the "unseen hand" of the old capitalism, and it was supposed to be capable of renegotiating trade deals and union contracts. We got half of the loaf.

It seems like a long time ago, doesn't it? The argument in America in the early 1980s was over how industry could best be managed and retained, not whether or not we would have industry here. And we believed that industry meant some level of unionization and that industry and unionization guaranteed at least the possibility that another New Deal might arrive. With industry, unions and a new New Deal within reach it was not unreasonable to think that a resurgent left might eventually take power.

Toyota and GM incarnated the turn towards alleged Japanese managerial and productive concepts by creating the New United Motor Manufacturing Inc.(Nummi)joint venture in 1984. This helped Toyota avoid taxes and tariffs and got it off of the trade hook in the pre-WTO days. It also gave GM a second wind with a long-term outlet for its parts and for the surpluses it had on hand when Nummi came into being.

At least two generations of managerial and engineering scientists have learned to recite the Nummi credos backwards and forwards since 1984 and they have spread the Nummi gospel through whatever is left of industrial America. This has gone forward as a barely-disguised ideological attack on unions and the left. Toyota and GM made some handsome profits, but the big advances for industry here were in creating and stabilizing "lean production" and buying off a section of the United Auto Workers' union leadership and membership. They were successful in both endeavors.

A brave vanguard of the traditional left in the UAW objected to Nummi at the time of its creation, but the international union's leadership and staff buried the objections while the fight against concessions in basic industry took up the militant's remaining energy and time. They were, we might say, prematurely anti-corporate.

Come now to 2009 and Toyota is closing the last auto plant in California--Nummi. With it, perhaps, will go much of the nonsense that has accompanied the pseudo-science of labor-management cooperation, but we can't be that lucky. Instead, what we are more likely to see and hear are drowning cheers from the hard-hearted far-right as they applaud the withdrawal of a foreign-based corporation from these shores, further deindustrialization, the further weakening of a once-strong industrial union and an opportunity to reintroduce their version of laissez-faire economics. They're hoping that the splatter effect of the Nummi closing will cover labor and the Democrats in gore--never mind that the Republican governor of California was willing to promise the company money he didn't have in order to keep the plant open.

This is more of the "one-sided class war" we used to hear about (which was never really one-sided, and only rarely reached the level of warfare) and so we wonder at the inability or failure of the unions or the left to talk about occupying the plant, forcing it to remain open and productive in some other capacity or once more raising the flag for an industrial policy that might work. At the very least, we should expect the Dems and the UAW to make Toyota pay a steep price for leaving.

Nummi was, as the far-right says, a political sop intended more to engineer social change than to produce automobiles. Whatever benefits and promises the UAW got from the GM-Toyota deal came with a price, however, and this is what the right will not tell you: the companies bought part of the union, changed the nature of production, forced a rigged debate in the US about deindustrialization at a moment when the economy was going into a slide, helped kill pattern bargaining and insured that the Labor/management cooperation disease spread through most American workplaces. Much of the union and Democrtic leadership was complicit, if only in their silence and weakness, but it was the most reactionary sections of capital that forced the deal to begin with.

There are plenty of lessons here, and we may be debating these for years to come. Today, right now, I'm thinking that three obvious lessons are these:

*All talk of labor/management cooperation is suspect. It comes either when the economy is doing great and they need our buy-in, or when the economy is beginning to stumble and they need the union stamp of approval for isolating workers and burying the left.

*Industry could previously depend upon union leadership to cut the deals and win some rank-and-file buy-in when questions like "lean production" came up. This guaranteed some union's survival. Industry doesn't need their consent now and can throw the union leadership and the unions under the bus. EFCA does not really correspond to this new reality; in fact, labor has no strategy or tactics in hand to deal with the new economic and political problems.

*The dominant Democratic and social democratic thinking in labor and across the left is also inadequate. We now have a left without labor at our core. Reliance upon the Democrats by labor and the left has weakened both forces. Few people are going to trust unions and a left which they can't rely upon for leadership, independence and clarity.