The United Auto Workers and Nissan Motor Manufacturing Corp. are locked in a bitter battle here that`s fast becoming a critical test of the union`s ability to organize auto plants that are 100 percent Japanese-owned.
Last week, union supporters inside the plant handed out flyers accusing the company of firing workers who got hurt on the job. At the same time, company supporters used their 10-minute morning meeting, a part of the Japanese-style management approach at the plant, to drum up support for an antiunion rally.
”We`re getting very close to petitioning for an election,” said Maxie Irwin, a UAW spokesman in Nashville, which is 15 miles from the plant. The union says more than 30 percent of the workers-the minimum requirement-have signed cards requesting an election, but the union wants 65 percent before turning the cards over to the National Labor Relations Board.
”They`ve met some success, but not much,” said Jerry L. Benefield, president of Nissan. ”I don`t think they can organize this place.”
So far, that`s been the case at all Japanese operations where there is no U.S. auto company participation in the ownership. Mazda`s plant in Flat Rock, Mich., which signed its first UAW contract last March, is 25 percent owned by Ford. The General Motors-Toyota joint venture in Fremont, Calif., has been unionized from its inception. Diamond-Star Motors near Normal, Ill., 50 percent owned by Chrysler, has pledged its neutrality in any organizing campaign.
But Honda`s growing manufacturing complex in Marysville, Ohio, and Nissan here remain nonunion. And in the next two years, two more Japanese-owned plants will open, in Georgetown, Ky., and Lafayette, Ind. For the first time since the 1940s, the UAW faces the prospect of having as many as 1 million nonunion cars produced annually in the U.S.
The influence of the Japanese operations, called transplants, extends beyond their numbers.
”The nonunion sector is providing the model,” said Harley Shaiken, associate professor of work and technology at the University of California-San Diego and a longtime observer of the industry. ”Wages are lower; work pace and productivity are higher. The Big Three are quite consciously pointing to the experience and productivity of the transplants as their goal.”
The UAW canceled an organizing drive at Honda more than two years ago after the National Labor Relations Board disagreed with union allegations that the company engaged in unfair labor practices.
Last January, the UAW beefed up its organizing staff here. Owen Bieber, president of the union, spoke to a rally of about 400 workers and kicked off the drive.
Unlike Honda, where sales and production are booming, Nissan has been traveling a bumpy highway the last year. After becoming profitable for the first time a year ago, sluggish sales of trucks this year forced the first production cutback at Smyrna since the plant opened in 1983.
While there have been no layoffs, there are now 2,400 hourly employees at the plant, down about 100 in the last year through attrition. Each week, about 100 hourly workers with nothing to do in the plant have been rotating through a 40-hour re-education session at the company`s training facility.
One solution for the excess manpower is a $31.5 million plant expansion now underway. The company will begin assembling engines, axles and bumpers that previously had been assembled at Nissan plants in Mexico and Japan or bought from domestic suppliers.
”We don`t lay people off,” Benefield said. ”We go and look for things for people to do.”
Despite that Japanese-sounding pronouncement, the Nissan plant is the least Japanese-oriented of the transplants in the U.S. There are only 15 Japanese executives in Smyrna. By comparison, there will be 50 Japanese executives employed by Diamond-Star.
To run the plant, Nissan hired a slew of former Ford Motor Co. executives, led by Marvin Runyon.
In David Halberstam`s book ”The Reckoning,” which traces the successful Japanese challenge to U.S. automakers, Runyon emerged as a hero for defecting to Nissan after unsuccessfully trying to get the numbers-crunchers running Ford to pay attention to the manufacturing side of the business.
However, Runyon retired from his $686,000-a-year job earlier this year, when President Reagan appointed him to head the Tennessee Valley Authority.
Benefield, who ran Ford`s Dearborn assembly plant, said the executives lured by Nissan to Smyrna created a hybrid-style management for the new plant, incorporating some of the concepts they learned on their frequent trips to Japan.
”We tried to select the things Americans would be interested in,” he said.
One thing the executives were very interested in was a fervent antiunionism, which has marked Nissan`s U.S. operation since its inception.
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”Every environment I was in with the union created an adversarial relationship between workers and management,” Benefield said. ”Because our management approach is a cooperative one, we think it`s important for the whole team to have the same objectives.”
To some workers at the plant, Nissan`s cooperative management technique is long on public relations and short on substance.
”I haven`t been approached on my ideas,” said Mike Williams, a 40-year- old union supporter on the car underbody line. ”At the meetings, they just tell us how much downtime we had yesterday and make the assignments. We sit there and listen, then go to the line.”
Even antiunion workers say the company`s attempts to get worker input leave much to be desired.
Glenn Johnson, a 40-year-old Vietnam veteran, described how it took him days to get a maintenance man to solve a problem he was having with a machine. ”We have focus groups to deal with problems,” Johnson said. ”But management is management, and like in the Air Force, you have to go through the chain of command.”
The former Ford managers at Nissan admit they`ve cut back on some of the Japanese-style management techniques they attempted when they opened the plant.
”Participative management began as everybody participating in every decision,” said Joseph DeSarla, the paint shop manager, who began his auto career under Benefield at Ford. ”But you never get decisions that way. There are things where you have to have management direction.”
Lately, that has involved using the 10-minute morning meetings to counteract the organizing campaign.
”We try to give them (area leaders, the equivalent of foremen, who run the morning meetings) information on how to counter the leaflets, innuendo and rumors that come out,” DeSarla said.
Meanwhile, the union is stressing the quick pace of work and what it says is a high rate of accidents.
Still, the union has an uphill struggle to organize the plant. Many workers from the rolling highlands of central Tennessee are suspicious of organized labor and have warmed to what they see so far as Nissan`s benevolence.
”Nissan does not lay people off,” said Glenda Barbee, a 40-year-old paint shop worker. ”They promised us they wouldn`t, and they haven`t gone back on a promise.”