When Dan Hoemann gets his master’s degree in business administration in December, he won’t trade in his flannel work shirt for a three-piece suit. He plans to stay in his toolmaker job with Chrysler Corp. in Fenton, Mo.
“I’ll use my abilities for my own investment purposes,” says Hoemann, 48, of O’Fallon, Mo., a nine-year Chrysler employee.
And, he adds, if the bottom falls out of the auto industry, “at least I’ll have my MBA.”
Hoemann is among thousands of autoworkers across the country who are taking classes and getting degrees under a tuition-assistance program run jointly by the United Auto Workers and the Big Three auto companies.
Participation is growing in the program, which began in the mid-1980s. It is part of a package of educational and training opportunities offered to autoworkers that makes them perhaps the best-educated blue-collar workers in the country, said Karl Mantyla, a spokesman for the UAW in Detroit.
For the auto companies, the program is an investment in the work force.
“You can tie it back to quality of product,” said David Caplan, a Ford Motor Co. spokesman in Detroit. “When reading skills are higher, so is the ability to understand different concepts. Building an automobile nowadays is not a question of just nuts and bolts. It’s really a process now. It’s much more complex than it used to be; more teamwork is involved.
“The philosophy is: Use people with their brains and not just their brawn. When you do that, you have to make sure training opportunities are there.”
Under the tuition-assistance program, an active or laid-off autoworker can receive up to $3,100 in tuition and fees to take classes for a degree, to enhance skills or just for fun. The coursework need not be related to the automaking job.
In the last nine years, General Motors has paid $128 million to about 6,000 educational institutions for its workers. More than 55,000 Ford workers have participated since 1982, with about 1,000 getting college degrees. Last year 17,400 Ford employees-or 18 percent of its hourly work force-got tuition assistance.
Workers take classes on college campuses or in UAW-company training centers close to the auto plants.
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The centers offer knowledge fit for a modern renaissance man or woman. Consider some of the classes this semester: Principles of Macroeconomics, American Constitutional Development, Focus on Modern Asia, Principles of Leadership, Acting and Chorus Ensemble.
Most of the workers who get degrees stay with the auto companies. The workers have built up loyalty, pay and benefits.
Tim Lyerla is an exception. He left the Ford plant in Hazelwood, Mo., when he couldn’t switch from his assembler job to one in which he could use his new degree in information systems. He took a job as a programmer-in-training at May Co.
“I wanted to stay with Ford, but there wasn’t anything there,” said Lyerla.
Cynthia Johnson of Alton, Ill., hopes to stay at Ford after she gets her master’s degree in human resource management next spring. She’ll have come a long way from the young woman who started on the assembly line installing dimmer switches in 1976. Since then she has held a variety of jobs on the line and in the training department, reared four children and earned a bachelor’s degree in sociology from Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville.
The education, she says, “is mine. I feel good doing it. I come from the floor. I’m mature enough. I feel I can put on a management hat and understand where people are coming from.”
Tuition assistance is especially helpful to laid-off workers. Diana Jones of St. Charles, Mo., was laid off from GM in June and is studying for a degree that will help her switch to paralegal work. She said the tuition-assistance program is “the best deal in town.”
GM plans to shut its Wentzville, Mo., plant in December and reopen it in 1995 to build full-size vans. Union representative Ray Womack hopes to go back to GM, but in the meantime he’ll study for a mechanical engineering degree.
“I thought it was a waste not to use that money,” he said.