Column: Workshop Talks
October 1999

What team concept is really about

by B. Ann Lastelle

The workers at the unionized meatpacking plant where I worked ten years ago had a rule: no worker could tell another worker what to do. That was management's role. The division was clear. Team concept subverts that principle and not just in nonunion plants. Saturn workers earlier this year threw out their union local leaders, in part because under the labor-management cooperation contract, which the leaders supported, union members, some appointed jointly by the union and management, help run production.

Most of the teams at my nonunion workplace have team captains. Those people, chosen by their supervisors, in addition to operating their machines are responsible for communicating with the supervisor, ordering temporary workers and placing them on the line, repositioning team members to cover for vacations and absences, and organizing a rotation among workers to relieve one another for breaks and lunch. Team captains have one overall assignment: keep the line running.

My crew has had no designated team captain, because each person to whom the supervisor offered the position refused it. Some of the team captain's duties in such a situation tend to fall on the operator of one particular machine. I was in that position for more than nine months.

Workers came to me with problems and questions when they preferred not to deal directly with the supervisor, or the supervisor was absent or abdicated responsibility ("You will run the line through breaks and lunch. Work it out."). I was all too aware of management's expectations and constantly fought, often unsuccessfully, their influence on my reactions.

I asked the only available person one day if she would relieve other workers for breaks and lunch, but she refused. She had good reasons. The crew was missing two people, even though we had asked the supervisor for help from another team, and a woman who had just returned to work after surgery would be left in a position that she physically couldn't handle. It was the supervisor's responsibility to notice these things, she said, but he hadn't. We shut down the line for breaks and lunch.

It again seemed reasonable several days later to shut down the line for lunch, so I did. The supervisor this time called all of us into the office. His point was twofold. First, we had wasted the company's time. Second, I did not have the authority to shut down the line; that had to come from him. I suppose I should have insisted on a rotation or come to him and said...what? He later wrote in my performance review that I needed to open up lines of communication with the supervisor. Perhaps "collaboration" is a more accurate word.

Team concept attempts to thrust the role of disciplinarian onto the workers themselves. It doesn't simply add work for the already overworked; it changes relations among coworkers. When another growing phenomenon-the use of temporary workers, who are disproportionately young, women and Third World, and who are supervised by the permanent employees-is added, relations among workers within a single factory appear overwhelmingly complex.

Yet what Karl Marx wrote in CAPITAL remains true. Workers enter the process of production as isolated individuals, brought together and united into a single productive body by the capitalist who purchases their labor power. Their cooperation can accomplish things that no individual laborer, working alone, ever could. Marx called this "the creation of a new productive power, which is intrinsically a collective one."

That new power benefits capital as long as capital has control over it. Team concept and the employment of temps help maintain that control. On what basis can the collective power of the workers assert itself on the workers' own behalf? Will the complexity of today's workplace mean that when an answer is found, the transformation will be truer, deeper and more completely human than in the past?

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