Kaiser Paves New Job Path Family Ties Used To Guarantee Jobs, But Not In Today’s Competitive Climate
For most of the past 50 years, the best way to get a job at Kaiser Aluminum Corp. in Spokane was to have the right relative.
“I’m not saying the people we hired were not good people,” says Gary Micheau, Kaiser Trentwood’s human resources director. “But certainly a lot of them were hired more on who they knew than what they knew.”
Familiarity paved the way to one of the best jobs in Spokane.
Sure, setting carbon on the Mead smelter’s potlines was back-breaking work. And the production lines at Trentwood’s rolling mill could be drudgery.
But it was the best pay you could get with just a high school education - or less.
Back in 1973, Kaiser paid $13,000, a better annual salary than many college graduates were making. Money enough to buy a house, own a car and a boat and raise a family.
But Kaiser employment was more than just a lifetime of work. A job also virtually assured that you could pass that same way of life on to your children. Spokane has a lot of three- and four-generation families of Kaiser employees. A job at Kaiser became something of a birthright.
And even if a son or daughter didn’t want to follow dad, being in the Kaiser family still had a payoff.
“If your kid was going to college, even in the liberal arts, you could get him a job at Kaiser for the summer, and a pretty good job, too,” says Micheau.
Well, the Kaiser money is still the best blue-collar wage in the area. But the people receiving those checks are changing.
State Employment Security Department figures show that Kaiser workers made an average salary of almost $40,000 in 1993, almost twice the average Spokane wage of $22,000.
But, according to Micheau, the familial path onto the Kaiser payroll has been blocked.
When Kaiser filled 114 new jobs at Mead and 54 new jobs at Trentwood this year, being somebody’s relative, friend or neighbor didn’t even get you an application.
The person Kaiser is hiring today is far removed from “someone who just got out of high school, or was working at Delma’s Burger Barn before Grandpa or Uncle Joe got them a job at Trentwood,” Micheau says.
Even the summer jobs now go exclusively to college students pursuing manufacturing-related degrees.
Attempting to compete in a global economy no longer affords the luxury of preserving the Kaiser generations.
Intellectual assets crucial
The corporate paternalism that Henry J. Kaiser’s generation fostered with such great pride died because it got to be too expensive in a world where every penny of cost must be wrung out of the production process in order to compete with vastly different labor and energy costs in all parts of the world.
“We’re a small organization,” says Micheau. “We’re big in Spokane, but we’re small in our industry. We don’t have $800 million to invest in a new facility. We don’t have the money to automate ourselves into competitiveness. That means that in order to compete, we have to take market share away from companies who have spent billions on technological upgrades.
“The only way we can do that, is we’ve got to have very talented people working here.”
In the evolution of the manufacturing process over the past 20 years, labor has become a precious variable.
“It used to be that we had our physical assets and labor was a kind of commodity that operated those assets,” Micheau says. “Well, the physical assets are no longer as important as the ‘intellectual assets’ - the people.
“It used to be ‘park your brain, bring your body. We have work.’ But we can’t afford that any more.”
In 1980, Trentwood employed 2,700 people and produced 30 million pounds worth of products a month. Today, the plant employes fewer than 1,500 and produces 50 million pounds a month. Yes, technological advances account for a lot of the increased productivity.
As Micheau points out, though, technology doesn’t run itself. Rank-and-file production workers run it, and they do so without the army of supervisors and engineers that provided technical guidance only a few years ago.
They are asked to apply intellect to improving the production process.
Absolute consistency of quality and a product tailored precisely to a customer’s needs is the only thing that will convince a beer or soft-drink producer to choose Kaiser can stock over Alcoa or Reynolds. And the automotive and aerospace industries have standards of quality unheard of in the industry even 10 years ago.
Now, when those customers come to Trentwood to talk about what they need, they spend as much time with the production workers as with the supervisors, Micheau says.
So who gets hired as production workers at Trentwood these days?
Typical of this year’s new employees are a technical maintenance engineer with years of experience at another local manufacturer; a maintenance worker with a AA degree in process control; a production line worker with a bachelor of science degree in environmental studies; a laboratory worker with a bachelor of science degree in chemistry. All the hires had either two or four-year degrees in manufacturing related areas. Most had related experience.
They all passed a battery of math and science aptitude tests, as well as exams testing their general knowledge of tools and the production process.
And besides all that, they have to pass a screening designed to assess their competency in group dynamics.
They have to, in other words, convince Kaiser that they get along well with other people and can be productive in a setting where a group of employees sets its own production goals and largely supervises itself.
Corporate culture hard to change
Change, of course, is never easy.
Sometime around 1985, Micheau initiated the process at Trentwood of “decoupling ourselves from hiring relatives, friends and neighbors, and hiring people who had the technical skills that were really needed to do the jobs that existed then, and the jobs as we envisioned in the future.”
He was regarded as a heretic.
“There are people even today who don’t understand why we won’t hire their kids,” Micheau says. “It’s gotten to be a much smaller group because there’s more understanding of why we don’t do that anymore.
“But it’s disappointing to people who work here because their father worked here and now they can’t pass that same thing along to their children.”
The change was more than an adjustment in hiring policies. It struck at the heart of Kaiser’s corporate culture.
And how big a task is it to change a culture?
“Cultures sustain themselves. They don’t go away,” explains Al Galioto, Micheau’s counterpart as human resources director at Kaiser’s Mead smelter.
“When you become a part of a culture, part of the adjustment to it is to learn the rituals and know the stories. You either get accepted there because you accept the culture, or you get rejected because you don’t. So cultures have a tendency to protect themselves and prevail.”
Galioto shakes his head and adds, “We’ve heard people we hired in 1992 tell stories about things that happened here in 1982 like they lived it. Well, that’s the culture.”
Trentwood is farther along the change curve than is Mead. For one thing, Trentwood got started in the process a little sooner. For another, Trentwood has some luxuries in fostering the change process that Mead does not.
At Trentwood, applicants still have to meet a set of physical standards. But unlike the old hiring process, “You have to pass the intellectual tests before you even get to the physical part,” says Micheau.
At Mead, just as it always has, the starting point remains the physical qualification. Even though computers now play a crucial role in monitoring the pots at Mead, working the potlines remains grinding labor that some people with otherwise great qualifications just can’t do.
Training emphasizes teamwork
Like Trentwood, the Mead facility is trying to break away from the the traditional labor-management hierarchy. It is trying to organize its work force into teams that are largely responsible for meeting production and efficiency goals without close supervision.
“We want groups of people converted into teams down on the floor, where they can make decisions around work without having to run it up and down what would be an organizational hierarchy,” says Galioto.
Besides the physical component, the employee Mead is looking for today has a high school education, is comfortable with computers, is competent with math and even has a familiarity with elementary algebra so he or she can understand how the computers that now run Mead’s potrooms are arriving at the information they are providing.
Galioto also wants people who have competent verbal and written communications skills and who perform well in the context of a team.
When Mead had a limited round of hiring in 1992 and 1993, the company took the group of candidates who had passed the physical requirements, and organized them into teams. They put before each team a set of Tinker Toys, and gave them the task of building the tallest freestanding structure they could. But before they could begin building, the group had to work together to plan the project for several minutes.
They were not looking for the people who could build the best tower. They were looking for the people who best demonstrated abilities to organize, lead and be productive in a group setting.
During this year’s hiring, Galioto said, the new hires had to be pulled together too quickly to repeat that exercise.
But they are being given two weeks of intensive training not only in the jobs they will be doing, but also in group dynamics.
“A lot of what they learn in these two weeks would have been things that a first-line supervisor would have gotten exposed to in the past,” Galioto says. “The goal here is to increase the group’s capability to make decisions and react to issues that need to be dealt with on the floor, rather than, ‘Well, I don’t know, I’ve gotta’ go ask my boss.”’
For people - both management and labor alike - who have spent entire careers working in an intensely supervised atmosphere, this is a wrenching change.
“People get into habits,” Galioto says. “That’s the way things are, and they get comfortable with that. So they don’t see any need to change.”
New hires are an opportunity to initiate change without the encumbrance of past experience. But, as Galioto points out, the culture is powerful. So the older workers and managers must be convinced as well.
“We’ve gotten over some of the suspicion,” Galioto says, “but I don’t think we’ve answered adequately for management or the union, the ‘What’s in it for me?’ part.”
Ultimately, what’s in it for everyone, say Galioto and Micheau, is the survival of Kaiser in a world full of companies that are finding ways to make these same changes.
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