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Topics:
Work & Empowerment
Union
and Management Collaborate to Democratize Work at the Shell Sarnia
Plant
A 1949 visit
to a coal mine in which a Tavistock researcher used to work led
to a discovery that began a long process of innovation in workplace
redesign that is still going on today. Miners were reinventing
old forms of team collaboration that proved to be particularly
appropriate to new technologies. Computer-based technologies and
turbulent organizational environments in the decades ahead have
proved, under certain conditions, to be particularly fertile ground
for redesigning work according to Tavistock principles and practices:
team collaboration, self development, continuous learning, and
shared access to information. Case study
plus.
Case
Study Plus: Union and Management Collaborate to Democratize Work
at the Shell Sarnia Plant
by
Carmen Sirianni. Copyright
© 1995 by Carmen Sirianni
The principles
of workplace democracy, personal development through work, and
collaborative organizational learning were pioneered by the Tavistock
Institute in London, and then brought to the United States, Scandinavia,
Canada, and many other countries from the 1960s onward. (See Tavistock
Institute Develops Practices of Contemporary Work Reform).
An example of an advanced sociotechnical design will perhaps best
demonstrate what workplace democracy in an industrial setting
can mean in practice.1
Tavistock
researchers became engaged in the latter part of the 1960s in
the Shell Philosophy Project, which eventually involved several
thousand Shell (U.K.) employees, managers, shop stewards and union
officials in a series of two and one-half day long off-site conferences
in which the underlying philosophy of work redesign was discussed.
The document
that emerged from this process was disseminated to Shell management
in various countries, and in the mid-1970s managers of Shell Canada
utilized it in drafting their own Philosophy Statement to guide
the design of a new chemical plant in Sarnia, Ontario. Officials
from the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers Union—the Canadian
branch that subsequently split off to form the Energy and Chemical
Workers Union—demanded a role in amending the Philosophy
Statement, placing more emphasis on self-management of work teams,
and then joined the team that designed the physical layout and
social organization of the new plant.
The basic
building block of the plant is the semiautonomous team. There
are six process teams composed of 18 members and a coordinator,
and a 14-member craft team. Each process team has responsibility
for all process operations of the plant during their rotating
shifts, including lab work, shipping, warehousing, janitorial
work, and daily conflict resolution. Teams decide among themselves
how work is to be assigned, vacations and overtime scheduled,
and technical training organized. Although management has the
right to designate coordinators, these are proposed by the teams
themselves, and management virtually never rejects team nominations.
The team of maintenance "craftsmen-instructors" (electricians,
pipefitters, millwrights, analyzers, instrument technicians),
as well as the lab specialists, not only perform their specialized
functions on regular day shifts, but teach their skills to the
process teams as the latter rotate through the day shifts, so
that operators can run the plant and respond to problems without
being overly reliant on specialists.
The fundamental
premise of the design is that organizational learning requires
unrestricted individual learning in a supportive team context.
Hence, all operators are expected to learn all the tasks necessary
to run the plant, a process that takes several years, and are
encouraged to develop specialties in the various maintenance crafts,
warehousing, quality lab testing and the like, which define a
variety of distinct career paths within the plant.
To encourage
unrestricted learning, there are no detailed job classifications
or seniority-based promotions that create artificial barriers.
Instead, there exists a system of open progression, with grade
levels and pay based on acquired skills, which are measured by
exams and performance tests that the teams themselves help design
and administer. Skill acquisition and pay levels of individual
members thus do not come at the expense of other members' chances
to learn, progress and receive recognition for their accomplishments.
Rather, individual members are interdependent in a positive sense,
and the performance of the team depends on nurturing all members'
capacity to keep learning. The Philosophy Statement recognizes
that in order to have "a climate which encourages initiative,
experimentation and generation of new ideas," error situations
must be viewed not punitively but from the standpoint of "what
we can learn." Resulting skill levels in the plant are so impressive
that managers visiting from a Shell petrochemical complex in Western
Canada remarked to the plant superintendent that they could not
distinguish the operators from the engineers.
The design
of the physical plant and computer system is also meant to facilitate
individual and team learning and initiative. The laboratory is
located in the main unit so that operators have easy access to
quality control testing. Administrative and maintenance offices
are also positioned close to operations to encourage access. A
single parking lot with no reserved spaces for management, as
well as a common lunchroom, helps break down status distinctions.
The computer software is designed to respond to queries posed
by operators, and provides them with on-line information about
economic and technical variables that are generally available
only to technical and managerial experts in conventionally designed
plants. Decisions are left in the operators' hands, and an off-line
computer facilitates learning as well. The software itself is
continually revised on the basis of operators' own experience
utilizing it. The information system thus leaves decisional loops
open, rather than closed, and is an example of what Shoshana Zuboff
has called the "informating" uses of computer technologies, in
contrast to their mere "automating" uses.2
The design
at Sarnia is viewed as continually evolving, and rank and file
workers and the union organization play a major role in determining
the direction of change. Every two or three years, of course,
a new contract is signed, but since the initial contract in 1978,
the burden of change has not fallen on refining and specifying
this rather minimalist document of ten or so pages. Instead, revisions
in work organization are the product of an ongoing debate about
the sociotechnical principles embodied in the Philosophy Statement.
Workers
continually discuss, for instance, what it means for employees
to be considered responsible and trustworthy, and for work organization
to encourage initiative and the development of skills to their
fullest capacity. And the system of plant governance gives labor
a major voice in all issues short of strategic business decisions.
The Good Work Practices Handbook specifies the details of work
design and skill progression, and is being continually negotiated
and revised. It is viewed as a binding joint agreement, but unlike
labor contracts that are written in "lawyer language," its everyday
prose facilitates ongoing discussion of work practices and the
values underlying them. When the shift system was revised to accommodate
workers' concerns for equity in night work—we will return
to this when examining working time innovations below—approval
was required by the Union-Management Committee that oversees all
matters of plant governance, plus a seventy-five percent vote
of all union members. The proposal was generated by one of the
many ad hoc union-management committees that have been set up
to deal with specific matters of concern, but was initially pushed
by local members against both management and the E.C.W.U. national
offices.
In another
instance, when it was recognized that unanticipated technical
difficulties in getting the polypropylene system up to steady
state as quickly as the isopropyl alcohol system had led to some
operators getting stuck, including those with more industry experience
who were spending time training others, workers began to meet
formally and informally within and across teams, and proposed
the creation of a task force to redesign the progression system.
The three union members of the five-person task force were elected
at a general union meeting, and there was one hundred percent
turnout at the union meeting to ratify the task force proposal
several months later. The craft team progression system was also
redesigned by a joint task force to give greater recognition of
their training role after the craftsmen forced the matter by conveniently
"forgetting" their skills and refusing overtime. The maintenance
and lab systems have likewise been redesigned in response to various
worker concerns. Workers are also represented on the Coodinator
Selection Review Board in case of disagreement over the appointment
of a team coordinator.
Grievances
tend to be settled informally within the teams, but if they are
not, a Team Norm Review Board consisting of representatives from
each of the seven teams, plus the union vice president and three
management representatives, meets to hear complaints and try to
resolve the issue by consensus. Only seldom do grievances go beyond
this level to the plant manager or to arbitration.
Union members,
in short, are actively engaged in discussing, managing and redefining
work organization and the values that inform it, and nearly every
worker has sat on at least one of the permanent or ad hoc joint
committees. The union's capacity for articulating distinctive
worker interests, mobilizing members and acting collectively has
not been lessened but enhanced by the flexible and participatory
work structures. Democratization of Local 800 itself had, in fact,
progressed so far that the president of sister Local 848 in the
adjacent Shell refinery, which operated on a more traditional
model, noted with considerable amazement and unease after attending
one of its meetings: "They all felt they had the right to speak.
Hell! That's no way to run a union."
Because
the organizational design at Sarnia directly empowers workers,
provides them access to information and open discussion, and makes
them much less dependent on managers in their everyday activities,
the internal culture of the union as well as the plant has been
considerably democratized. As Rankin argues, workers are less
prone to have fantasies of managers as all powerful or all weak,
all good or all bad, and are more willing to engage realistically
in the problems of managing in an uncertain and anxiety-ridden
environment. They are also less likely to projectively dump negative
feelings of inadequacy and inferiority, which are produced by
dependent and mystified work relationships, onto their shop stewards,
as if they were trash cans, and less prone to distorted communication
within union meetings. Demagogic appeals within the local are
no longer very effective. As the national union representative
has noted, "there is more analysis and less bullshit in the local.
You can't orate your way out of a problem, you can't give a fine
speech unless there is substance to it."3
Democratic
culture and internal process, in short, are nurtured by a participative
structural design in a way that reveals the fruitful convergence
of the two analytical approaches that were originally linked in
Tavistock research, but had diverged shortly thereafter, namely
the task analysis of sociotechnical systems theory of Trist and
Emery, and the psychoanalytically oriented group process theory
deriving from Wilfred Bion and Melanie Klein. The accelerated
transition to postindustrial and postbureaucratic work environments
can increase everyday work anxiety, and hence the possibilities
for distorted processes of communication and injurious forms of
splitting and projecting. And yet this transition also poses new
challenges for self-development, collaborative learning and group
activity, and thus requires that the task analysis of sociotechnical
theory be complemented by a group process analysis that enables
organizational members to reflect on the interrelationships of
task structures, group (psycho)dynamics and developmental issues
in their own lives.
Without
democratic organizational design that nourishes such reflective
group process, the anxieties of working in more complex and turbulent
environments provide fertile ground for manipulative, scapegoating
and quasi-totalitarian corporate cultures that attempt to pass
themselves off as participative. Larry Hirschhorn's The Workplace
Within perhaps most ambitiously attempts to rejoin the two traditions
of Tavistock analysis, and clearly reveals both the democratic
promise as well as the psuedo-participatory abuse that is possible
in the transition to postindustrial workplaces.4
The Shell
Sarnia plant also provides an example of how sociotechnical design
can complement flexible working time. Despite the initial improvements
in task restructuring and work team autonomy, the traditional
shift system in this continuous process plant reproduced the usual
inequities between those who were stuck for long periods on night
shifts and those whose seniority had permitted them to bid on
permanent day shifts. Such inequities ran counter to the general
philosophy of the new system, and disrupted team collaboration
and learning, since many night shift workers bid on day shifts
as soon as their seniority permitted, and some simply quit.
Management
tried to eliminate the problem by instituting twelve-hour shifts,
thus reducing the actual number of nights on the job, but workers
took this idea several steps further and proposed a much more
equitable solution. All operating teams would rotate day and night
shifts (with three days on nights, followed by three days off,
followed by three days on day shift, and so on). Within an eighteen
week cycle, each team would switch twice to regular eight-hour
Monday to Friday day shifts for two consecutive weeks, during
which they receive extra training from the craft team and work
further on their secondary specialties. And within each cycle
they would also get two blocks of nine days off in a row. This
schedule produced much greater equity, reduced considerably the
number of weekends and other off-standard hours worked, and gave
all operators nine-day mini-vacations, in addition to their usual
vacation weeks, approximately six times a year.
The sociotechnical
system based on cross training, continual learning, relatively
autonomous team collaboration and an egalitarian ethos was thus
reinforced by the innovative shift schedule that the workers designed.
And although the schedule did not reduce the overall number of
hours worked, the blocking of free time into three- and nine-day
periods permitted considerably more attention to various leisure
and community activities.5
Notes
1 My account
draws on Thomas Rankin, New Forms of Work Organization: the Challenge
for North American Unions (Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
1990); and on accounts taken from academic, labor and management
consultants involved in the design process, especially Louis Davis
and Charles Sullivan, "A Labor-Management Contract and the Quality
of Working Life," Journal of Occupational Behavior 1 (1980), 29-41;
and Norman Halpern, "Sociotechnical Systems Design: the Shell
Sarnia Experience," in J.B. Cunningham and T.H. White, eds., Quality
of Working Life: Contemporary Cases (Ottowa: Labour Canada, 1984),
31-75. See also Charles Heckscher, "The Lakeville Chemical Plant,"
in The Post-Bureaucratic Organization (London: Sage, 1994), 253-273;
and The New Unionism (New York: Basic Books, 1988).
2 Shoshana
Zuboff, In the Age of the Smart Machine (New York: Basic Books,
1988).
3 Rankin.
4 Larry
Hirschhorn, The Workplace Within: Psychodynamics of Organizational
Life (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988). See also Gerald Sussman, Autonomy
at Work: A Sociotechnical Analysis of Participative Management
(New York: Praeger, 1976).
5 Carmen
Sirianni, "The Self-Management of Time in Postindustrial Society,"
in Working Time in Transition, eds. Karl Hinrichs, William Roche,
and Carmen Sirianni (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991),
231-274; Stanley Nollen, New Work Schedules in Practice (New York:
Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1982), 83ff; and Rankin.
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