When Madrid showed up for this interview, however, he suspected things might be different this time. GM was partnering with the Japanese automaker Toyota to reopen the Fremont plant. For Toyota, this was a chance to build cars inside the United States and expand the company’s sales in America. For General Motors, it was an opportunity to learn about the famed “Toyota Production System,” which was producing cars of very high quality at very low costs in Japan. One hitch in the partnership was that GM’s agreement with the UAW dictated that the plant had to hire at least 80 percent of its workers from employees who had been laid off two years earlier. So Madrid and his friends were showing up, one by one, to interview with New United Motor Manufacturing, Inc., or NUMMI.
Madrid figured he was a good candidate because his on-the-job drinking, truth be told, was tame compared to the antics of his former colleagues. Yes, he may have gotten drunk and had sex in the warehouse where they stored Chevy seats, but unlike many of his coworkers, he didn’t snort coke while attaching brake pads or smoke weed from bongs built from muffler parts. He hadn’t been a patron of the parking-lot RV where prostitutes offered services perfectly timed to union-mandated work breaks. Nor had Madrid ever deliberately sabotaged a vehicle like those who put empty whiskey bottles and loose screws behind door panels so they would bang around after the cars were sold.
The saboteurs were an extreme example of a fierce war that had consumed the Fremont plant in the GM days. Workers weren’t above dirty tactics if they thought it would strengthen their union’s hand. Employees knew that as long as they kept the assembly line moving, no one was likely to get punished for misbehavior, no matter how egregious. At GM, all that really mattered was keeping production on pace. Employees sometimes discovered mistakes on cars as they moved along the conveyor belt, but rather than stop and fix the problems, they would mark the vehicle with a wax crayon or a Post-it note and let it continue on its way. Eventually, those fully assembled autos would be hauled into the back lot and taken apart to repair the error. Once, a worker had a heart attack and fell into the pit as a car passed over; everyone waited for the vehicle to rumble along before they pulled him out. They all knew the plant’s fundamental law: The line doesn’t stop.
Madrid’s first interview occurred in a small conference room. Across the table was a representative from the UAW, two Toyota executives from Japan, and a GM manager. Everyone exchanged pleasantries. They asked Madrid about his background and gave him some basic math and assembly problems to test his knowledge of auto manufacturing. They asked if he intended to drink while working. No, he said, he was done with that. It was a relatively brief conversation. Then, as he was walking out, one of the men from Japan asked Madrid what he had disliked about the plant when he worked there last time.
Rick Madrid had never been shy about speaking his mind. He didn’t like working on cars he knew had problems, he told them, because whatever he was doing would have to be undone to repair a mistake. He didn’t like that his suggestions were always ignored by his superiors. Once, he said, when a new tire mounting machine was being installed, he had come up with an idea for putting the controls in a different place to speed up work. He even sought out an engineer to show him a diagram of the concept. But when he came back from lunch, the new machine was in place with the controls in their original location. “I operated from the left side of the tire machine, all the controls were on the right side,” he told the interviewers. “Thank goodness that engineer didn’t build bridges.”
When the plant was run by GM, workers were just cogs in a machine, Madrid told them. “You were just there to do what they told you to do,” he said. Nobody ever asked him his opinion or cared what he thought.
He expressed all these frustrations to his interviewers and then kicked himself on the long drive home. He really needed this job. He should have kept his mouth shut.
A few days later, Madrid got the call. The Japanese executives had appreciated his honesty and were offering him a job. First, though, he would have to go to Japan for two weeks and learn about the Toyota Production System. Sixteen days later, NUMMI flew Madrid and about two dozen other workers to the Takaoka auto plant outside Toyota City, Japan, the first in a series of trips nearly every employee at NUMMI would take. When Madrid walked into the Japanese factory, he saw familiar assembly lines and heard the recognizable sounds of pneumatic tools hissing and buzzing. Why had they bothered flying him across the world to train inside a factory just like the one at home? After a basic tour and an orientation meeting, Madrid walked onto the factory floor and watched one man put bolts into doorframes, over and over, with an air-powered gun. By the time each car rolled off the line, Madrid knew, those bolts would be buried under layers of metal and plastic. It was just like California, except the signs were in Japanese and the bathrooms were much cleaner.
Then the worker manning the pneumatic gun pushed a bolt into place, applied his tool, and an ugly squeal sounded. The bolt had misthread the hole—a common mistake—and was stuck halfway in the doorframe. Madrid expected the man to signal the defect by marking the door, like they did at GM, so the car could be eventually towed to a back lot and repaired. The problem with that system, however, was that replacing the bolt would require disassembling the door, repairing the mistake, and then rebuilding everything. The trim would be less snug in the vehicle’s frame afterward. Whoever bought the car wouldn’t notice at first, but after a few years, the door would start jiggling. It would be a shoddier vehicle.
When the screw gun squealed inside the Japanese plant, though, something unexpected happened. The worker who made the mistake reached above his head and pulled a hanging cable that turned on a spinning yellow light. He then reversed the direction of his screw gun and pulled the bolt out of the doorframe, grabbed another tool, and used it to smooth the hole’s threads. At this point, a manager walked over, stood behind the worker, and began asking questions. The worker ignored his boss except to bark out a few orders, and then grabbed another tool to rethread the hole. The conveyor belt was still moving, but the worker hadn’t finished his repair. When the door got to the end of the worker’s station, the entire assembly line stopped. Madrid had no idea what was going on.
Another man, clearly a senior manager, came over. Instead of yelling, he laid out a new bolt and equipment on a tray, like a nurse in an operating room. The worker kept issuing orders to his superiors. In Fremont, that would have gotten him slugged. Here, though, there were no angry shouts or anxious whispers. The other men on the line were calmly standing in place or double-checking parts they had just installed. No one seemed surprised at what was happening. Then the worker completed his rethreading, put a new bolt in the door, and pulled the cord above his head again. The assembly line started moving at normal speed. Everyone went back to work.
“I just didn’t believe it,” Madrid said. “Back home, I had seen a guy fall in the pit and they didn’t stop the line. For so many years, I had learned you don’t stop the line, no matter what.” He had been told it cost $15,000 a minute to pause an assembly line. “But, for Toyota, quality came before income.
“That’s when it dawned on me, that we can do this, we can compete against these guys by learning what they do,” Madrid said. “One bolt, one bolt changed my attitude. I felt that I could finally, finally take pride in what I do.”
As Madrid continued his training in Japan, there were other surprises as well. One day he shadowed a worker who, midway through a shift, told a manager he had an idea for a new tool that would help him install struts. The manager walked to the machine shop and returned fifteen minutes later with a prototype. The worker and manager refined the design throughout the day. The next morning, everyone had their own versions of the tool waiting at their stations.