AN EXAMPLE OF HOW TQM WORKS IN THE CORPORATE WORLD:

Great Economics, Pitiful Corporate Loyalty   by Dave Mundy

A very good friend of mine (okay, my new girlfriend, if you must know) recently completed one of those going-back-to-school-and-getting-a degree things, and is now a qualified microcomputer support specialist.  It's "the" field to be in, and she started her job-hunting thrilled to the gills.

She about turned into jello when she got a call the other day to interview with a certain computer-manufacturing giant based in far-north west Houston.

Then came the interview.

Whatever happened to the days when the boss called you in, looked over your resume, talked to you a few minutes and decided "yea" or nay?"

For starters it wasn't just one interview my friend endured -- it was three.  First up was the man she'd originally talked to, then a panel of three interviewers, then a panel of two.  None of them apparently, are allowed to make The Decision, because none of them did.

Many of the questions, my friend said, were technical in nature which she expected and welcomed. What puzzled her were the values-and-feelings questions:  "Can you work as part of a team?"  "When you complete a project, are you willing to share the credits with your team members, even though you did most of the work?"  "What's more important to you:  a lot of money or staying loyal to your employer?"

My friend is returning to the work force for the first time in many years, and was mystified about the purpose behind such questions.  "It was like they were wanting me to say I'd be completely loyal to the company, even if I had to work with jerks," she mused.

It was about at that point I ran her through some back issues of The Katy Times and some of the 9,000-plus pages' worth of documentation I've acquired over the last couple of years. Then I kind of spelled things out.

For starters, the job she was applying for was a "contract" job -- in other words, not even a permanent position.  Many large manufacturers have turned to that ruse to avoid keeping ground-level employees past that first pay-raise period -- the idea being that there are always new, eager faces out there, begging to hire on under almost any conditions.

It keeps labor costs down, because you can always "lay off" those workers during a staged "economic downturn," then "re-hire" them for the same salary or less.  It's great economics and pitiful corporate loyalty.

The newspaper industry did exactly that for years, snatching up journalism-school graduates by the thousands -- paying them peanuts, then letting them go the first time they asked for a pay raise.  Anybody can write, right?

You think teachers are under-paid? Check out the average salary for first-year journalists.

The result:  many of the best-qualified young journalists left the business entirely to pursue more lucrative positions in public relations, marketing and advertising -- leading to a continuing decline in newspaper quality and a continuing decline in newspaper readership.  I'm happy to say the folks I work for have seen the light and are working to reverse that trend.  [Mr. Mundy was premature in his assessment of the "folks he worked for" for as soon as he wrote about President George Bush and all his failings with regard to public education, Mr. Mundy was given the opportunity to pervert the truth or hit the road.  He chose to hit the road. MM]

I also let my friend in on another little secret:  the big multi-nationals don't want people with a lot of individual initiative and drive.  They want good little worker droids who will be happy, not complain and go home singing the praises of the employer.  Happy workers are less likely to form or be active in labor unions, and are therefore less likely to drive up labor costs, keeping the investors' profit margin nice and healthy.

The same concept is why we are now implementing the School-to-Work system in Texas.  We will train approximately 80 percent of youngsters to take dirt-pay jobs, work in nice little teams and be happy with their lot in life.

Thanks to the federal regulations surrounding School-to-Work, small businesses and entrepreneurs will soon be priced completely out of the market.  We will become a corporate socialist state.

Written as an editorial for The Katy TImes  July 30, 1997