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Years ago, I lived on a small farm near Edson. Three times a week, for about half the day, I delivered the rural mail to my neighbours, less than a hundred families, spread over more than a hundred square miles served only by unpaved roads.

It was a great job. If I had a boss, I didn’t know what his name was. I never saw him and I never talked to him on the telephone. I never once received direction, to say nothing of a scolding from a “superior”. I just did my work, and I got paid. Not very much, but I got paid.

Sometimes my neighbours had full-time jobs, but they only worked periodically, or some had part-time or seasonal jobs. No one went to work every day, day after day, year after year. We were farmers, if we were anything. We weren’t expected to have jobs. If a friend was temporarily working on an oilrig someplace, “working out” the expression was, away from home for a time, well, you kind of felt sorry for him.

Ah, “superior!” Now there’s a word. My first job as a union electrician, some years after I gave up the mail route, involved running conduit for gas detectors in a tunnel under the University of Alberta. I was working alone, though as an apprentice, I was under the direction of a journeyman. It was a dirty job; he was rarely there.

My stepdaughter Melissa, a U of A student then, met me for lunch one day. To meet her schedule, I took a late lunch break, returning to the job at about 2. Someone from another trade said, “You don’t want your boss catching you come back this late.” I told him I didn’t have a boss. “You own your own company, with no superiors?” he challenged. “Oh, I’ve gotha,” I answered, “well, there are people with our company who think they are my superiors.”

Only about 132 years ago, on September 4, 1863, my great great grandfather, Peter Chandler died in jail. He hadn’t liked the military any better than I did. He’d been a deserter from the Union Army in the American Civil War, which only then ended outright slavery. This left my great great grandmother, Maria Cooper Chandler a widow. There was no social security. There were no veteran’s benefits for widows of deserters. Welfare hadn’t been invented. She and her little family spent most of the rest of her life going from one mill town to another, looking for work. Housing was abysmal. One winter, in Bennington, Vermont, they lived in a house that had no stove, just a fireplace. One son worked in a thread mill at the age of ten, 16-hour shifts. They weren’t slaves and they weren’t peasants, but it wasn’t much of an improvement over either.

A daughter, Adeline Chandler, whose wedding ring this one on my hand once was, married Andrew Wrigley, who came from a long line of mill workers in Saddleworth, Yorkshire. For all of their lives, since an early age, my great grandparents worked in mills. Andrew reached the station of boss carder before he died, and Adeline was a weaver. She started working in mills as a child, and when she reached the age of 65, she wasn’t nearly done working in them.

I remember their house. My Aunt May was living in it when I was a child. It was just down the street from the mill in Watervliet, NY, hard by the Hudson River. When my Dad was a kid, that house did have running water, but not to drink or cook with, or even wash with. Clean water was hauled in buckets from a nearby spring. The running water was only good for flushing the indoor toilet in the cellar. Straight from the Hudson, it already had turds in it.

The lot of working people began to improve immeasurably about the time I was born. Labour unions raised up many, and not only the unionized. Employers improved the wages and working conditions of other workers to keep the unions out.

In the 30’s, Franklin Delano Roosevelt brought incredible reforms, the timing of them just a little too late for my great grandmother to retire. Today’s political trends threaten to take back every one of them. Will my great grandchildren work in factories while still children? Will they be basically unemployed?

Could be. But, we are not going to worry about that this morning. Today, let’s say maybe Ralph Klein and Jim Dinning have it right.

This morning, I want to look at the nature of jobs, not the amount.

The elitism which has dominated employment from the beginning of one person working for another’s benefit, elitism, by definition, is undemocratic and, since a cardinal concept of our faith is belief in the dignity of every human being,” it is very unUnitarian.

Strange to tell though, the Unitarians were the ruling class in the New England of my great grandmother Adeline Chandler Wrigley. I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if the mill owner they worked for in Bennington Vermont that cold winter was a Unitarian, and probably the fellow who owned the stove-less house was too.

Protestants owned New England, and the Unitarians were at the top of the heap. An affluent Mrs. Clarence Day, in LIFE WITH FATHER, is quoted as saying, “Well, we are New Yorkers, so of course we are Episcopalian, but if we were in Boston, we’d be Unitarian.” The first church I served, in Providence, RI, had once boasted a couple of dozen millionaires, all I think, industrialists.

My working class family were Hardshell Baptists, but increasingly, the mill workers of New England were mostly Catholic; Irish at first, and many French Canadians; later came the Poles and Italians.

In the 1950s, woolen mills and many other staple industries in New England were going broke. Modern new plants were springing up in the South, where there were no unions and low heating bills. There was a plant shutting down every day in New England.

When I was a student at MIT’s School of Industrial Management, there was a professor there, Joe Scanlon, who had an insight, and was eager to implement it. He went to various companies on the edge of bankruptcy, and he made them an offer they couldn’t refuse. He told them there was a good chance of turning their companies back into profitability, and what he asked was:

1. Let me retrain your foremen to treat their workers with respect, asking them as partners for suggestions, instead of calling them a bunch of dummies.

2. Give me the power to fire any foreman that I can’t bring around to my point of view.

3. Promise me you won’t fire anybody if production zooms upwards. You’ll have to hire more salesmen to handle the extra product.

4. Share a proportion of the profits with the workers.

Their backs were to the wall. Sharing profits doesn’t hurt a bit when you know in your heart you’ll never see one again. Lots of factory owners said yes.

Many of the employees on the shop floor had worked in the same mill for years. Experience had taught them many things, and one of those things was, do your work, but don’t offer ideas.

“If the bosses are so smart, let them decide everything. Why should we help them, even when we do know better? They insult us every day.”

Employers got dumb insolence, just like the Army did from 119 college students who were afraid to speak to Captain Jacques.

But these workers were not dumb.

In many plants, after Scanlon’s reforms, production figures went through the roof. The workers had known all along thousands of ways of doing their work better, but no one would have listened to them even if they had been willing to tell. Now, dying companies breathed new life. Amazingly, there were profits, and they were shared.

But even more amazingly, and this happened everywhere, all of a sudden, everybody loved working there.

It seemed that Joe Scanlon, and other academics like Deming, applying social and psychological science to personnel management, were on the threshold of making revolutionary changes to American Industry.

Except for one thing. When Scanlon approached the management of plants which were not going belly up, but were still profitable, every one of them refused to have anything to do with his insane plan to empower the ignorant wretches they had working for them.

What did the owners and managers have to lose? Nothing really, except power.

Give up power? For the mere promise of greater profit? Level us to those riffraff? Are you some kind of communist?

Professor Deming had even suggested that of all the humiliating schemes managers had foisted on subordinates, performance evaluations took the cake for discouraging morale. Abolish them, he said, you’d have better productivity.

He and Scanlon were ignored by America. But not in Japan.

Soon Japanese workers were meeting on Saturdays, on their own time, participating in Deming’s Quality Circles, brainstorming on how to make the product better, and faster. And, because Japanese companies stuck by their workers in good times and bad, they knew that if they did increase production, nobody was going to get fired. Their products got better and cheaper.

And in Germany, after the war, worker empowerment went right to the top; boards with equal representation from workers and owners ran many giant corporations.

Meanwhile, in Detroit, workers with the attitude of dumb insolence were still grudgingly bolting cars together, sometimes leaving empty liquor bottles with insulting messages in them in the door panels.

Next thing you know, all over North America, everybody was driving a Volkswagen or a Toyota. Can you blame them?

In the fall of 1987, I was hired by an Edmonton organization, the Training Group, to do write training materials for a polyethylene manufacturing plant in Sarnia, Ontario. They told me that if this pilot project went well, Imperial Chemicals would hire us to write the training stuff for two other Sarnia plants.

I wrote about half the job posts for this plant, and the entire general background material you called Overview.

But what did I a sometime electrician, know about making polyethylene? Just what the workers told me. You see, Scanlon and Deming’s work had now come full circle. These production workers were empowered.

Their “superiors” now told us they realized their employees on the plant floor know more about running the plant than they did, and knew more also than the engineers who had designed it, who had failed to see many problems, which the production people had solved.

These men and women, not their foremen and supervisors, told us how they did their jobs, and all I had to do was describe it in an easy to read, step-by-step manner.

Workers writing their own job descriptions constitute a revolution in the workplace. It was not unique to Impeerial Chemicals or its parent, EXXON.

To keep up with the Europeans and Japanese, American industry has been empowering workers. A new style of organization chart had appeared. Instead of a pyramid with the CEO at the top, this one looked like a series of concentric circles.

The workers actually producing the product appear at the centre. Those who advise them, helping with pay-roll or transport, are in the next band out, and so forth out to the CEO, who may do financing and long-range planning.

Today, something like 80% of the Fortune 1000 companies are empowering workers. Many production teams are self directed and self-managed. When General Mills empowered its workers in Lodi, Ca., production went up 40%.

They liked our work at Sarnia Polyethylene. The plant had been up and running for seven years and never made a profit before. They’d had a problem with the reactor running away, caused I think by inconsistent catalyst. In telling us how they made it, we found different workers made it different ways. I sat patiently until they thrashed out what the best way was, and all agreed to do it that way.

Production immediately went up, quality went up, and for the first time, they were making money.

We got to write some of the training materials for two other complete Imperial chemical plants nearby. Next thing you know, business was rolling in, and a Toronto sub-office to the Edmonton home office (there’s a lovely switch) was established to handle the business. How sweet it was.

Now it happened there is an EXXON polyethylene plant just like Sarnia’s near Houston, Texas, only twice as big. We got the job of writing a training program for it. I’m spending so much time in Texas, I drawl. Next thing you know, we’ve got so much Texas business that a branch operation is opened there. Do I want to move to Texas? Well no, not really. I keep flying back and forth.

Next thing you know, the Training Group is doing EXXON plants all over the world. Do I want to spend 6 months in Saudi Arabia? I doubt the Saudis would employ my wife, as she is both a Jew and a Communist. I turned it down, but the fact is, TTG was making untold millions all over the world thanks you might say to the success of the little pilot project in Sarnia in which I had played a key role.

By now, my company had hired a lot of people, but many had left also. Funny thing is, the wisdom of Scanlon and Deming had yet to reach the Training Group. We worked only with progressive firms, all of who believed in training and in the intelligence and ability of its workers, but The Training Group was not one of them.

There were virtually no training materials to teach us how to do our jobs. We did it different ways, and caught shit sometimes for doing it the wrong way, though no one would take responsibility for telling you in advance what the right way was.

And we did have annual employee performance evaluations, which had a form that suggested they were objective, but in reality, they were just used to dignify the subjective. I’d found them humiliating. Employee turnover was high, especially among us training consultants. In less than three years, I the most senior employee among the front-line troops.

I made a few modest moves to democratize my workplace, but they don’t go anywhere. Any suggestions are taken as criticism of management if not outright insubordination.

One Sunday night, I went with my wife to the Ukrainian Hall where the Communist Party of Alberta was holding an annual subscription night for their national newspaper, the Tribune. Fred Weir, their Moscow correspondent, was the speaker.

Someone asked him how far democratization would go in the Soviet Union. He said he didn’t know. He also suggested we probably think we live in a democracy because the get to vote in elections, but, he said,

“Tomorrow when you get to work, when the plant gate or office door closes behind you, I want you to look around. I am willing to bet that when you do, what you are going to see is a dictatorship.”

Well, the next day was a Monday. When the front office door shut behind me, I looked around the office, and I said to myself, “senior consultant or not, even though I have made these guys a pot of money, if Betty, the Edmonton Office Manager, calls me into her office at 4 this afternoon and says, ‘Today is your last day,’ I’m gone, aren’t I? This is not a democracy. It’s ‘Off with their heads’ said the King, and off they went.”

A little after 4 that very day, (and I swear I am not making this up) it’s Betty on my intercom. Into her office I go. They are letting me go. “But what about my performance evaluation? My supervisor in Texas has had nothing but praise for my work. Why are you firing me?”

“We’d rather not say.” (Off with their heads, indeed.)

I have a friend who is Dutch, and is fond of telling me what life is like in a civilized country like Holland. “For example, if you have an apartment, it is yours. The landlord can’t kick you out, except for cause.” So I asked him recently, “Can a company do that to you in the Netherlands?”

The answer is no. After you have passed your probationary period working for a firm in Holland, it’s your job. If they want to let you go, they can, but they have to take their case, showing cause, to the government firing commission. I asked him if giving as the reason, “We’d rather not say” would cut much ice with the government, and he assured me it would not.

In Sweden, they have a law protecting children. It’s against the law to strike a child, or to humiliate one. I bet they have a similar law for employees.

When my father was young, his father often whipped him with a willow switch, to teach him one lesson or another. His teachers had a strap for the same reason. Then researchers learned that frightening children makes it harder for them to learn, and that secure children not only learn better and but get along better too.

I think secure employees perform better too. Of course, some managers might say that without the fear of God, or of their boss firing them, workers might not do a damned thing, but I don’t think that is right. Mind you, managers skilled in motivation wouldn’t hurt. Volunteer organizations could teach them how.

Summer before last, a lot of fathers in my neighbourhood and not a few mothers pitched in and built a playground for our kids. The man from the manufacturer was there as a resource person. He knew how this gigantic tinker toy fit together, but had no authority over us. We worked hard all weekend long, fed lunches and suppers by other volunteers, and got it all built, set in concrete and padded with truckloads of sand. Nobody was the boss.

I love to work. I hate being bossed. I hardly think I’m the only one.

Given a chance, I’d like to think our workplaces will become more democratic. Not because it is the right or moral thing to do, though it is, but because it’s more productive. Bosses are going to have to give up some of their power so their companies are more competitive, or they are going to be out of a job themselves.

I see a tomorrow, in which many many people will be able to say they don’t have a superior. And some of them may even have jobs.

Mr. Wrigley formerly served First Unitarian Congregation, Toronto, and The First Unitarian Church of Edmonton. He is retired.
He now attends the Edmonton Monthly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers.)

Added to archives October 20, 2008.