Restoring prosperity

These are troubling times in the American workplace. Despite assurances from economists and politicians, job insecurity and corporate weakness are on the rise. We don't read about companies hiring; we read about companies firing, American corporations, bruised by international competition and rapidly changing markets, are fighting furiously to survive. At a time when unions seem powerless and irrelevant, and when management seems convinced that employees should be treated as costs instead of assets, a new economic vision is desperately needed. Restoring Prosperity provides that vision, a provocative new economic model that offers hope for a unified workplace and a second industrial revolution. The product of a massive, first-of-its-kind study conducted at the University of California at Los Angeles, Restoring Prosperity looks at four companies and their struggles to succeed in the new economy. Wellford Wilms, a professor of education at UCLA who has spent his career studying the relationship between education and economic productivity, and his team of graduate students didn't just occasionally visit these companies. For five years, armed with employee badges and notepads, Wilms and his team worked in the steel rolling mills at USS-POSCO, built Geo Prizms and Toyota Corollas at General Motors and Toyota's NUMMI plant, worked the assembly line at Douglas Aircraft, and joined design teams at Hewlett-Packard. Each of these companies was attempting to transform itself in order to survive, and each had dramatically different results. With uninhibited access to all levels of company management and labor, and with the sort of personal trust gained only after several years of working side by side with fellow employees, Wilms and his researchers were able to carefully discern the human side of the trauma of change and define a set of counterintuitive rules to govern workplace reform. Wilms enriches his analysis with the voices and personalities of those engaged in the effort to change, from managers to union leaders, from midlevel supervisors to research scientists, from CEOs to assembly-line veterans. We see why even the best-intentioned efforts fail, and why what works in one place may not work in another.