Working for the Japanese

What is it like to work in a U.S. factory that has been taken over by the Japanese? It has been more than four years since the Firestone Tire & Rubber plant in LaVergne, Tenn., was bought outright for $52 million by Bridgestone of Tokyo, Japan's No. 1 tiremaker. Some obvious things have not changed in that time: workers still labor over tire presses, for example, and steel- belted radials still roll off the line. But in any number of subtle and not so subtle ways, the influence of the new owners can be felt throughout the factory and indeed throughout the town -- from the new automated stitching equipment on the shop floor to the cherry trees growing in profusion near the plant and in front of LaVergne's city hall.

LaVergne (pop. 5,500) is a decidedly rawboned blue-collar town rather than a quaint Tennessee tourist attraction. Dotted with car washes and low-rise factories, it has a work force that exceeds its population. Mayor Vester Waldron describes the place as a "bedroom community without the bedrooms."

As it happens, though, LaVergne is just four miles down the road from the Nissan autoworks that inspired the screenwriters of Gung Ho, the 1986 Hollywood film about Japanese-American factory relations. The movie depicts the Japanese takeover of a mythical Pennsylvania company town as a comic clash between a lackadaisical work force and transplanted managers obsessed with efficiency. Although Bridgestone and LaVergne officials play down the comparison, workers at the Japanese-owned tire plant have another perspective. Says Roger Sherrill, a longtime tire assembler at Firestone who was on hand when the Japanese arrived: "That movie hit it right on the head."

Worker-management frictions began even before Bridgestone (the name comes from the surname of the company's founder, which translates as "stone bridge" in Japanese) took over the factory in January 1983. During preliminary negotiations with United Rubber Workers Local 1055, the plant union, an angry blue-collar leader became abusive, brought up Pearl Harbor and asked the Japanese present to get out of the bargaining room. To his amazement, they did, flying all the way back to Japan. A deal governing labor relations was struck only after the union wrote an apology and formally asked Bridgestone to come back.

The factory that Bridgestone bought was aging and underutilized: 400 of its 1,000 workers had been laid off by Firestone. Before the Japanese took over, the plant produced barely 700 tires a day. Bridgestone kept on all workers still on the job and rehired the 400 who had been furloughed. But employees still feared the worst -- wrongly, as it turned out. "Everybody kind of expected that they would have to work a lot harder," says Sherrill. "But what we've found is that they just want you to work faster. They'll invest , money in new machinery in a heartbeat if they think it will make you more productive."

There were other pleasant surprises. "The Japanese tend to work more overtime than Firestone did," says Local 1055 President Dan Bailey. At overtime wages of $20 an hour, he adds, "nobody's griping about having that extra money in their paychecks." According to some workers, the firm's management seems much more receptive than the previous owners to suggestions and complaints. "With Firestone, they wanted you to park your brains at the gate," says one employee. "With Bridgestone, they want you to talk even when they know they're not going to listen."

But Bridgestone has listened, even though the Japanese have kept a certain distance on the shop floor. When the company revealed plans last year to locate a new factory elsewhere in the state, the workers argued for keeping the facility in LaVergne. "We told them we'd proved ourselves as a work force, and gradually they became more receptive to the idea," recalls Bailey. In April Bridgestone announced it would build a new $70 million factory alongside the old one. Claims Bailey: "That kind of dialogue never would have got started at Firestone."

There has been little social mixing between the Japanese and Americans -- no intercultural baseball games or communal exercise sessions. "The Japanese are pretty closed as a group," says LaVergne City Manager Richard Anderson. "They pretty much keep to themselves." One reason, of course, is that many of the Japanese speak less than fluent English. But there is no question that Bridgestone has pumped new life into the local economy and turned the old tire factory around. The plant's output has more than quadrupled, to 3,000 tires a day. "Morale is at least 300% better than it was under Firestone," says Tire Builder Sherrill, "although there are still a lot of times when we don't really understand the Japanese people's way of doing things, and they clearly don't understand ours."