Empire of Illusion - Chris Hedges [74]
When a temporary worker at Toyota City was injured and forced to quit, he told Kamata: “I’d have quit a long time ago. But I came here with Miura, so I can’t let him down.”40 Reflecting on these statements, Kamata argues that the “work here is so difficult that people try to support and encourage one another, especially the ones who come here together. We feel it’s not fair to drop out and go home alone.”
“Circle leaders often learn a great deal about team members’ personalities and histories, sometimes for the purpose of manipulation,” González writes.
For example, at an assembly plant jointly owned by General Motors and Toyota in Fremont, California, a management handout, entitled “Facts a Group Leader Must Know,” implored team leaders to learn the birthday, marital status, anniversary, number of children, and hobbies of each circle member. Furthermore, “team members are encouraged to help each other deal with personal problems.” At a Toyota plant in Japan, team chiefs even used team members’ birthdays to calculate biorhythm charts, so that an individual’s “bad days” could be anticipated by the quality circle.
At a General Motors plant, 22,000 employees partook in weeklong “family awareness training” aimed at “establishing a family atmosphere within the division,” where managers and workers did interpersonal activities.41 “One of the exercises worked at developing trust,” González summarized:
Employees were paired up and then one of them was blindfolded and guided by the other. In another exercise, “Johari Window,” the object was to reveal as much about one’s “joys, fears, and needs” as possible—and in so doing, open the “window.” Another exercise, “Hot Seat,” took place on the last day of the training session: “One by one each person sits on the ‘hot seat’ and listens to group members say positive things about him or her. It is hard to say which is the more moving experience—sitting on the ‘hot seat’ or seeing those in the seat moved to tears.”42
“A recent scandal in the federal government illustrates the dangers posed by coercion masked as harmony,” González concludes.
In May 1995, a Congressional subcommittee was stunned by the bizarre testimony of many witnesses who told of being “psychologically abused” and subjected to sessions resembling “cult programming” during management and diversity training sessions sponsored by the Federal Aviation Administration. According to witnesses, men were fondling women, blacks and whites were urged to exchange epithets, and co-workers were tied together or disrobed for hours at a time during the weeklong training courses, which the FAA subcontracted to various management consultants. One consultant, Gregory May, received $1.67 million in government contracts. According to some witnesses, May is influenced by a West Coast “guru” who occasionally contacts a 35,000-year-old spirit named Ramtha.43
In Britain, coercive persuasion techniques were among the blunt instruments used to undermine the strong shop-stewards organizations in well-organized plants such as Unilever and at Rover in Cowley (in the greater Oxford area), with the promise of “jobs for life.” Many trade union officials were initially seduced by this illusion of corporate and worker harmony. General Motors’ Saturn car was built in plants that adopted the Japanese industrial relations model. This experiment, which soon became very unpopular with workers, lasted until 2004, when the union at the Spring Hill plant in Tennessee challenged the GM management and voted to restore the traditional United Auto Workers’ contract.
Corporatism, aided by positive psychology, relies on several effective coercive persuasion techniques, similar to those often employed by cults, to meld workers into a “happy” collective. It sanctions interpersonal and psychological attacks and lavish praise to destabilize an individual’s sense of self and promote compliance. It uses the coercive pressure of organized peer groups. It applies interpersonal pressure, including attacks on individuality