Better labor relations = better product quality?

From the annals of "I'm skeptical", a brief (and rare) comment on chemical manufacturing in The New York Times by economics reporter Adam Davidson:

For 25 years, Monty Newcomb has worked at the same chemical plant in Calvert City, Ky., making products that hold pills together and remove sediment from beer. In his early years, Newcomb watched his union, the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, lose one battle after another in its ongoing struggle with management... [snip] Newcomb told me that at his company, International Specialty Products, workers were disgruntled and the work suffered — for example, more than 20 percent of one chemical they produced didn’t pass inspection. 

As a union steward, Newcomb feared that unless something changed, the plant would shut down and everyone would lose his job. So in the mid-’90s, his union asked management to attend its High Performance Work Organization Partnership program, which was creating a revolution in labor-management relations.  

[warm fuzzy section about improving management-labor relations, improvements in efficiency, etc.]  

And although the plant, now owned by Ashland Inc., currently exports about 50 percent of its product, it’s keeping production in Kentucky, where it recently invested $15 million in upgrades. “We make things so much cheaper than anyplace now,” Newcomb explained. Ninety-nine percent of that particularly pesky chemical now passes inspection.

I would really, really, really like to know the backstory behind this, and why one particular product did not meet spec routinely, and how that might be connected to management-labor relationships. Count me skeptical, but there are a host of other factors that might contribute to improvements, like, I dunno, a change in the process? Or a change in the spec? Or new raw materials? Perhaps I am a novice process chemist, but if human factors are contributing to 20% of batches failing, it's probably not the operators' fault. (Or maybe it might be. I'm doubtful (and potentially very naive) about sabotage.)

I don't doubt that Mr. Newcomb is correct and that things at ISP have gotten better from a labor/management point of view, but as a proud employee of NAICS 325, I am skeptical that we're getting the full story here.

McKinsey report on manufacturing

The red boxes mark places where chemists typically work. Credit: McKinsey

From the Washington Post summary of a McKinsey report on manufacturing, an uncomfortable statement:

Manufacturing contributed 20 percent of the growth in global economic output in the decade ending in 2010, the McKinsey researchers estimate, and 37 percent of global productivity growth from 1995 to 2005. Yet the sector actually subtracted 24 percent from employment in advanced nations. 

“Manufacturing makes outsized contributions to GDP. It makes outsized contributions to overall productivity growth. It drives prosperity,” said James Manyika, one of the authors of the report. “But purely on employment, it has been declining over time.” 

That said, it's sort of good news for chemists:

In other words, the manufacturing worker of the future is more likely to have a graduate degree and wear a suit or a labcoat to work than to have only a high school education and carry a lunch pail.

I hope that's true.