BIW contract fell short> `Model’ team concept didn’t sustain support

BATH — At the time it was signed in August 1994, an innovative labor contract at Bath Iron Works grabbed national attention as a revolutionary model of union-management cooperation.

President Clinton visited the shipyard on Labor Day and stood in the rain to deliver a speech in praise of the accord and its underlying “teaming” concept.

Today, the three-year agreement under which BIW trained workers in multiple crafts, cooperated with unions to resolve workplace problems and made shared decisions with its employees, is just a memory.

The current contract approved last summer by Local S6 of the International Association of Machinists did away with many of the innovative changes in the teaming agreement.

“It is back to `We’re management, you’re labor,’ ” said longtime employee Charles Finn, an electrician. “It was doomed to fail because they didn’t have a system to make it work.”

Although many people viewed the teaming contract as progressive, even its most ardent supporters say mistakes made during implementation caused problems that helped lead to its unraveling.

Not everyone bought into the concept, according to former union leaders and management proponents. They believe unnamed people on both sides worked to sabotage it.

“It is very easy to say, `No, don’t change,”‘ said Duane “Buzz” Fitzgerald, who retired as BIW chief executive and president in 1996. “It is a hell of a lot harder to say `yes.’ It is easy to oppose change, but it is far more difficult to promote change.”

The teaming contract, approved 2-1 by the union’s rank and file, was born out of years of labor-management hostility and frustration.

The accord guaranteed job security for three years and created joint labor-management committees to deal with issues ranging from grievances to work assignments. The company got more flexibility in its right to train workers in more than one skill, a provision management hoped would reduce idle time among workers.

“It never really worked the way it was envisioned,” said Brian Bryant, who was elected president of Local S6 in 1996 when almost the entire slate of pro-teaming union officers who negotiated the 1994 contract was either voted out or chose not to run.

Fitzgerald said the training and education needed to make such a revolutionary labor-management concept a success never properly materialized. BIW’s current management has declined to talk about teaming or the current state of labor-management relations.

“We talked a lot about training, but we really missed the boat in the huge education task we should have implemented. As a consequence we created a lot of confusion,” Fitzgerald said.

Workers were supposed to be trained in skills that could let them move a job along more quickly. But they were often trained in two unrelated skills that did not improve efficiency, the union said. And some S6 members viewed cross-training as a way for management to eliminate jobs.

Despite the failures, the tenor of the relationship between the union and management did improve. Even Bryant said management gained a better appreciation of what the unions could do, and now have more trust in the union to make appropriate decisions.

Dave Libby, once an embittered BIW employee who worked as a union officer for the chief purpose of bashing the company, ultimately came to believe that working with management was the best way to save both the union and the shipbuilding giant.

In his current post as a union business representative overseeing 14 locals from Maine to California, Libby holds firm to his faith in teaming.

“I think the companies and the unions that make it work will be the ones that make it and survive,” he said.