Inhuman Relations

This vivid expose of the use of Quality Circles by a major company to defeat a union organizing drive dramatically presents a negative view of the highly acclaimed new humanism in American management. Guillermo Grenier gives a unique insider's account of Johnson & Johnson's implementation of the workplace reform technique called Quality of Worklife or Quality Circles as a union-busting tactic. He describes this and other methods of controlling workers, which are veiled by the benevolent rhetoric of the new managers, and shows how the supposed "democratic reforms" often have autocratic underpinnings and results. For seven months in 1982-83, the author worked as a graduate researcher under the social psychologist in charge of Team development at a Johnson & Johnson division in Albuquerque. "Team" is the name used by the company for the quality circle technique of organizing workers into small groups that discuss problems on a regular basis. The Team approach, Grenier explains, "in fact increased the conflict not only between management and worker but between the workers themselves. With calculated precision, the workforce was divided and eventually conquered because management controlled their formal and informal interactions while at the workplace." Timely, controversial, and dramatic, Inhuman Relations presents the view that human relations management techniques have a strong anti-union tradition and have developed into liberal, acceptable methods of controlling the workforce. Author note: Guillermo J. Grenier is Assistant Professor of Sociology and Director of the Center for Labor Research and Studies at Florida International University.