[The following article appears in the Spring 1995 edition of
_The_Public_Sector_Network_News-, pages 8 and 9.]

                    TQM AS A PHILOSOPHY

     I am often asked to provide a labor perspective on TQM
because of my job as senior labor relations representative for a
union representing 64,000 state employees in California. I have
decided to write about a related, but actually broader
perspective on TQM--a philosophical one.
     Labor's difficulty with the TQM movement is not only the
fear that it will destroy job security, collective bargaining,
and unions themselves, but something even more basic. Humans
commonly see things in black and white, good or bad, without
paying attention to the fine shades in between. In the case of
TQM, those unionists who react negatively see absolutely no merit
in TQM whatsoever and tend to view it as another example of
warmed-over exploitation of labor and surreptitious union
busting. Other unionists, not quite so prone to this black and
white approach, have difficulty because there doesn't seem to be
one common philosophy that all TQM proponents espouse. There are
two or three main prophets who have lead the way in proffering
TQM principles, and even among the following of these individual
gurus, there are vast differences as to what the gurus really
mean in terms of empowering employees and so forth. This leads to
excessive variance in theory and application, hardly in keeping
with quality.
     What is missing, not only for unionists critical or wary of
TQM, but for anyone concerned about improving organizations and
making them more effective is a truly common set of clear
principles that do not beg the questions by utilizing terms like
quality. I attend a lot of meetings where people talk about
"implementing quality" or "adding quality" to their organization
as if it's something you can install like a new lightbulb. It
should be clear that quality is a concept that describes the
state an organization is attempting to reach by making constant
improvement in tune with specific principles. Clearly, it is the
changes that are made and the principles upon which they are
based that are important, not simply adding quality. Quality can
be achieved but not implemented.
     By the same token, I am less than impressed with the
over-reliance on graphs, charts, and statistical processes, often
referred to as the metrics. At meetings with management, I often
hear talk about the importance of measurability. Statements like,
"If we can't measure it, we need to get rid of it" are often
made. Measurement certainly is important, although I often feel
that the progress of Deming's principles would have been served
better if he had majored in poetry. Quality is not the
implementation of statistical tools. People make quality
possible. You cannot espouse quality without believing that
people are capable of achieving it. The tools are useful, but
they are not magic.
     A concept such as quality does not say anything meaningful
to the suspicious unionist who is asked to help empower
employees, when the unionist has spent his or her life working
under the paradigm that the union empowers employees, and
management merely uses their labor for profit and/or to
provide services. Hidden in that adversarial paradigm is a
certain view about human beings and relationships, and it is that
view that underlies the paradigm and translates into the thinking
and behavior of the labor and management relationship. It is a
shared view of human beings (human nature) and how they relate to
one another that is critical.
     This is why my own simple definition of TQM is "pleasant
relationships." To me, it captures the essence of what the goal
of TQM is all about. Quality is not the state achieved when
profits are maximized by selling more widgets because the widgets
are the best obtainable in global markets. Quality is the state
that inheres in an organization when the relationships between
people have been maximized to be the most pleasant possible,
resulting in the work of those individuals becoming the best
possible that humans can achieve. The principle involved here is
that good things happen when people relate well with each other.
There are some skeptics who have suggested that humans in groups
are really only capable of very basic kinds of accomplishments
and, over the long haul, cannot make important changes in the
human condition. This is the hero theory or only-the-individual-
can-make-a-difference philosophy that has held sway for much of
human history. What makes TQM so revolutionary is that it
suggests that humans are at their best, and achieve more, by
working together in ways that produce a state that can be called
quality. The important element in achieving that state is not the
tools used, such as statistical methods, type of diagrams, or
flowcharts, but the changes made in how people interact with each
other and how this affects their interaction with their work.
     This is exactly the same thing that the collective
bargaining process is all about. Most collective bargaining laws
covering public and private employees in the United States and
elsewhere contain some vision statement about harmonious
relationships between the parties and talk about achieving the
mission or goals of the organization, state, county, enterprise,
and so on. It is curious, therefore, that anyone would even
suggest any antipathy between the collective bargaining process
and TQM, when in fact they're really about the same thing.
Ideally speaking, the collective bargaining and TQM processes
should meld together to create a new, better kind of
relationship, not only between labor and management, but between
all workers at all levels within the organization.
     Obviously, I am being optimistic about human nature,
intelligence, and behavior. I am not suggesting that TQM is a
panacea. I _am_ suggesting that, if humans wish to achieve group
behaviors that are beneficial to human beings, the use of TQM
principles is one of the ways of doing that. I would also suggest
that the concept of pleasant relationships is not only at the
core of TQM as it applies to business and public enterprises, but
that it also needs to be at the core of government and society
itself. For most philosophers, the basic philosophical question
is how to live. A perhaps too pat, but nevertheless correct
answer is pleasantly, and if a methodology such as TQM is to be
salable and acceptable to broad numbers of people (and union 
leaders), it will need to be expressed in terms that enable
individuals to see how it makes their lives more pleasant.
     Of course, there will still be those skeptics that say
pleasantness is really just a trap, that it's another management
technique to lull the union into being less vigilant so that the
rights of workers can be done away with and their jobs can be
transplanted overseas. I certainly do not doubt that there are
employers who have, are, and will use TQM as a front for
attempting to achieve those goals. Obviously, this is a
perversion of TQM and I think these perversions and a lot of the
confusion surrounding TQM exist because of a lack of focus on
what the essential philosophy of quality really is.
     Many unionists decry TQM because they simply see more
measurement of job performance and no real change in the
structure of work that provides any benefit to either the workers
or to the enterprise itself. In my own experience, I can state
definitely that most management people I have talked to about TQM
appear to regard TQM along the lines of the additive paradigm
that I described earlier and not along the lines of changing or
building pleasant relationships which would require structural
changes within their organization. While such structural change
may also be frightening to unionists, if the changes can be
achieved with the participation of the union and the employees,
and can be achieved by first agreeing upon some common vision of
what better or more pleasant relationships would or should be
like (the key element in relationship building), the process of
building better labor/management relations will make the process
of quality transformation much more effective and meaningful.

For more information contact: 
Ron Safran 
Sr. Labor Relations Representative 
California State Employees Association 
1108 "O" Street 
Sacramento, CA 95814 
Phone: (916) 326-4269 Fax: (916) 326-4215