Benhamou no comprehend 3Com workers: him speak 5 languages, them speaks more then 20!
A 3Com Factory Exemplifies Diversity in the Workplace
By TIMOTHY AEPPEL
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
MORTON GROVE, Ill. -- Draped from the ceiling in 3Com Corp.'s sprawling modem factory in this Chicago suburb is a sign of the times: 65 different national flags, each representing the origin of at least one person who has worked here since it opened 2 1/2 years ago.
The plant employs 1,200 people, the vast majority immigrants. They speak more than 20 languages, including Tagalog, Gujarati and Chinese. English, of varying degrees, ties them together.
"If there's a problem, I call over somebody who speaks the person's language to help," says Thai Chung, a 33-year-old refugee from Vietnam who manages Line 12, one of a dozen assembly lines.
That doesn't always work. A few days ago, Mr. Chung, a wiry man who spends much of his day striding up and down his line, wanted a janitor to clean up some grease. He spoke to him in English but obviously wasn't understood even after repeating himself slowly. He thought the man might be Polish; so he enlisted Vesna Stevanovic, one of the assemblers on his line. But she's from Serbia and couldn't speak to him, either. "I'm not even sure he's Polish," says Ms. Stevanovic, gazing over the frames of pink eyeglasses. "I don't know what he is."
The janitor eventually got the message. Nobody knows how. Stella Foy, a gruff 57-year-old Chicago native who also works on the line, says simply: "Around here, you point a lot."
Many factories, as they hire more immigrants, are being plunged into an industrial Tower of Babel. Earlier waves of immigrants tended to have more in common, such as the East Europeans who flocked to the steel mills a century ago. Now factories, running faster and using increasingly complex equipment, might seem to need such commonality among their workers more than ever.
A Highly Diverse Group
Churning out modems around the clock, 3Com's workers could hardly be more diverse. Urbane Asians with multiple college degrees work alongside people only recently arrived from Central American villages. Serbs work with Bosnian Muslims, as well as Iraqis, Peruvians and South Africans. Managers think at least a third of their workers wouldn't mind if asked to work Christmas -- as they were two years ago -- because they don't celebrate it.
Overcoming language barriers is just one of the challenges. Some immigrants come from countries where you seldom say "please," and certainly not to someone you consider your social inferior. That aloofness can cause hurt feelings. The factory also has its own hierarchy, based largely on language ability and background. Those who speak the best English and are the best educated are the most upwardly mobile.
Saji Korah is one of them. "I have a bachelor's degree in economics from India and an associate's degree in computer programming," the 34-year-old says in crisp English. Yet his job today, riveting brackets onto circuit boards, could be done by someone far less educated.
More Schooling
It's monotonous, and he makes it clear he has no intention of doing such work for long. He is going to school part time for yet-another degree, in computer-information systems. He dreams of becoming one of the plant's roving technicians.
Asked whether he has problems communicating with less-well-spoken colleagues, he says, "Sometimes, I have trouble following their pronunciations." Standing nearby, Suresh Patel says he has trouble, too, but mainly in understanding American-born workers. "Sometimes, they talk too fast," he explains.
In dealing with such difficulties, 3Com's approach is simple. Its managers don't even try to accommodate cultural quirks -- probably an impossibility anyway. They just make it clear that they expect newcomers to adapt to the factory's methods. "They're here because they want to be here, so we start with that assumption," says Tom Werner, vice president of manufacturing for the company's two big Chicago-area plants.
In addition, the company continually designs and redesigns the work to fit the varied work force. When Richelle Ho, a 23-year-old from the Philippines, steps up to her post on Line 12 as her shift starts, a laminated sheet explaining her task hangs above her workstation. A few sentences direct her to put strips of yellow tape over the "gold fingers," the part of the printed circuit boards that will eventually plug into a computer. But the page is dominated by a big color-coded drawing, showing the outlines of the product and arrows pointing to the gold fingers.
Language isn't a big deal to Ms. Ho, who speaks fluent English. At lunchtime, however, she usually joins a clique of Filipinos, and they talk in Tagalog, the main language in the Philippines. But she comes from a region where another language, Cebuano, is spoken, and, she says, "I don't speak Tagalog very well."
If any job on the line becomes too complex, it is broken up into narrower slices to make it easier to learn. Mary Ellen Smith, director of manufacturing, says: "We keep as much simplicity in the process that we can. The key is that anyone can come in and do that job."
The factory doesn't have much choice but to hire a lot of immigrants. Many native-born Americans wouldn't consider taking the often-tedious entry-level jobs. But for John Phan, a 35-year-old who came from Vietnam a decade ago speaking little English, operating a machine on Line 12 is a step up. He makes $10.05 an hour, compared with $7.50 an hour he previously earned at a plastics factory.
Mr. Phan's English is heavily accented, and he admits he sometimes can't understand co-workers. But that hardly matters; he seldom has to talk. He knows when a machine is running low on components, for instance, because a white light flashes on a pole jutting up from the top of it. One machine even talks to him: "Be careful, the feeder section may move," coos a soothing female voice, just before a big metal rack known as a feeder automatically shifts out into the corridor. "These machines are very smart," he says.
How He Manages
When he must communicate, Mr. Phan has options. He often works alongside another Vietnamese, Peter Mac. "Sometimes we speak Chinese, sometimes Vietnamese; I know both," Mr. Phan says. Moreover, the English-fluent supervisor, Mr. Chung, can speak those languages. Indeed, of the 25 workers on Line 12 in this shift, only three are native-born Americans. The largest group is 10 workers from India, and the line includes an Iraqi, an Ecuadorian, a Guatemalan and a Serb, as well as a handful of Filipinos.
But when offering a full breakdown of his team, Mr. Chung -- himself still haunted by a harrowing escape by boat from Vietnam to Thailand in 1981 -- carefully separates the three Vietnamese from the three who consider themselves "Chinese people from Vietnam." Such distinctions are important, deeply intertwined with personal identities, though most Americans encountering all this for the first time might be baffled.
Mr. Chung says he doesn't intentionally group people according to nationality, yet some of that happens anyway. The lines have considerable autonomy to arrange workers any way that helps them meet production goals; if putting together fellow nationals is beneficial, so be it. That's why the "functional testing" section of line 12 is staffed today by two Indian men -- one of them Mr. Patel -- who always work together. "It makes it easier," explains Mr. Patel, adding that when nobody else is around, he and his colleague talk to each other in their native Gujarati.
They observe a kind of linguistic etiquette: Workers know that when with someone from their own "group," they can slip into their own language. But if an outsider is involved, it's English.
However, this sort of consideration goes only so far. Eleanor Punay, from the Philippines, tries to explain why she often was offended when she first started here. "Where I'm from, you say 'please' and 'thank you' a lot, maybe even too much."
Getting Reassurance
As she speaks, she glances nervously toward a man operating a machine a few feet away; she doesn't want him to hear her. Lowering her voice, she says: "Let's just say there's some countries where they don't say it as often as you'd want." Early on, she adds, she spoke about the matter to her sister, who works in a hospital with many foreign doctors, and the sister assured her it wasn't personal.
Ms. Punay's co-worker doesn't look up, and it's unclear whether he heard any of this. But a few minutes later, he tucks his last finished modem onto a black plastic rack and pushes it over onto Ms. Punay's worktable without a word.
"Thank you," she says. He pops back into his chair and turns back to his work.
Immigrants work on every part of the assembly line, but especially on the second half of it, doing jobs like inserting final components by hand, testing products and packaging them. The front end of the line is heavily automated, with machines such as "chip shooters," which put tiny electronic components such as silicon chips onto the circuit boards as they move down a conveyor belt. Each circuit board, though only about the size of a slice of toast, ultimately carries about 200 parts.
Yet most people on the line don't need to know the technical details. Even those running the machines are mainly expected to refill parts and do minor adjustments. If a machine breaks down, teams of technicians and programmers swoop in.
Language ability is a litmus test for advancement. You can't run a line or become a roving technician if you have serious trouble with English. Yet even those on their way up sometimes worry about their accents or verbal ticks.
"I get really frustrated," says Mr. Chung, the supervisor, despite his excellent English. Talking about technical issues is no problem, he says, "but sometimes I'm talking to someone, and I want to explore something deeper, something important; but I can't get into it." He figures his English conveys, at most, 70% of what he is thinking on personal matters. What bothers him more, he adds, is that he sees other immigrants who have been in the U.S. far less time than he has and, he thinks, speak better.
A Bit of Envy
Like many of the plant's upwardly mobile immigrants, Mr. Chung is proud of what he has accomplished. He owns a three-apartment house with his brother and likes to travel; he has visited Paris. Yet he feels thwarted in his ambitions. He dropped out of college after his junior year and took a factory job to make money to help bring his other relatives over from Vietnam. Now, he looks with some envy at his older brother, who finished college and works for the Federal Aviation Administration. "He's doing real well, better than me," he says wistfully.
Those at the plant with good English and ambitious to advance can choose from an array of training courses beyond the basics needed for their immediate jobs. The courses cover everything from leadership skills to how to run a chip shooter. Workers can even take a course on drawing up an instructional sheet similar to those hanging over their workstations; they practice by writing one for making a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich. Training also relies heavily on lots of illustrations and on-the-job practice.
Hattie Curry is one of the few Americans on Line 12. A native of North Carolina, she started working for the company seven years ago, before this plant opened; the company, acquired by 3Com last year, was then known as U.S. Robotics.
Ms. Curry notes the increase in immigrants at 3Com and says working with them hasn't always been easy for her. "Before I worked here," she says, "I hadn't been around a lot of foreign people; I didn't understand their ways." As a newcomer, she thought some with more skills were reluctant to train her and tried to block her advancement. "Now, I know that's just their way," she says. "They don't mean to be mean." But she has changed her own style: "I handle them more firmly now; I've become stronger."
Yet despite all the blending of people on the factory floor, it stops in the lunchroom. From a corner table, three Indian women look over the rest of the big dining area. A table near the checkout is occupied almost entirely by African-American women. The table next to them, by Indian men. And so it goes around the room. "We share our food," says Jashwanti Bodhanwala, a mother of two who has been in the U.S. for 23 years, as if that entirely explains the apartheid-style dining.
One thing the lunch groups do is to facilitate gossip. The room is one of the few places, besides the outdoor smoking areas, where people relax and swap rumors.
Ms. Bodhanwala tugs off a piece of moist, spicy Indian flatbread, and spoons onto it a lump of homemade mango chutney from a plastic container. Asmabahen Patel, sitting opposite her, offers some mustard pickles. "Of course, if you weren't here," says Ms. Patel, gazing at a reporter, "we'd be speaking Gujarati." |
