Fancy Lamps

The Ford and Cooper plants are identical in one respect—both pause production for ten minutes, twice a day, at nine a.m. and at two p.m., although at Ford these respites are called 'daily shutdowns for relief for our employees' and at Cooper they are referred to with less ceremony as 'breaks'.

This is a reminder that, for all the focus on the things that factories make, a factory is also a place where people live. A factory worker spends almost as much time at his or her station as in bed. For all the impact that each individual new lamp or new car may have on its owner's life, the effect is dwarfed by the impact that the making of thousands of new lamps or the making of new cars has on a person.

Both factories stress the empowerment of their workers and the ability of their employees to exert control over their work and their lives. This is easier to see at Cooper Lamp than at the Ford factory. Cooper workers make their work areas into their own personal environments, posting pictures of grandchildren and home towns, stringing their work benches with Christmas lights or cheesecake calendars. Lauren introduces them one by one, talking about their various strengths, the innovations they suggested, the tools they helped develop—sometimes something as simple as a section of hacksaw blade that happens to be perfect for pushing the edge of a cloth lampshade neatly beneath its trim.

At Ford, the workers are kept ten or twenty yards away from visitors, and there is scant evidence of any kind of individuality. At Ford, culture comes from the top down just as the car components do. Some rules are for safety—no exposed jewellery allowed. Some are for cleanliness—no chewing gum. Others instill a sense of esprit d'corps and productivity. A series of triangular signs exhorts SAFETY and QUALITY and DELIVERY and similar lofty sentiments.

The workers at the Ford Assembly Plant are divided into 'Kaizen groups'—Kaizen being the overarching Japanese production philosophy which stresses teamwork, quality, cost-cutting and improvement. Detroit was caught napping by the Japanese car revolution of the 1980s, which left American products seeming woefully expensive and shoddy by comparison. American carmakers such as Ford leaped to adopt Japanese quality-control standards. 'Kaizen' is just one of the Japanese terms incongruously banded about in an afternoon at an auto plant on the South Side of Chicago.

For instance, there is a cord running the length of the assembly line, referred to by workers as the 'andon cord'. Any worker can pull it and stop the line, and the problem will be displayed on large display boards ringing the assembly line.

'Andon' is Japanese for 'paper lantern', and originated in the Toyota Production System, where workers are encouraged to take a personal role in making sure that mistakes either don't happen or are immediately corrected, a philosophy one Ford executive put as: 'Don't create it, don't take it and don't pass it along.'

With all deference to Ford and Japanese quality assurance, that is what Cooper employees—members of Professional, Technical, Office, Warehouse and Mail Order Employees Union, Local 743—have always done. Another challenge of lamp construction is to get it balanced so it can stand up straight. Picture a lamp that is constructed of wooden spools on a metal core—if the spools are not stacked with perfect precision, the core will be crooked and the lampshade will never hang properly. People spending $500 for a lamp return them and get their money back if the shade doesn't hang properly. So many things can go wrong in the found objects—the Cambodian silver cups and Thai dragons—used for lamp bases. The pre-drilled centre poles can be off and their bottoms might not be entirely flat, and the Cooper workers spend a lot of time laboriously correcting these flaws.

Cooper is proud of the initiative of its individual workers. When I ask Suzanne Lauren how Cooper Lamp keeps a step ahead of the Chinese, she doesn't talk about the niche of luxury lamps; like the Ford engineers, she speaks of innovation, and offers up their latest model of cord-free, low-light lamps being introduced under the 'Lightini' brand. 'We had a very good customer come in whose wife had just bought a series of antique bookcases, and spent the entire weekend on-line trying to find lamps because she didn't want to drill holes for lamp cords in them,' Lauren explains. 'So that's how this started.'

The lamps—small with fist-sized granite bases and brass shades—are powered by three C batteries and can run continuously for about a month, before needing to have the batteries replaced. 'We're working on a rechargeable one, that's in the pipeline as we speak,' she said.

Replacing batteries, or even recharging a lamp once a month seems a bother but Lauren points out that the true market for these lamps is not rich ladies with expensive bookshelves, but restaurants, where the new lamps would replace candles. Replacing a candle every night is a far greater inconvenience than changing a battery once a month. Cooper is just about to start attending the big restaurant shows, promoting the lamp not only for its convenience, but for its ability to save businesses money. Restaurants can significantly cut their insurance rates by replacing candles with the low light lamps, a fact of which most of them are unaware, Lauren said, 'until we tell them.'