Nearly everyone in business talks about improving productivity, but notable breakthroughs are rare. Last year productivity in U.S. manufacturing rose 4% v. 5.8% in 1971. Lately the workers at Kaiser Steel Corp.'s continuous-weld pipe mill at Fontana, Calif., have shown that dramatic gains can be made with only minor changes in methods and machines. In the last three months of 1972 they raised their productivity by a herculean 32%.
The new Stakhanovites* had a powerful incentive. Last October Kaiser officials announced that the 4,000-ton-a-month plant was being shut down, a victim of rising costs and stiffening foreign competition; a ton...