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The Saturn Automobile Corporation and the Disorganization of Labor

Paper Draft Sharryn Kasmir

Department of Anthropology, Hofstra University

This paper offers a consideration of the Saturn Automobile Corporation. Saturn was

developed during a time of capitalist crisis in the mid-1980s, when it was inaugurated as

a “model plant,” where labor-management cooperation and the team concept were more

fully realized than in any other US auto factory. Saturn began as GM’s attempt to

produce a subcompact to compete against the Japanese models that dominated the small-

car market. When Saturn was still in the planning stages, UAW Local 1853 scrapped the

national union contract and negotiated a local Memorandum of Agreement that paired

union leaders with managers at every level of the organization. Union members hired

their fellow team members, organized workflow, consulted on advertising campaigns,

and planned for the brand. The Memorandum also eliminated job classifications and

seniority rules so the team concept could be fully implemented, and it traded hourly

wages for a formula that held a portion of salary “at risk” and paid bonuses based on

quality and production targets. Saturn’s singular labor-management accord long set a

standard for labor relations in the US.

Labor, government, and academic advocates believed that Saturn and Local 1853

were pioneering a new model of unionism that would tie capital to place, win union

involvement in planning, extend democracy to the workplace, increase job satisfaction,

and realize human potential (Bluestone and Bluestone 1992, Rubinstein 1996, Rubinstein

and Kochan 2001,) aspirations also associated with cooperatives and the social economy.

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My account disrupts this interpretation and casts Saturn in a critical light. I argue that

rather empowering workers, Saturn played a role in the long-term effort to disorganize

the working class in one national sector.

I suggest a connection between the regime of labor-management cooperation that

came to fruition at Saturn, and the assault on organized labor that began in the 1970s with

capital flight and continued in the 1980s when competition among union locals narrowed

the scale of labor struggle and diminished autoworkers’ political horizons. I argue further

that Saturn helped to establish a new pattern of class domination in the US, which

counted upon the politics of localism, the ideology of enterprise, and privilege for some

and dispossession for others. The Saturn case encourages us to ask about questions about

social economy enterprises that focus our attention not on the internal dynamics of the

firms we study but on their broader impact on working-class formation and matters of

class power.

The Assault Labor

When GM announced its plans to build Saturn in 1985, it promised a fully integrated,

high-tech facility, $3.5 billion, and 3,000 jobs (until then the largest single industrial

investment in US history.) This at a time when the corporation laid off thousands of

workers in Flint and other industrial cities, shuttered plants, and left abandoned places in

their wake.

After states and municipalities engaged in a highly publicized bidding war for the

plant, Saturn broke ground in the rural town of Spring Hill, Tennessee, 35 miles south of

Nashville. Although the Spring Hill plant was planned as the exclusive facility for the

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new brand and the workshop for a new version of labor relations, by 2007 production of

the last of its models was moved to Mexico, and the plant was retooled to build

Chevrolets. Spring Hill is now one of three North American GM plants to be idled—11

will close permanently—while the corporation shuts factories and redistributes

production across the globe. 21,000 UAW members will lose their jobs in this

restructuring; during bankruptcy reorganization, GM terminated the Saturn brand.

This spatial assault is not new. Since the 1936 sit-down strike in Flint, Michigan

established the UAW, capital has fled organized labor, both within the US and globally

(Silver 2003: 28-49.) In the 1970s, GM rolled out its “southern strategy” of opening non-

union plants in the US south. This came on the heels of an upsurge of autoworker

militancy centered in Detroit and led by African-American workers. African Americans

had been relegated to the hardest, dirtiest, and lowest-paying jobs since they migrated to

Michigan’s auto factories after WWI and WWII. In the aftermath of the 1967 uprisings,

Black UAW members in Detroit organized the Revolutionary Union Movement, the

League of Revolutionary Black Workers, and the Black Workers Congress. These groups

pursued leadership positions and racial equality in their locals, became involved in

community struggles, and brought Black Power, socialist and anti-imperialist politics to

the shopfloor and the union. The Marxist-led movement quickly spread to other factories

and other cities (Georgakas and Surkin 1998, Geschwender 1977.)

These struggles in auto factories intersected with the radical movements of the

day: Black Power, the counter-cultural and hippie critiques of consumerism and

alienation, the anti-war movement, and the women’s liberation struggle against

patriarchal masculinity. Their connections were also international. Black workers

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supported national liberation movements in the Third World, opposed the war in

Vietman, and demanded equal pay for Black Chrysler workers in South Africa

(Georgakas and Surkin 1998:132; Geschwender:1997: 92.) They also expressed a

growing rank-and-file sentiment for the humanization of factory work, a theme that

sounded also in Italy, France, and elsewhere in Europe.i

The southern strategy, which counted on deep-seated anti-union sentiment and

racism to keep workers unorganized, was one dimension of GM’s effort to unmake the

racial and political terrain of working class power in auto cities. On a second front and

simultaneous with the southern strategy GM introduced the team concept (Rubinstein and

Kochan 2001, 17.) At first glance, the team concept seemed a response to workers’

demands for a more humane workplace, greater respect on the job, and relief from the

assembly line, but its origins in this moment of GM’s anti-union move to the south

suggests management’s interest in using this work regime to discipline workers. When

the UAW launched an all out offensive and successfully unionized all of the southern

plants (which it did by 1979,) GM abandoned the southern strategy for one of global

investment, and it set out to implement the team concept throughout system.

In 1982 (after UAW’s participation in a government bailout won Chrysler wage

concessions,) GM demanded that the UAW reopen the national contract to negotiate

givebacks. When the union refused, GM announced that it would close four plants;

within months, it announced the closure of Southgate in California. The UAW was forced

to the bargaining table and to accept to $2.5 billion in cuts to wages and benefits.

GM thus pioneered the tactic of threatening plant closings to win concessions; this

opened the door to the team concept and to plant-level negotiations on work rules,

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something that undermined the union’s hard won and fiercely defended national contract.

After this, it became commonplace for locals to bid for new product lines and negotiate

plant-level agreements to out-compete other plants, a practice was known as

“whipsawing” (Mann 1987: 79-81.) Whipsawing reflected the emerging common sense

of neoliberalism that enterprise should prevail in all areas of social life, including the

union hall, where locals were encouraged to act like self-interested businesses. It also

established the conditions for new divisions and inequality among UAW locals. Losing a

bid meant that workers might face temporary lay off or see their factory permanently

close; winning meant concessions on work rules, including accepting the team concept

and lean production.

The dissident UAW Caucus The New Directions Movement was founded to

oppose the concessionary stance of the national (Dandaneau 1996: 7-33). New Directions

saw the team concept as a thinly disguised speed up and attempt to bust the union, since

teams turned workers into petty managers of each others’ efforts and robbed the union of

control over job classifications and seniority rules, two sources of labor’s power on the

shop floor. This perspective was developed in left labor journal Labor Notes (see Parker

and Slaughter 1985, 1988, 1994). New Directions considered that competitive bidding

decentralized and weakened the union, turning it into “a loose federation of locals

competing among themselves” (quoted in Mann 1987: 82.) The more militant Canadian

wing of the UAW so strongly opposed these developments that it left the International

over the issue (Green and Yanarella 1996:6.)

At the 1983 UAW convention, during a period of widespread plant closings,

union activists raised the question of whipsawing among rank-and-file members. They

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asked two related questions about geography and power: “Why isn’t your International

union doing more to stop these closing?” “Why isn’t your local doing more to get other

UAW locals to develop a national strategy against plant closings?” (Mann 1987: 155) At

this juncture, the International might have challenged GM, but it did not bring these

questions to the convention floor. Instead it sounded, “the constant theme [of] the battle

against imports and calls for protectionist legislation. While delegates cheered wildly at

every verbal assault against Japan, there was no strategy offered with which to confront

the Big Three automakers on the issue of capital flight or … whipsawing (Mann 1987:

156.) In this way, the UAW collaborated in a politics of jingoistic nationalism and

narrowed the political aspirations of workers who, a decade earlier, might well have been

persuaded by internationalism. And it limited the political horizons of its members still

further, as it pitted insecurity in one place against investment and relative privilege in

another. Thus the “competition union local” was invented (here I am explicitly drawing a

comparison with Don Kalb’s [2009] concept of the competition state.)

This environment gave rise to Saturn’s singular labor agreement. When 1853

forewent the national contract, agreed to the team concept, conceded on work rules, and

pegged pay to quality, it set a new bar for local givebacks. The president of a Michigan

local summed up the damage: “Saturn had become a Trojan horse in our midst. Armed

with the threat of plant closing, the company is now playing local against local to see

who will meet or exceed Saturn’s give-backs” (quoted in Mann 1987: 82)

John Holloway reminds us that “Capitalist crisis is never anything other than that:

the breakdown of a relatively stable pattern of class domination. It appears as an

economic crisis, expressed in the fall in the rate of profit, but its core is the failure of an

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established pattern of domination” (1987: 145-6.) The new pattern of domination—itself

the product of protracted struggled—counted upon a shifting geography of labor and the

unevenness and insecurity that this produced; a new model for labor-management

relations that purportedly empowered individual workers while it undermined union

power; and new hierarchies and divisions within and among working classes. In the

remainder of this paper, I sketch this new pattern of domination and Saturn’s role in

bringing it about.

Competition States and Neoliberal Ideology

With billions of dollars in capital investment at stake, Saturn was the object of intense

competition, and municipalities and states orchestrated extravagant public-relations

campaigns and offered liberal incentive packages to win the company. Thirty-seven states

and 1,000 communities vied for Saturn (Sherman 1994:102.) John Russo dubbed the

episode “Saturn Mania” for the public spectacle of the competition--there was

widespread media attention, including the appearance of seven governors on the Phil

Donahue talk show to sell their states to GM and the release by a small record producer

of the novelty song “Saturn” that was a tribute to the frenzy—but also for its political and

ideological effect.

Spring Hill won the plant with massive state subsidies that the area could ill

afford. Tennessee helped GM acquire 2,450 acres of farmland for the site, has no state

income tax, and offered $50 million in infrastructure and worker training and tens of

millions in tax abatements. It was also selected for its distance from Detroit and from

UAW power. Saturn was located in a southern right-to-work state, in proximity to non-

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union Japanese transplants. This distance from Detroit, at the same time physical,

political, and symbolic, was deemed indispensible to creating a new benchmark for labor-

management relations.

The success of Saturn mania (from a corporate point of view) encouraged GM

and other corporations to seek tax breaks at existing facilities. It worked at an political

and ideological level to deepen the anti-union environment in the US by encouraging the

public to see organized labor—coded racially as “Detroit” or in class terms as “the old

world”-- as the enemy of economic viability, promoting the idea that a cooperative

workplace, rather than one with a strong union, was more “American.” Russo also

believes it forced many pro-union Midwest democrats to turn against organized labor

(Russo 1986, also Nader 1985b.)

Creating Difference

Saturn workers were recruited from a pool of GM workers who were laid off or whose

plants were facing closure. They were the “survivors” of reserve places and discarded

workforces who were then made into what was widely considered a “labor aristocracy.”

Like other union autoworkers, their wages were high and benefits generous compared to

other fractions of the US working class. Since Saturn workers were not covered by the

national contract, their average base pay was $4,000 less than that of their GM

counterparts; however, risk pay and bonuses reaching $10,000 in the mid-1990s more

than made up for this shortfall. But the differences extended well beyond pay.

Saturn workers were the objects of a dense public-relations campaign, both inside

and outside the plant, that extolled the working conditions in the factory and workers

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“difference” from and superiority to other autoworkers. Workers and their unions make

difference in ways that capital alone cannot, and Local 1853 collaborated in creating a

distinction between Saturn workers and other autoworkers and helped to mold a new kind

of unionism and a “different kind of worker” at Saturn.

UAW vice-president Don Elphin, a leading architect of Saturn, emphasized that

“the keynote of … worker participation programs is to change the self-concept” of

workers (quoted in Mann 1987:87, emphasis added). Saturn set out to make this new

self-concept. The public relations campaign that launched the brand portrayed Saturn

employees as a new breed of workers who were neither alienated from the product of

their labor nor from the consumers (Aaker 1994, Kasmir 2001, Rogers 1999). Saturn was

saturated with technology, language, and images (including Saturn commercials

broadcast on an in-house television station) that encouraged workers to see themselves as

distinct from and better than other autoworkers (see Kasmir 2001, 2005).

Teams were one technique of this self-concept. Teams took on what had

previously been managerial tasks, such as controlling inventory, producing within

budget, assigning jobs, and allocating labor hours. These responsibilities meant that team

members supervised each other’s work, thus blurring the line between labor and

management. Workers went to team and plant-wide meetings, visited suppliers, and, in

order to receive bonus payments, completed 92 hours of training per year. These

responsibilities took them off the assembly line, and as many workers told me made their

jobs seem “white-collar.” All employees were given a Franklin Planner in which to

schedule these meetings, trips, and classes. This planner was more than a calendar; it was

a system for self-improvement. In addition to entering appointments, workers who used

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their planner properly spent time each day writing their goals. There were larger spaces in

which to elaborate plans and personal mission statements for weeks, months, and years.

The making of difference went beyond these techniques of management and of

the self. Because Local 1853 broke from the national contract; because Saturn’s media

image was steeped in a critique of the “old world” of union conflict and Spring Hill was

constructed as Detroit’s opposite; and because the plant fully implemented the team

concept, UAW members elsewhere widely believed that Saturn was a non-union plant.

Back home in Flint, Detroit, New Jersey and elsewhere, friends and ex-coworkers were

under the impression that those who left for Saturn went to a non-union facility. A worker

who was originally from Linden, New Jersey told me “when I went “went back to my

plant... I brought the union card because people told me Saturn didn’t have a union.”

These perceptions came, in part, from 1853’s record of failing to demonstrate

solidarity with other UAW locals. During a 1992 strike at GM Lordstown, 1853 president

Mike Bennett complained to the press that the National should allow those Lordstown

workers who were making Saturn parts cross the picket line (Parker and Slaughter 1997)

thus suggesting that rather than Saturn showing solidarity with those on strike, Lordstown

workers should acknowledge and preserve Saturn’s difference and support its experiment

in workplace cooperation. Statements and actions such as these earned Saturn a poor

reputation within the wider labor movement. The head of middle Tennessee’s central

labor council commented: “Saturn is good internally for its people, but not externally for

the rest of us.”

Change and implications:

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This set of circumstances began anew in 1998, during a strike that began at GM’s Flint

Metal Center parts plant over the outsourcing of work to non-union plants. A second Flint

parts facility struck in short order, and strikes spread throughout GM, some plants

walking out over local issues, others forced to close for lack of parts. The combined

action of the locals had the distinct appearance of a solidarity strike in support of Delphi

workers fighting for their jobs. 186,000 workers were out, and 27 of 29 assembly plants

and scores of parts facilities shut down in the biggest labor stoppage at GM since the

1970s. But Saturn workers remained on the job; once again, they stood apart from their

fellow autoworkers.

“In the name of preserving the nation’s best-known experiment in cooperation

between labor and management,” reported the New York Times “they have set aside union

solidarity by assembling cars using parts from Japan and at least one nonunion American

company, instead of parts from Flint” (July 22, 1998:A1). Saturn workers were deeply

troubled. One worker told me,

Before the [strike], a lot of the people went on their five [five days off after night shift] up to Michigan. And they had relatives, and they were being harassed. A lot of them told me, ‘I have a brother-in-law just gave me a hard time. I couldn’t even drink a beer with him because he says, ‘How can you justify my being on strike and you guys are out there working, it’s not right. What kind of a union are you guys?’’ And a lot of them, … when they went home … their dads, brother-in-laws, asking them, ‘What kind of a union do you guys belong to? A dissident group calling themselves Concerned Brothers and Sisters, drawing on

the fraternal language of the US labor movement, began to organize to force their union

leaders to support the strike. Significantly, Concerned Brothers and Sisters drew an

extreme conclusion about Saturn workers’ difference: They began to call themselves

“scabs,” using the term of class betrayal that has a long history of power and violence in

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the US labor movement. Their shop-floor militancy and evocative class rhetoric,

combined with increasing pressure from the International, led Local 1853 to hold a strike

authorization vote. The strikes were a month-and-a-half old when the vote was taken;

nevertheless, Saturn’s decision to join was momentous. Dozens of national and

international newspapers covered the story, carrying headlines such as, “Elite car workers

ready to strike” (The Independent, July 21, 1998:13.)

Concerned Brothers and Sisters organized again several months later to support

candidates from an opposition caucus for union office. The opposition slate ran on a

platform of reform and vowed to change the Memorandum of Agreement to bring Saturn

closer to the national contract. In an overwhelming defeat, all the standing officers, many

of whom had been in power since the plant opened, were unseated by opposition

candidates. I have written elsewhere about the significance of these elections, and of the

subsequent events that finally led in 2004 to a majority vote to return to the national

UAW contract. These events are now overshadowed by GM’s bankruptcy and the demise

of the Saturn brand. Saturn workers’ privilege within the UAW is gone and the future of

the Spring Hill plant unsure. Many have taken buyouts or have transferred (yet again) to

other GM plants in the hope that they can work enough years to secure their retirement.

Concluding Thoughts

The case of Saturn points, I believe, to several relevant matters for our discussion

in this workshop. First, we are reminded that privilege in one location, for one fraction of

one national working class implies new inequalities and divisions. In the case of Saturn,

these divisions (and the hundreds others like them) weakened organized labor and helped

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remake a working class that is currently disorganized and largely unprepared to fight

back during this current capitalist crisis. Rather than providing an alternative to this

defeat, Saturn played a small but important part in setting its conditions. This case thus

suggests that there is a thin line between worker empowerment and worker control in

social economy experiments. Therefore, when we consider social economy businesses,

we are well advised to situate them within their historical and political contexts, their

particular ideological fields, and their own nexus of class relations and power, keeping

foremost in our analyses their impact outside the doors of the firms and organizations we

study and advocate.

i In Europe, Andre Gorz was among the left intellectuals to promote this political development. Drawing lessons from the Italian metal workers strike of 1962-63, one of several at that time over working conditions, alienation, and other non-economic issues, Gorz (1967) urged European labor movements to deemphasize wage struggles and instead pursue a radical agenda with regard the conditions and purpose of work and the reproduction of labor. To the extent that accumulated working-class victories won high wages and job security, the 1960s generation of workers was moved to fight for state services, autonomy, and free time and over the meaning of work and the terms of their own subjectivity.