Innovative Saturn-UAW Contract Dismantled

It seemed like such a great idea at the time. Create an atmosphere where workers and management are empowered to work together in harmony. Saturn's historic labor agreement was the cornerstone of the corporation, fostering a relationship that fueled interest in the small-car company in individuals and organizations far beyond the confines of the automotive industry. But not anymore. Nearly twenty years after the innovative labor contract was created, Spring Hill workers voted to dismantle the contract in a three-to-one vote. The new contract, which mirrors the national GM-UAW agreement currently in place at other General Motors plants, will go into affect at the beginning of next year.

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Charlie

Reply to
CE
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Nice, GM conned the UAW into ditching the no layoff policy. Now they can lay off everyone at the plant and move production to Mexico...

Is there any part of the US auto industry that isn't totally broken? It's no wonder GM, etc can't make a decent car, between the MBA clowns running things, the bean counters, the lawyers, the UAW, and the FEDs....

Reply to
Philip Nasadowski

Actually, having no connections with Saturn but in Nashville nearby, it's viewed locally as a move by original Saturn employees. Most of the original guys had been laid off from other factories, no locals hired. They negotiated a no lay-off contract along with some concessions in pay & work rules. Now that most of those guys are pretty much ready to go, they're shucking the old deal for the standard deal which pays better and I'm guessing helps retirement.

There is also local talk of Saturn putting out other products for other GM brands. That could be true. The typical deal is the union is in from the front end saying we'll have 2 electritions here and a wheel technition here. Just the way they're designed, that plan has to be transferrable to Spring Hill. They've been doing one week a month maintenance a month on the Ion line because they aren't selling.

Reply to
Allison

Don't forget post Enron, i.e. Sarbanes-Oxley too... it's a pain at my place. I used to joke that the last thing we do is make product - sadly it's not funny.

Reply to
Jonnie Santos

SOX shouldn't hit the front-line worker, but if Saturn interprets SOX requirements with the depth my firm has interpreted them for accounting and IT, the back-end admin and support staff will pull their hair out.

Which leaves who to run the company? As an investor, a vendor/supplier, and as a customer who wants the company around for a long time (my family has a Saturn SW2 that we love and are considering replacing it in a year or so with a VUE) I want professionally trained management, preferably folks who know operations and have taken the time to get some professional management training. I want the support staff (legal, accounting, supply chain, engineering, etc.) to also be committed to personal development in their fields, be it education, professional/trade organizations, or taking the job seriously enough to become top-notch.

My experience with the Spring Hill plant is dated, but I used to sell and support data acquisition and submetering instrumentation. I had projects in the Saturn plant, the Honda Marysville, OH plant, and called on some Detroit GM facilities through a distributor. The Saturn plant and the Honda plant were very well run and the Saturn folks were much nicer to work with than the Honda folks. The GM plants in Detroit run by old school, pulled myself up by my bootstraps types, were hell with which to work. Saturn and Honda wanted to submeter their facilities in order to assign energy costs to the departments in which the energy was consumed -- a must for activity based costing, which allows better budgeting and performance monitoring. ABC isn't easy to do correctly and I never found out if they achieved their end goal, but at least Saturn and Honda were trying to operate as a modern company. In the last Chevy plant I visited, I might as well have been time warped back to 1955. Ford, to their credit, was also working with our equipment and had a nice energy monitoring system -- but they were much more uptight than Saturn & Honda.

I could easily turn your MBA comment into a reply about all the waste I've experienced in union shops. However, I support collective bargaining and wish that both labor and management could concentrate on good operations rather than finger-pointing. An MBA is not required to be a good manager, but it is a tool that can help a good manager be a better manager.

I wish the entire plant luck in their transition, and I hope that GM corporate doesn't screw it up.

I think that elsewhere in this thread the Ion's slow sales was mentioned or alluded to. I'm a Saturn fan and even I don't like the Ion. Can't really explain it, though the speedo in the center of the dash is a good start. Maybe I'll warm up to it. I didn't like the VUE until I rented one for a week.

Cheers,

Dave One of those 'MBA clowns'

Reply to
David Firth

Seems to me that the real losers in the new contract are the Saturn dealers. At least before when the plant was going to be building just Saturns there was an incentive to turn out good new product for Saturn dealers. Now what will they be getting in 5 years?

Reply to
Art

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