Lofty promise of Saturn plant
12-03-2005, 06:32 AM
#1
Thread Starter
Lofty promise of Saturn plant
An interesting article from yesterday's New York Times concerning the Saturn plant that was opened with high hopes that the Saturn division would help to solve GMs problems. As we all know, it didn't work out that way for the company or the employees.
An interesting article. What happened? Read it and comment.
December 2, 2005
Lofty Promise of Saturn Plant Runs Into G.M.'s Fiscal Reality
By JEREMY W. PETERS
and MICHELINE MAYNARD
SPRING HILL, Tenn., Nov. 29 - This was the factory that was going to revive the American automobile industry, proving that Detroit could build quality cars and win back buyers who had defected to the Japanese.
Opened when auto companies were closing plants and cutting hundreds of thousands of jobs, General Motors' Saturn plant here was a rare opportunity for the company and its workers to literally leave the industry's old ways behind and embrace some of the lessons that Japan was teaching, with an American twist.
Now, Saturn is in danger of falling victim to the fate this plant was intended to avoid.
The plant, the only one exclusively devoted to building Saturn vehicles, is among 12 factories that G.M. plans to shut or partly close, eliminating 30,000 jobs in North America as it tries to recover from one of the worst slumps in its history.
Next year, in a move that presages the end to G.M.'s grand Saturn experiment in Spring Hill, the company will shut one of two assembly lines at one of the most famous factories in the country. While workers are hoping that G.M. will invest here to modernize the plant, the troubled auto company has made no commitment that would guarantee Spring Hill's future.
Nestled in rolling farm country 30 miles south of Nashville, workers and managers at the sprawling complex started out making decisions together and customers prized the vehicles because they came from "a different kind of car company," as the Saturn tagline went.
The Saturn plant, like other efforts at G.M. to battle foreign competition, became a victim of the company's short attention span. At a critical time when the plant needed to grow, G.M instead poured money into sport utility vehicles and pickups, hoping to outwit the Japanese - only to see them invade those markets, too. And workers here are paying the price.
"Workers have got to be asking themselves, What do we have to do?" said Gary N. Chaison, a professor of industrial relations at Clark University in Worcester, Mass.
"The social contract was that if we build a quality product, we're going to have jobs, our kids are going to have jobs, and the plant will still be in town," Professor Chaison said. "Now, that idea is gone."
It certainly looks that way to Michael O'Rourke, who uprooted his wife and three children from Wisconsin to come south. Saturn was the promise of a future he could not find at his old plant.
"I still remember the day I gave away my snow blower, I was so happy," Mr. O'Rourke, the president of the United Automobile Workers local here, said this week.
These days, Mr. O'Rourke, who sits in an office with file cabinets plastered with bumper stickers reading "I Love My Saturn" and "Buy American, Buy Union," faces an uncertain future along with his co-workers.
About 1,500 workers at the plant are set to lose jobs that G.M. originally assured them were guaranteed. Another 4,000 jobs at Spring Hill, the second-youngest plant in G.M.'s American network, may hinge on whether the auto company gives this factory new models to build. Even if G.M. does allot new work, the vehicles are likely to be other G.M. cars.
These Saturn workers have learned the harsh reality that building quality cars and cooperating with management are not enough to save their jobs.
As in the past, their futures now depend primarily on whether their plants build vehicles that sell, which they cannot control, rather than how well they are built, which they can.
Saturn workers are not the only ones getting this message. G.M. also plans to close its well-regarded plants in Oklahoma City and Oshawa, Ontario. Both have won the title of the best plant in North America by J. D. Power & Associates, which publishes an annual ranking according to efficiency and quality.
G.M.'s chief executive, Rick Wagoner, said last week that he regretted having to shut such heralded plants. "It's not an easy decision," Mr. Wagoner said. "We don't have many plants that aren't high quality and very productive."
But the heartbreak is especially deep at Saturn, where the original promises that G.M. made its workers when the first cars were built there in 1990 have been steadily slipping away as sales have faltered by 25 percent from their 1994 peak, to about 221,000 last year, and its buzz has faded. Yet for a time, the Saturn approach worked to extraordinary acclaim. Owners of Toyotas and Hondas were buying Saturn's small cars on the belief that G.M. had matched their vehicles in quality.
In truth, Saturns never consistently beat their Japanese rivals in surveys performed by J. D. Power or Consumer Reports, but Saturn's consumer-friendly image and the almost cult-like following among Saturn owners made it seem as though they did.
Now, perception is not enough.
The best foreign manufacturers can build a half dozen or more different kinds of cars and trucks at their assembly plants in the United States and Canada, and this allows them to quickly shift production when buyers' tastes change.
And with its market share eroding, and with $4 billion in North American losses just this year, G.M. is on a mission to do the same.
" Toyota and Honda really have a remarkable capacity to put more than one vehicle in a plant," John Paul MacDuffie, an associate professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, said last week. "G.M. just can't do that," except at a few factories.
Workers in Spring Hill, where cows graze across railroad tracks from a plant that once became iconic in quirky television commercials, said they came here believing that they could help G.M. rebound and give the U.A.W. a stronger voice.
Saturn was "an opportunity to show everyone the worker had some influence in the making and building of a car, that we weren't just line rats," said Mark Wunderlin, 49, who moved here from Oklahoma City in 1990.
Saturn workers took part in brainstorming sessions, sharing ideas with management that they might have never mentioned at a conventional plant. Leaders of the U.A.W. served alongside G.M. executives on an advisory council, sharing decisions affecting Saturn.
Saturn had its own purchasing department, buying parts separately from G.M. - and sometimes getting a better deal. (G.M. does not break down its results by line, so it is unclear how much profit or loss Saturn has generated.)
Thousands of visitors and hundreds of corporate managers flocked here to get a glimpse of the Saturn "secret," which the company happily displayed, with tours of the plant and seminars in classrooms just a few feet away from the factory floor.
Spring Hill - which had only 1,500 residents when G.M. selected the hamlet after a lively competition among politicians vying for the plant - swelled to 17,000 people.
Despite the risk of leaving their old jobs behind, workers were eager to come because there were to be no layoffs under the union contract at Saturn. (The contract was changed last year after G.M. persuaded workers that it stood in the way of introducing new models to the plant.)
When production slowed, workers were assigned to sweep the floors or paint white fences that stretched several miles around the plant.
But the Saturn dream died well before the plant. In the mid-1990's, when Saturn reached its peak sales of just under 300,000 cars a year, plant and union officials were campaigning hard for an expansion so that the factory could build half a million vehicles a year.
They had a good argument. Buyers were outgrowing their small Saturns, and with the Toyota Camry and Honda Accord regaining some of Saturn's converts, Saturn's partisans pleaded with G.M. for bigger cars.
G.M. executives, facing a hot market for S.U.V.'s and pickups, and having already spent $5 billion at that point on Saturn, decided, however, to pour money into developing trucks instead.
Thus, there were no new Saturn cars for four years. And when G.M. finally decided to build a midsize Saturn, the production went to Wilmington, Del., instead of Spring Hill. By the time the Spring Hill plant got new vehicles to build, including a small S.U.V. called the Vue, Saturn's buzz was long gone and so was its status as a separate part of G.M.
"It's been a slow process, but little bites have been taken away," said Darryl Kilburn, 41, an electrician whose wife, Marlene, 50, also works at Spring Hill. They met here after coming to Tennessee from other G.M. plants in Michigan: he from Flint, she from Lansing.
Both were eager for a chance to start over. But now, as back in Michigan, "you just do your job and go home," Mr. Kilburn said.
G.M. officials say there is still an opportunity for Saturn to win new business. It plans four new vehicles for the Saturn lineup, although none yet are earmarked for Spring Hill and may be built elsewhere.
"The big issue for Saturn is a simple one, and it's basically product," said David Cole, chairman of the Center for Automotive Research in Ann Arbor, Mich. "Saturn hasn't had the array of products it needed."
G.M. is expected to send production of small Saturn cars, built on the assembly line now planned to be shut, to another factory, perhaps at Lordstown, Ohio, where it recently expanded.
Sylvia Johnson, 54, said she wondered if Saturn could survive. Sitting in the gymnasium of the union hall, Ms. Johnson recalled her excitement when she arrived in 1996, after working for 20 years at an Indiana parts plant that closed.
"Everyone had that gung-ho feeling," Ms. Johnson said. "I thought we would still be doing the same thing for the next 30, 40 years."
Leo Jones, 47, shares her sense of disappointment. Ten years after he arrived from a G.M. plant in Lansing, Mich., where he had worked for a decade, Mr. Jones has been laid off most of this year. Lately, he wishes he had stayed up north.
"If I had to do it again, " he said, "I wouldn't come down here."
An interesting article. What happened? Read it and comment.
December 2, 2005
Lofty Promise of Saturn Plant Runs Into G.M.'s Fiscal Reality
By JEREMY W. PETERS
and MICHELINE MAYNARD
SPRING HILL, Tenn., Nov. 29 - This was the factory that was going to revive the American automobile industry, proving that Detroit could build quality cars and win back buyers who had defected to the Japanese.
Opened when auto companies were closing plants and cutting hundreds of thousands of jobs, General Motors' Saturn plant here was a rare opportunity for the company and its workers to literally leave the industry's old ways behind and embrace some of the lessons that Japan was teaching, with an American twist.
Now, Saturn is in danger of falling victim to the fate this plant was intended to avoid.
The plant, the only one exclusively devoted to building Saturn vehicles, is among 12 factories that G.M. plans to shut or partly close, eliminating 30,000 jobs in North America as it tries to recover from one of the worst slumps in its history.
Next year, in a move that presages the end to G.M.'s grand Saturn experiment in Spring Hill, the company will shut one of two assembly lines at one of the most famous factories in the country. While workers are hoping that G.M. will invest here to modernize the plant, the troubled auto company has made no commitment that would guarantee Spring Hill's future.
Nestled in rolling farm country 30 miles south of Nashville, workers and managers at the sprawling complex started out making decisions together and customers prized the vehicles because they came from "a different kind of car company," as the Saturn tagline went.
The Saturn plant, like other efforts at G.M. to battle foreign competition, became a victim of the company's short attention span. At a critical time when the plant needed to grow, G.M instead poured money into sport utility vehicles and pickups, hoping to outwit the Japanese - only to see them invade those markets, too. And workers here are paying the price.
"Workers have got to be asking themselves, What do we have to do?" said Gary N. Chaison, a professor of industrial relations at Clark University in Worcester, Mass.
"The social contract was that if we build a quality product, we're going to have jobs, our kids are going to have jobs, and the plant will still be in town," Professor Chaison said. "Now, that idea is gone."
It certainly looks that way to Michael O'Rourke, who uprooted his wife and three children from Wisconsin to come south. Saturn was the promise of a future he could not find at his old plant.
"I still remember the day I gave away my snow blower, I was so happy," Mr. O'Rourke, the president of the United Automobile Workers local here, said this week.
These days, Mr. O'Rourke, who sits in an office with file cabinets plastered with bumper stickers reading "I Love My Saturn" and "Buy American, Buy Union," faces an uncertain future along with his co-workers.
About 1,500 workers at the plant are set to lose jobs that G.M. originally assured them were guaranteed. Another 4,000 jobs at Spring Hill, the second-youngest plant in G.M.'s American network, may hinge on whether the auto company gives this factory new models to build. Even if G.M. does allot new work, the vehicles are likely to be other G.M. cars.
These Saturn workers have learned the harsh reality that building quality cars and cooperating with management are not enough to save their jobs.
As in the past, their futures now depend primarily on whether their plants build vehicles that sell, which they cannot control, rather than how well they are built, which they can.
Saturn workers are not the only ones getting this message. G.M. also plans to close its well-regarded plants in Oklahoma City and Oshawa, Ontario. Both have won the title of the best plant in North America by J. D. Power & Associates, which publishes an annual ranking according to efficiency and quality.
G.M.'s chief executive, Rick Wagoner, said last week that he regretted having to shut such heralded plants. "It's not an easy decision," Mr. Wagoner said. "We don't have many plants that aren't high quality and very productive."
But the heartbreak is especially deep at Saturn, where the original promises that G.M. made its workers when the first cars were built there in 1990 have been steadily slipping away as sales have faltered by 25 percent from their 1994 peak, to about 221,000 last year, and its buzz has faded. Yet for a time, the Saturn approach worked to extraordinary acclaim. Owners of Toyotas and Hondas were buying Saturn's small cars on the belief that G.M. had matched their vehicles in quality.
In truth, Saturns never consistently beat their Japanese rivals in surveys performed by J. D. Power or Consumer Reports, but Saturn's consumer-friendly image and the almost cult-like following among Saturn owners made it seem as though they did.
Now, perception is not enough.
The best foreign manufacturers can build a half dozen or more different kinds of cars and trucks at their assembly plants in the United States and Canada, and this allows them to quickly shift production when buyers' tastes change.
And with its market share eroding, and with $4 billion in North American losses just this year, G.M. is on a mission to do the same.
" Toyota and Honda really have a remarkable capacity to put more than one vehicle in a plant," John Paul MacDuffie, an associate professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, said last week. "G.M. just can't do that," except at a few factories.
Workers in Spring Hill, where cows graze across railroad tracks from a plant that once became iconic in quirky television commercials, said they came here believing that they could help G.M. rebound and give the U.A.W. a stronger voice.
Saturn was "an opportunity to show everyone the worker had some influence in the making and building of a car, that we weren't just line rats," said Mark Wunderlin, 49, who moved here from Oklahoma City in 1990.
Saturn workers took part in brainstorming sessions, sharing ideas with management that they might have never mentioned at a conventional plant. Leaders of the U.A.W. served alongside G.M. executives on an advisory council, sharing decisions affecting Saturn.
Saturn had its own purchasing department, buying parts separately from G.M. - and sometimes getting a better deal. (G.M. does not break down its results by line, so it is unclear how much profit or loss Saturn has generated.)
Thousands of visitors and hundreds of corporate managers flocked here to get a glimpse of the Saturn "secret," which the company happily displayed, with tours of the plant and seminars in classrooms just a few feet away from the factory floor.
Spring Hill - which had only 1,500 residents when G.M. selected the hamlet after a lively competition among politicians vying for the plant - swelled to 17,000 people.
Despite the risk of leaving their old jobs behind, workers were eager to come because there were to be no layoffs under the union contract at Saturn. (The contract was changed last year after G.M. persuaded workers that it stood in the way of introducing new models to the plant.)
When production slowed, workers were assigned to sweep the floors or paint white fences that stretched several miles around the plant.
But the Saturn dream died well before the plant. In the mid-1990's, when Saturn reached its peak sales of just under 300,000 cars a year, plant and union officials were campaigning hard for an expansion so that the factory could build half a million vehicles a year.
They had a good argument. Buyers were outgrowing their small Saturns, and with the Toyota Camry and Honda Accord regaining some of Saturn's converts, Saturn's partisans pleaded with G.M. for bigger cars.
G.M. executives, facing a hot market for S.U.V.'s and pickups, and having already spent $5 billion at that point on Saturn, decided, however, to pour money into developing trucks instead.
Thus, there were no new Saturn cars for four years. And when G.M. finally decided to build a midsize Saturn, the production went to Wilmington, Del., instead of Spring Hill. By the time the Spring Hill plant got new vehicles to build, including a small S.U.V. called the Vue, Saturn's buzz was long gone and so was its status as a separate part of G.M.
"It's been a slow process, but little bites have been taken away," said Darryl Kilburn, 41, an electrician whose wife, Marlene, 50, also works at Spring Hill. They met here after coming to Tennessee from other G.M. plants in Michigan: he from Flint, she from Lansing.
Both were eager for a chance to start over. But now, as back in Michigan, "you just do your job and go home," Mr. Kilburn said.
G.M. officials say there is still an opportunity for Saturn to win new business. It plans four new vehicles for the Saturn lineup, although none yet are earmarked for Spring Hill and may be built elsewhere.
"The big issue for Saturn is a simple one, and it's basically product," said David Cole, chairman of the Center for Automotive Research in Ann Arbor, Mich. "Saturn hasn't had the array of products it needed."
G.M. is expected to send production of small Saturn cars, built on the assembly line now planned to be shut, to another factory, perhaps at Lordstown, Ohio, where it recently expanded.
Sylvia Johnson, 54, said she wondered if Saturn could survive. Sitting in the gymnasium of the union hall, Ms. Johnson recalled her excitement when she arrived in 1996, after working for 20 years at an Indiana parts plant that closed.
"Everyone had that gung-ho feeling," Ms. Johnson said. "I thought we would still be doing the same thing for the next 30, 40 years."
Leo Jones, 47, shares her sense of disappointment. Ten years after he arrived from a G.M. plant in Lansing, Mich., where he had worked for a decade, Mr. Jones has been laid off most of this year. Lately, he wishes he had stayed up north.
"If I had to do it again, " he said, "I wouldn't come down here."
12-03-2005, 08:14 AM
#2
Yes It's too bad. Remember the Saturn concepts and then the downgrade that went into the actual production and facility? I think the acct's got in there initially and changed the original concept dollar shuffling.
It sure seems to me that GM (I could be really off base here I'm hip shooting) was/is more interested in GMAC than GM in many ways. Money's easier to move than cars, and you don't need to provide a warranty.
That's the way business works. I guess
fltsfshr
It sure seems to me that GM (I could be really off base here I'm hip shooting) was/is more interested in GMAC than GM in many ways. Money's easier to move than cars, and you don't need to provide a warranty.
That's the way business works. I guess
fltsfshr
12-03-2005, 08:59 AM
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It only proves that GM's demise is inevitable, or it will have to completely transform itself.
The present corporate culture of GM is poisonous to any attempt to be a warm and fuzzy car company.
The present corporate culture of GM is poisonous to any attempt to be a warm and fuzzy car company.
12-03-2005, 10:45 AM
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Key excerpts:
Originally Posted by ralper,Dec 3 2005, 10:32 AM
...The Saturn plant, like other efforts at G.M. to battle foreign competition, became a victim of the company's short attention span. At a critical time when the plant needed to grow, G.M instead poured money into sport utility vehicles and pickups, hoping to outwit the Japanese - only to see them invade those markets, too.
...In truth, Saturns never consistently beat their Japanese rivals in surveys performed by J. D. Power or Consumer Reports, but Saturn's consumer-friendly image and the almost cult-like following among Saturn owners made it seem as though they did. Now, perception is not enough.
...The best foreign manufacturers can build a half dozen or more different kinds of cars and trucks at their assembly plants in the United States and Canada, and this allows them to quickly shift production when buyers' tastes change.
..."Toyota and Honda really have a remarkable capacity to put more than one vehicle in a plant," John Paul MacDuffie, an associate professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, said last week. "G.M. just can't do that," except at a few factories.
..."The big issue for Saturn is a simple one, and it's basically product," said David Cole, chairman of the Center for Automotive Research in Ann Arbor, Mich. "Saturn hasn't had the array of products it needed."
...In truth, Saturns never consistently beat their Japanese rivals in surveys performed by J. D. Power or Consumer Reports, but Saturn's consumer-friendly image and the almost cult-like following among Saturn owners made it seem as though they did. Now, perception is not enough.
...The best foreign manufacturers can build a half dozen or more different kinds of cars and trucks at their assembly plants in the United States and Canada, and this allows them to quickly shift production when buyers' tastes change.
..."Toyota and Honda really have a remarkable capacity to put more than one vehicle in a plant," John Paul MacDuffie, an associate professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, said last week. "G.M. just can't do that," except at a few factories.
..."The big issue for Saturn is a simple one, and it's basically product," said David Cole, chairman of the Center for Automotive Research in Ann Arbor, Mich. "Saturn hasn't had the array of products it needed."
12-03-2005, 12:37 PM
#5
Thread Starter
I think you're all right. If you remember back to its beginnings, Saturn was established as an autonomous division of GM. It was going to be allowed to act on its own and to create its own image and cars. It was supposed to be customer oriented and was supposed to try to not do all of those things that the typical GM divisions had been doing to offend customers. Saturn was going to be more like a Japanese car company than a division of General Motors.
I didn't think this policy would last, and I didn't think that Saturn would be allowed to remain autonomous if it was successful. I was sure that everyone would want a piece of it if it turned out good.
The last I heard, GM's policy for Saturn is to position it somewhere between Pontiac and Cadillac. The feeling among management is that now that the brand has been established its time for it to take its place in the GM lineup.
I think that Palmateer has hit on something. Even if GM does come up with a good idea the culture and environment there won't allow it to survive.
I didn't think this policy would last, and I didn't think that Saturn would be allowed to remain autonomous if it was successful. I was sure that everyone would want a piece of it if it turned out good.
The last I heard, GM's policy for Saturn is to position it somewhere between Pontiac and Cadillac. The feeling among management is that now that the brand has been established its time for it to take its place in the GM lineup.
I think that Palmateer has hit on something. Even if GM does come up with a good idea the culture and environment there won't allow it to survive.
12-03-2005, 04:07 PM
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Does anyone else see a correlation between GM and the federal government?
The only difference I see is the government can print money.
Both are consumed by special interests and money.
The only difference I see is the government can print money.
Both are consumed by special interests and money.
12-03-2005, 04:33 PM
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Surely a key piece of this article is...
And despite upper management's pleas not to pay attention to the man behind the curtain, people do, and they want real quality, not just smoke and mirrors.
I'm now in my second "permanent" job, but I'm keenly aware that, despite tenure, there are no real guarantees for the future. (To be clear: I left the first one voluntarily.) If the State of Florida decides that my university is superfluous, the tenured faculty will face the same issues that those Saturn workers are facing.
For me, the lesson is that no one should expect big institutions (including the government) to take care of them. At some fundamental level, we're all on our own. HPH
Now, perception is not enough.
I'm now in my second "permanent" job, but I'm keenly aware that, despite tenure, there are no real guarantees for the future. (To be clear: I left the first one voluntarily.) If the State of Florida decides that my university is superfluous, the tenured faculty will face the same issues that those Saturn workers are facing.
For me, the lesson is that no one should expect big institutions (including the government) to take care of them. At some fundamental level, we're all on our own. HPH
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12-03-2005, 04:41 PM
#8
Thread Starter
Originally Posted by Jim Reichard,Dec 3 2005, 09:07 PM
Does anyone else see a correlation between GM and the federal government?
The only difference I see is the government can print money.
Both are consumed by special interests and money.
The only difference I see is the government can print money.
Both are consumed by special interests and money.
Otherwise you are right, they are very much the same.
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