Learning from Saturn by Saul A. Rubinstein and Thomas A. Kochan, Ithaca, N.Y.: ILR Press, 2001, 156 pp., ISBN 0-8014-3873-X.

This is a jewel of a book: most informative, insightful and, in several respects, even endearing. This review will attempt to highlight some of its main features: the importance of the issues at stake, the ideas behind Saturn, the inner workings of this labour-management partnership, the ups and downs of reinventing the local union, the management of Saturn’s external boundaries and some impediments to learning within General Motors (GM) and the United Automobile Workers Union (UAW) and the lessons to be learned. This reviewer feels that the authors have achieved a scintillating success both in looking at this experiment openly, critically and in-depth on the basis of years of superb research, and in conveying their results and judgments in a most readable and lively language. The issues at stake stem from the fact that Saturn is often hailed as the boldest expression of a new labour relations model—in the United States at the least. This was certainly portrayed through the marketing slogan: “A New Kind of Car, A New Kind of Company,” as well as through a prevailing perception of “A Different Kind of Union.” To illustrate the novelties, let us mention the involvement of individuals through teams, the consensual inner workings of teams, a labour-management partnership of governance, the recognition of multiple stake holders including retailers, and a highly networked organization. The key question the authors seek to answer then is to what extent Saturn has been a success. The ideas behind Saturn go back a half-century. They include the postwar adversarial relations, experiments in the 1970s in Quality of Working Life, GM’s adventures in the 1980s in advanced technology, the set-up of NUMMI in 1982 by GM and Toyota and, finally, a joint GM-UAW study by the so-called “Committee of 99.” Its findings were the basis of a 1985 GM-UAW Memorandum of Agreement on Saturn’s organizing principle, fully five years before the first car rolled off the line in early 1990. Not only does this 28-page Memorandum contrast with the 400 pages of the GM-UAW national agreement, it also reads as a “document in a foreign language.” Some of its key features include: a “risk-and-reward” pay plan; teamwork with job rotation within the team; joint decision-making based on consensus principles; above the teams, co-management of modules of one hundred production employees by two advisors, one represented by the UAW, and the other not; and partnering in several functional staff areas, eventually including 400 union members, which marks a far-reaching innovation in labour’s on-line co-management. During the five start-up years prior to 1990, examples of critical union input into key decisions included product development, selection of suppliers, marketing and retailer relationships, work force selection, and training and development. In addition to several features of lean production, Saturn was also designed to embody a stakeholder firm and networked organization. The inner workings of this partnership in action have been analyzed through extensive and conceptually rigorous field research. This has generated a wealth of information and led the authors to four main conclusions. First, the self-directed nature of teams has made them the foundation of Saturn’s success, which includes high motivation and high-quality work. A key factor in their effectiveness is the quality of support by module advisors. Teams do best under the following conditions: (1) when the module advisors communicate well with their peers, and this is an area where representative advisors do well; (2) when the two advisors balance the time they spend on people and production issues, such balance not being the same thing as equal time; and (3) when there is alignment between the two partners on …