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Saturn's workers were recruited from U.A.W. locals in 38 states and carefully screened. By accepting a job at Saturn, they gave up their rights ever to work for any other GM division. Instead of hourly pay, they work for a salary (shop-floor average: $34,000), 20% of which is at risk. Whether they get that 20% depends on a complex formula that measures car quality, worker productivity and company profits. In the company's first year, employee salaries will depend largely on car quality. If a team produces fewer defects than the targeted amount, its members will receive 100% of their salary. If they perform even better, they are eligible for a bonus.
The result is that Saturn has attracted a younger, more entrepreneurial crew / than other GM divisions. The average age of a Saturn worker is 38, vs. 43 for the whole company. Saturn's work force is 20% female, slightly higher than the portion at GM as a whole. Many workers say they were drawn by the prospect that Saturn could compete on an equal footing. "The thing that most interested me was the idea that we could beat the Japanese. That's why I came here," says James Archibald, 34, a line worker in body fabrication, who pulled up stakes in Alabama to take his chances at Saturn. Archibald and his fellow workers share an almost religious zeal for their mission and habitually refer to traditional GM methods as "Old World," as if they were talking about the Middle Ages.
But people skills are not Saturn's only strong point. Since they were outfitting a plant from the ground up, Saturn's team members incorporated an array of new equipment and techniques. Their aim was to achieve what the M.I.T. study dubbed "lean production," the Japanese system that uses "half the human effort in the factory, half the manufacturing space, half the investment in tools, half the engineering hours to develop a new product." At Saturn, team members rejected the traditional U.S. form of assembly line, where workers do two things at once -- toil and shuffle -- as they struggle to keep up with car bodies creeping down the line. On the Saturn "skillet" line, workers ride along on a moving wooden conveyor belt as they do their jobs, which enables them to concentrate on their work. Other progressive steps are the use of water-borne paint (rather than oil-based), which reduces pollution, and an aluminum-casting method called the lost-foam process, which produces better-quality engine components with less machining.
The product contains several innovative features as well, including 54 patented inventions. Some are subtle: electronic controls for the automatic transmission that allow smoother shifting. Others are more fundamental: the body of a Saturn is built atop a very rigid space frame, which gives structural integrity and protection for passengers. The space frame is not unique to Saturn, but it supports a special feature: all the vertical body panels (doors, fenders, quarter panels) attached to it are made of plastic polymer, which doesn't rust and resists low-velocity denting. The horizontal panels are still made of steel.