UAW May Vote to Scrap Team Approach at Saturn

United Auto Workers members at General Motors Corp.’s Saturn plant in Tennessee, where pay is falling because of slow sales, could soon scrap the innovative labor teams that are part of the unit’s folksy advertising image.

Saturn is unique within GM because of its extensive use of team-based labor groups, which give workers expanded responsibilities for monitoring quality and costs. Workers in Spring Hill, Tenn., will soon decide on whether to schedule a referendum on changing to a traditional UAW-GM contract.

A change could be a setback for Saturn, which tries to capture sales from Japanese imports by marketing itself as a “different kind of car company.”

It comes amid a slump--January sales fell 20% to 14,621 from the year-earlier period--that has reduced overtime pay as well as bonuses.

The sales decline also threatens Saturn’s independence, as GM makes it share future models with other units.

“People who bought Saturns bought what the company is about, and the labor-management partnership was part of that,” said Mike Bennett, a strong proponent of the team-based approach who is bargaining chairman of UAW Local 1853 at the plant. “GM’s interference with the way we do things down here is really handicapping us.”

Bennett blocked a similar proposal five years ago. Now, he said, there’s a good chance it will pass. Some of the plant’s 6,000 production workers see drawbacks in job assignments, pay and other issues.

Richard Benevides, 48, a seven-year Saturn worker who repairs bumpers, said he’ll vote for a traditional UAW-GM agreement. “We tried the team concept here,” he said. “It doesn’t work.”

Bennett said he didn’t know precisely how a change would affect the plant’s operating methods. One possibility is that workers will be assigned to several separate classifications instead of just one.