In the spring of 1989, Chrysler and Mitsubishi Motors entered a joint venture to build automobiles in Bloomington-Normal, Illinois. Production and maintenance workers at the joint venture Diamond Star plant approached their jobs with great anticipation. Not only did these jobs offer significantly higher wages than most had made previously, they came with promises of employee empowerment. Now eight years after “lean production” and “employee teams” were introduced, this paper revisits the initial an expectation of workers and through an employee survey assesses how employee attitudes have changed. In brief, we found that worker satisfaction, support for new productive systems and trust in management had fallen dramatically from the initial study. Our findings add to the growing body of work in the automotive industry that strongly contradicts the thesis that lean productive systems necessarily lead to worker satisfaction and empowerment.
UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS URBANA-CHAMPAIGN