David Robertson

First Published in 1998. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This study of CAMI Automotive, a unionized joint venture between General Motors and Suzuki, is the most comprehensive ever undertaken of a lean production plant. James Rinehart, Christopher Huxley, and David Robertson address a topic that has inspired fierce debate in industrial relations, sociology, labor studies, and human resource management. Heralded as a model of lean production when it opened in 1989, CAMI promised workers something different from traditional plants—a humane environment, empowerment, and cooperative labor-management relations. However, the enthusiasm workers felt during the orientation and early phases of production steadily declined, as did their involvement in participatory activities. Workers came to describe CAMI as "just another car factory." Union challenges and shopfloor resistance to key elements of the lean system grew, capped by a five-week strike in 1992. The authors attribute workers' disillusionment to lean production itself rather than to North American managers' inadequate implementation.

This master politician and self-made man served for half a century, as congressman and later as key New Deal senator from his native South Carolina; as Supreme Court justice; as "assistant president" during the Second World War; as Truman's secretary of state in the early years of the Cold War; and, finally, as governor of South Carolina. He came tantalisingly close to the American presidency and was a key participant in the decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan. In later years he was a seminal figure in the so-called Southern Strategy that brought Richard Nixon to the White House. For his shrewdness and mastery of the art of politics Byrnes earned the sobriquet "sly and able." He was surely both--and one of the key shapers of American politics in this century.