‘A Trojan Horse in Our Midst’

The Saturn automobile factory in Spring Hill, Tennessee was idled during GM’s bankruptcy reorganization in 2009. This chapter examines that Saturn instead contributed to widespread insecurity by facilitating the disorganization of autoworkers, one of the most powerful sectors of the US working class. It sketches the part Saturn played in this process by charting three moments in which distinct scales of working-class identification, alliance and struggle, local, national and international, were made and unmade. Fordist localism initiated a key dimension of monopoly capitalist control in the US beginning in the 1920s. The combined effect of Saturn's labor accord and cultural/ideological project was so great that the president of a Michigan local considered that Saturn had become a Trojan horse in our midst. Saturn thus marked a milestone in the dismantling of labor's power in auto, a process that began with capital flight in the 1970s and continued in the 1980s with labor-management cooperation, lean production, whipsawing and localism.