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A landmark labor-management experiment · 1984–2010
The same workers, the same union — a turnaround.
NUMMI was a 1984 joint venture between Toyota and GM in Fremont, California, that reopened GM's worst-performing plant with most of the same workers and the same UAW local — and made it one of the best, using the Toyota Production System built on a genuine labor-management partnership.
Lean production + labor partnership
Workers were organized into problem-solving teams with real authority — including the power to stop the line to fix a defect — and the union was a partner in the system rather than its adversary.
The same workforce GM had written off produced top-quality cars — proof that the problem is usually the system and the relationship, not the people.
NUMMI's lesson outlived the plant (which closed in 2010): trust and team-based problem-solving can revive what conflict could not.
Source: NUMMI history; MIT International Motor Vehicle Program
The framework they used
Interest-Based Problem Solving (IBPS)