REPRESENTATIONS OF WORK IN TV ADS

The non-alienated workplace

Saturn ad campaigns have targeted this imagery of authenticity. The Saturn ads emphasize the authenticity of the place (Spring Hill, Tennessee) where the car is made; the authenticity of the people who make it; and the authenticity of those who buy it. Saturn emphasizes the authenticity of the production process designed in partnership with workers to replace the automated mass production line. Saturn ads focus on the personal relationship between consumer and producer, as opposed to otherwise impersonal commodity relations in which the producer has long since vanished by the time we meet the commodity.

No other ad campaign in the 1990s has done so much to conceptualize and represent non-alienated work relations as Saturn's. Saturn ads go out of their way to stress that Saturn workers find pleasure in their work because they have been treated as responsible partners in the production process.
Indeed, they are even entrusted with the power to stop the production line if it means getting the cars they make just right.To a certain extent, Saturn's "Rope pull" ad does tell the story of a different kind of shopfloor relationship negotiated between General Motors and the United Auto Workers. The "Rope Pull" ad is narrated by a worker, but it essentially tells the Saturn's corporate version of the story about constructing an auto plant where workers are treated with respect, are invited to participate in improving the production process, and are treated as equals on the shop floor. The Saturn experience is often mobilized as the poster child for management initiatives such as total quality management and team-building.

Other Saturn ads are dedicated to showing how Saturn workers function as an integrated community, a community of others who care not only about the quality of their work, but also for the consumers for whom they are producing. Saturn continually reinforces the idea that they are reintegrating production, consumption and community.

Another ad features a school teacher's letter to Saturn regarding the production of her car. A female voice-over reads the letter against a montage of shots that mix her relationship with students at Wood Acres School with production at the Saturn assembly plant.

"Dear Saturn Team members who are building my car, My name is Judith Reusswig and I'm a third grade teacher. Last week I placed an order for a Saturn SL2. After reading the Time magazine article and seeing them around town, I decided my new car would be a Saturn. I liked the whole idea of what Saturn was about. It is one of those things I try to instill in my kids, so I hope it is true. It reminded me a little bit of a mom and pop operation in the old days where you made a car for this person and this person was happy with the car they got. I just wanted you to know that you were building that Saturn with the blue green exterior and gray interior for me. So you know who I am, I am enclosing my school picture. I'm looking forward to my new car. I'm sure if everything I read is true, I won't be disappointed."

The ad structures a correspondence between the teacher and her students and the workers who comprise the Saturn production team. Each shows care and devotion. She gives her students personalized attention, the same attention Saturn workers give to producing cars. Both produce quality products. Referred to as team members, abstract impersonal labor at Saturn is reconstituted as a community of laborers characterized by organic relations. This historical reference comparing Saturn's production to a "mom and pop operation in the old days when you made a car for this person" is a total fabrication, created to wrap Saturn in the legitimacy of a romantic past. Abstract labor is personalized and so is the abstract consumer. Saturn is no longer a commodity but a personally produced automobile. And the consumer is no longer an abstraction but a warm, honest woman with roots deep in her community. Commodity and market relations disappear in Saturn's narrative. The ad ends with a worker reading her letter, looking at the enclosed photograph, and smiling with the pleasure that he participated in making a quality product for a quality person. In Saturn's story, all the elements of the commodity form (abstract labor, market relations, impersonalism, exchange value, standardization) have been replaced by communalism and personalism. In this context it is useful to reread Karl Marx on the commodity form, because in a ghostly way ads like this ideologically invert, item for item, the relationships that are structured by the commodity form.

The absence of alienated relationships is also a focal point of Walmart advertising. One series of Walmart ads dwell on the folksy efforts to retain a personal relationship with customers. Several ads attempt to show that the firm is dedicated to community life, perhaps because they have received negative press about driving small businesses out of small towns. One Walmart ad features Cindy, who works at Walmart, and is shown via homevideo-styled footage, involved in community affairs and family values whether she is at work or not.

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