Overdrive on the Assembly Line : JUMP START; Japan Comes to the Heartland <i> By David Gelsanliter (Farrar, Straus & Giroux: $19.95; 214 pp.) </i>

In the beginning of “Jump Start,” David Gelsanliter raises a series of questions. Among them: Are the Japanese saving the American auto industry and “restoring our faith in the American worker,” and will American labor be able to organize Japanese plants in the United State?

To find the answers, Gelsanliter looks at the Toyota plant in Georgetown, Ky., the Nissan plant in Smyrna, Tenn., and Honda’s factory in Marysville, Ohio.

Choosing three stories was the author’s first mistake. He correctly focuses on the economic cost, such as tax breaks that small towns accord in luring the Japanese--or any employer. But he gets bogged down in reciting mind-numbing details of the negotiations between local communities and the Japanese companies.

The author, whose background is primarily in newspaper management, obviously is enamored of the Japanese and their system of kaizen (continuous improvement). In Japan, he says, “workers arrive early and stay late.” We learn that American auto workers can only accomplish 80% of what Japanese auto workers, dashing around the plant, can do in the same time.

Gelsanliter clearly thinks all this is good. Well, is it really? He makes no mention of the growing discontent among Japanese workers over the exhausting pace of work and their quality of life. Such absences undermine the book’s authority and credibility.

The author says the success of “Japanese auto makers in the United States will depend on how well they can blend their culture with ours.” Yet this book is too superficial to give the reader a feel for either culture, Japanese or American working class, except in the most stereotypical manner--the Japanese work hard; American workers are lazy. American workers speak only briefly and generally to reinforce the author’s contention that they love working under the Japanese management system.

The book’s central failing, however, is that Gelsanliter does not capture the pulse of any of the three plants he writes about. “Quality circles,” a central component of the vaunted Japanese tema concept in which workers discuss problems, is explained in one sentence. Gelsanliter recognizes the quickening pace on the assembly line but gives short shrift to the extensive evidence of severe injuries and trauma at the Nissan and Honda plants.

So when the author concludes that “another generation is finding better jobs in the auto industry without having to leave home,” he has not made his case and he is simply wrong.