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Re-engineering, lean and agile production, Total Quality Management (TQM), team concept, flexibility. These are the buzzwords of late 20 th Century capitalism and they are having a profound impact on the lives of working people around the world. These are practices that over the last decade have become entrenched in large-scale manufacturing. While the auto industry was the first to pioneer and perfect many of the concepts associated with lean production, they have spread to other industries. Public sector workers know first hand the struggle to resist these and other characteristics of lean. In brief, lean production involves removing the "rigidities" that are associated with tradition Forest-style production.
Lean production is an assembly-line manufacturing methodology developed originally for Toyota and the manufacture of automobiles. It is also known as the Toyota Production System. The goal of lean production is described as to get the right things to the right place at the right time, the first time, while minimizing waste and being open to change. Rather than be locked in to producing large amounts of one style of product over long periods of time, companies find it more profitable if they can operate in a more flexible manner. This flexibility involves keeping less inventory on hand, purchasing supplies only when needed and thereby reducing overhead. Another aspect of lower inventory is just-in-time delivery, which strives to fill smaller and specialized orders on what can be an irregular basis.
Lean production can involve contracting out aspects of the production process, rather than covering them in house under the same bargaining unit. In conjunction with contracting out comes the casualisation of the firms' own staff - hiring on a casual, part-time, or on call basis, matching staffing with production on an as-needed basis. This can result in successive periods of over and under-work. The team concept and TQM or continuous improvement facilitate the intensification of work and the downsizing the number of employees as the remaining workers takes on more and more work. To facilitate the implementation of lean, companies either have to operate non-union, or to force wide-reaching concessions from unions in bargaining. Both options have proved successful.
In Michigan, only 25 % of the automobile part manufacturers that supply the Big Three run union shops. In New Brunswick, an Irving paper mill successfully negotiated an eight-year contract with CEP that allows for unlimited contracting-out and complete in-plant flexibility. These defeats for the labor movement are merely two examples upon which countless more instances could be added. Anyone grounded in reality has to recognize that the lean paradigm is deeply entrenched in the manufacturing sector and spreading.
And it is imperative to recognize that the lean paradigm must grow. For lean manufacturing to succeed, it is necessary that every sector connected to manufacturing be leaned and flexible or enhanced profitability will not be fully realized. Transportation is the most obvious relevant example. The lean firm produces and delivers just-in-time and therefore maintains minimal inventories. As a result it depends on transportation to an unprecedented degree. This dependence takes two forms.
First, strikes and other forms of service disruption have a profound negative impact on lean production. Inventories are quickly depleted, just-in-deliveries are no longer just-in-time and the entire manufacturing matrix is thrown off line. This phenomenon was evident in the recent UPS strike in the United States. Business customers quickly applied pressured upon UPS as their inventories and deliveries dried up. Within a week, financial analysts were predicting catastrophic consequences even if the strike only lasted for a matter of weeks.
This kind of pressure on UPS was much more significant than the much-commented upon public support for the Teamsters. The second aspect of the new dependence on transportation is more complex. It involves re-aligning the transportation sector to better complement lean production. When firms produced large batches of standardized products over long periods of time and delivered to a few firms with large capacities for inventory, there was flexibility in the transportation sector. Standardized work schedules, set routines, and long-term job security were all possible within this production paradigm. Truck drivers, rail workers, and particularly long shore workers were able to maintain their relative privileges won through bitter and militant struggles earlier in the century without facing serious opposition from capital.
However, as lean expands and entrenches itself, it is increasingly finding the old agreements in transportation unworkable. Regularized work schedules, deeply rooted union control over hiring, and high pay are beginning to increasingly appear as unacceptable rigidities within the system. If goods are produced somewhat irregularly, in smaller batches, on an as needed, just-in-time basis then the transportation needed for these goods must be similarly organized if it is to be efficient and cost-effective. In short, flexible production requires flexible delivery. If transportation workers are not hired on call, on short notice, as needed, then there is a tendency to have a surplus of labor at some times and a shortage of labor at others.
In sectors as different as auto and airline, electronics and rail, aerospace and fish processing, there is a common drive to what is called lean production. And in workplaces as diverse as plants, offices, rail yards, mines and hotels the workers feel the pressure and stress of a production system whose logic is quicker, cheaper and faster. Companies have gone beyond the rhetoric of partnership. They are more aggressive in pushing their workplace agenda.
They are more conscious of the changes they are pursuing. And companies are more confident in their ability to dramatically change production and the way we work. The study conducted on the lean production reported two dramatic conclusions. The first was that the best Japanese companies could produce with "half the amount" required by North American or European producers. They produce a product with considerably less of everything - people, material, resources, space, etc. - than anyone else.
And second, they did so primarily through the effective management of production and human resources. On this basis, MIT argued that a new production system called lean production was changing manufacturing on a worldwide basis. The claims in auto are now being extended to other sectors of the economy. Lean production emerged as management's model for changing workplaces and work practices. Traditional workplaces are "robust, " relying on buffers of all kinds - inventory, space, large rework areas, banks between operations, and extra workers. The objectives of lean production aim to strip away these buffers and reduce costs and involve workers in the efforts to do so.
Lean production's twin objectives are to reduce production time (lead time) and labor costs. In the end that means taking labor out of production and time out of labor. The differences between lean companies and other companies are not found in developments such as teams, suggestion programs, small group improvement activities, multi skilling or the like. The biggest differences are found in practices such as the massive outsourcing (contracting out) of parts and final assembly.
The outsourcing is done with low wages, insecure employment and fully using production capacity. Other differences are in technical developments such as the ease of making products (simple designs, fewer parts, quick assemblies). Most important, in terms of the labor process, is work intensification - tight work cycles, long hours, regimented work practices and significant managerial flexibility to use labor as it sees fit. It is here that lean production ends up.
Lean production gets applied to workplaces through programs of quality management, waste elimination and continuous improvement. Whether it is TQM (Total Quality Management), Excellence! , CIP (Continuous Improvement Process), Synchronous Manufacturing, TPM (Total Production Maintenance) or whatever; whether it is in the railway, auto, airlines, fishing or other sectors; whether it is production workers, skilled trades, technical, service or office workers, the objective is to get lean production. Quality Management means more than designing and producing the highest quality product or service. It has become a catch-all term for all the cost-cutting and intensification that goes with lean production. Quality ends up focusing on the cost of quality (can we do it without inspectors? ). 'Building quality in' gets workers to treat each other as suppliers and customers rather than as co-workers; and 'quality consciousness' ends up in new absentee programs and significant attendance demands. Waste gets defined to mean anything which is not absolutely essential to production.
The idea is to get to the lowest level of all inputs - equipment, material and workers. Company activities are divided into two major types, those which add value and those which don't. Value added activities are those which directly change a product or service into its finished form; everything else is non-value added. All costs associated with non-value added functions are waste and are to be eliminated, whether it is buffers between operations, slack time, waiting time, walking space at workstations or more generally indirect labor such as the skilled trades.
Much of the waste reduction effort involves a detailed look at jobs, work processes and work areas to rid them of non-value added operations and to achieve cost-cutting, job reductions and a tighter work effort. The more sophisticated companies launch a two-stage attack on non-value added activities. Those activities that can be immediately eliminated and those that currently are necessary but can be eliminated if the production process is changed. Continuous Improvement eliminates waste by changing the methods of production. Continuous improvement requires the personal involvement of workers.
At issue is not only what we do, but what we know. Continuous improvement relies on workers' contributions through schemes such as suggestion programs or small group activities geared to problem solving. The goal is to get workers to support cost-cutting, to accept reducing jobs and to participate along with management in changing work processes and practices. Under lean production even the ground rules of employee involvement have shifted.
In earlier programs there was a more subtle, even more open approach where it was recognized that, at least initially, workers would try to improve their working environment and working conditions. Workers are under stress from fast paced, intense, repetitive work while at the same time preferred, off-line jobs are eliminated and time is squeezed at every workstation. The attack on waste, the aim of low-cost quality and continuous improvements, means more and more control over workers' time and activities, a faster workplace, longer and more irregular hours. As well, jobs are more standardized and the workplace is more regimented.
In many workplaces management is unilaterally driving the changes. Gone are the collaborative appeals to workers. There is little attempt to gain union participation. Instead, swat teams parachute into the workplace or work area and leave with cost reductions whether or not these reductions are reasonable or can be maintained in the long term. Workers end up with changed jobs and a reorganized workplace. In some workplaces local unions are being asked to participate in a process of change.
Usually a supposedly neutral consultant comes in and management says "there is no agenda, " only the "need to change." Before long there are orientation and training sessions, steering committees and design teams, special project groups or task forces and all headed toward lean production. Programs are often designed before the union is approached. Unions are brought in to tinker with the details. Take for example the shift from Push to Pull production. Moving from batch production to flow production or one-at-a-time production is a central element of lean or "synchronous" production. The move from Push to Pull seems like a common sense approach to production.
Why produce more than what is immediately needed by the next process? Why have inventory as a buffer in the system? But to maintain the continuous flow required by one-at-a-time production requires that the time for each job has to be standardized. Set times for each job often eliminates personal time. There is no time to take a breath. The move from Push to Pull means idle time quickly becomes a target of the change and must be eliminated for the system to work.
What appears as a shift in the technical system (Push to Pull) ends up changing the social relations of production in this case personal time for workers and flexibility that benefits workers. A similar point can be made about eliminating buffers. The idea that production can occur without problems is make-believe. That production lines or offices can operate without hitches and hiccups, or be defect-free, is fantasy. It is simply an impossible goal. In workplaces something is always going wrong and there are always problems to contend with.
If this is the case, then how does an operation function without buffers? It doesn't. These issues confront unions and labor movements around the world. There are national debates within unions and different unions argue in favor of different responses. Some argue in support of collaboration in the hopes of forging a coalition with business, others have grudgingly gone along in the face of what is seen as inevitable. Some have just decided to get involved.
Others have resisted involvement while workplaces have been reorganized just the same. Since lean production operates in different ways it has to be addressed in different ways - from the day to day experience of the job to the logic of competitiveness. Lean production intends to redefine a fair day's labor. In management's view there is too much slack in the system and too much idle time in each of our jobs.
Within each work cycle management wants to change how much time we work and to remove the slack time. The goal is to get as close as possible to sixty seconds of work in every minute. It is an unreasonable goal. There is a fine line between vision and illusion. Lean production helps management cross the line.
There needs to be a brake on unreasonable demands and clear limits to the intensity of work. Workers shouldn't have to say, as they do in lean production, that they can't survive to retirement. Instead, the workplace should be characterized by a comfortable work pace - one that is sustainable. This requires three elements: recognition that a comfortable pace involves discretionary time and the possibility for workers to vary the job and the pace; adequate relief staff; regulated (negotiated) process for changing job content and job times. Although there is renewed attention to workplace learning, company controlled training emphasizes programs aimed at changing attitudes and providing skills which facilitate work reorganization (communication skills, working in teams, continuous improvement). Little is being provided in terms of basic skills, opportunities for academic upgrading, technical training or in the areas of critical thinking and personal development.
Those are the elements of good training. In the drive to lean, jobs are being redesigned. For those who claim a 'win-win's intuition, this means jobs which are enriched and enlarged and workers who have authority and responsibility. In reality, jobs are made tighter and more intense and workers become 'multi tasked', more flexible and are assigned more indirect duties. Developing good job design means: Jobs which are constructed on the basis of deepening skill and expanding options rather than the reverse and workplaces where injured workers are accommodated without additional pressure on co-workers. Overall, lean production has put a lot of additional pressures on workers, and com promissory solutions have not been found yet as for how to improve the situation.
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