The international motor vehicle program's lean production benchmark: A critique

Monthly Review

Volumn 50, Issue 8, 1999, Pages 19-27

  Rinehart, James ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF WESTERN ONTARIO   (Canada)

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EID: 0742332248     PISSN: 00270520     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.14452/MR-050-08-1999-01_3     Document Type: Article

References (10)

1. We found nothing in the lean production work process that necessitated teams. They were not technically required but a product of social engineering. Nearly all operations in the plant could be done without a team. See J. Rinehart, C. Huxley, and D. Robertson, Just Another Car Factory: Lean Production and its Discontents (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997).
2. Paul Adler, a proponent of lean production, admits that neither individual workers nor work teams have much autonomy under lean production. However, he argues that worker autonomy is obsolete. Due to interdependence of workers arising from the "deepening" social and technical division of labor, the issue now is the "much more modest question of participation." (See Adler's article in Perspectives on Work, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 61-65.) Adler's logic is similar to that of economists who, with each increase in the unemployment rate, raise what they consider to be the natural and, hence, acceptable level of joblessness.
3. Academics associated with IMVP invariably refer to workers in lean plants as multiskilled, as if such repetition will make it so.
4. The existence of such conflicts speaks volumes about the appropriateness of calling lean production post-Fordist.
5. An example of a reduction of non-value-added labor is the elimination of the steps an assembler takes to pick up a bumper that is to be attached to a car. The attachment adds value but the steps do not.
6. See David Roberston, et al., "The CAW Working Conditions Study: Benchmarking Auto Assembly Plants," (CAW-Canada, North York, Ontario, 1996).
7. See Wayne Lewchuk and David Robertson, "Working Conditions Under Lean Production: A Worker-based Benchmarking Study," Asia Pacific Business Review, Summer 1996.
8. This description of Toyota is from Mitsuo Ishida's article in After Lean Production.
9. That efficiencies can be realized in the absence of even the most genuinely progressive human resource practices is no mystery. Most workers take pride in doing a good job and are concerned about making quality products. Moreover, there are functional alternatives to commitment, alternatives that produce behaviors similar to those exhibited by committed workers. These compliant behaviors arise from the more coercive sources of "motivation," such as high unemployment, higher underemployment, job insecurity, etc.
10. NUMMI chronicler and enthusiast Paul Adler refers to NUMMI workers as motivated by "a mature sense of realism" and an understanding that they must earn their money "in the old-fashioned way." This is another way of saying that NUMMI workers are terribly insecure.