Building Post-Fordism from the Shopfloor Up: Labor’s Constrained Agency and Caterpillar’s Employee Satisfaction Process

Abstract This article investigates a joint union/company program at Caterpillar, Inc—the Employee Satisfaction Process ( esp )—which operated between 1986 and 1991. The esp was an initiative ostensibly designed to upgrade workers’ skills and involve workers in creative decision-making. In practice it served to extract and exploit workers’ considerable shopfloor knowledge in matters of cost savings, production efficiency, shopfloor configuration, and effective worker supervision. It accomplished this chiefly through the work of neoliberal discourse, which enticed its blue-collar workforce to hand over its expertise. We conceptualize the esp as a rent-extraction machine. We situate this program in the context of Caterpillar’s neoliberal renaissance—a process of flexible accumulation and spatial fixing in response to its crisis of overaccumulation in the late 1970s and early 1980s. We show how labor’s agency and expertise were fundamental to Caterpillar’s neoliberalization and that workers acted willingly to undermine their own job security and union bargaining position. We argue that the extractive industry value chain—a subject of much interest in the social sciences—overlooks the heavy machinery manufacturing sector. This study constitutes a first step toward incorporating the equipment production sector into our understanding of extractive industries.