The end of lean production and what lies ahead for labor: The US experience

The three-and-a-half decades of productivity growth in manufacturing in the United States came to an end with the recession of 2008–2010. This signaled the exhaustion of the lean production methods and related technology that has driven growth since its introduction in manufacturing in the 1980s and its subsequent spread to services. In the framework of Marx’s conception of turnover time, this article will examine the causes of lost productivity, impact on work and inventory, and the means capital has employed to redress lost productivity and profits, the latter found largely in the example of Amazon. Capital has attempted to supplement or replace lean methods with a new generation of digital technology to track and intensify labor in the workplace, on the one hand, and shifted from single-sourced supplies and just-in-time delivery to a reorganization of the movement of goods and value within and between points of production and circulation to reduce turnover time, on the other hand. This involves the transformation of the warehouse from a place of storage to one of movement, multiple sourcing of inputs, the increase in ‘nodes’ and vehicles in the transportation system, the regionalization of movement, and digital technology to coordinate this motion within and between facilities. Businesses have increasingly replaced just-in-time and other lean methods with maximized inventory velocity in emulation of Amazon’s system of rapidly moving inventory. Despite the application of algorithms to maximize inventory velocity throughout the system, human labor continues to punctuate the entire movement of goods and value and possesses positional power to disrupt this motion and impact turnover time. There is renewed potential for worker organization in the ‘positional power’ offered by the emerging changes in production and circulation.