Even more important than these managerial prescriptions was the rapid introduction of “lean production” in the United States during the 1980s. Termed “management-by-stress” by critics Parker and Slaughter, this characterization captured the way in which these new production norms reduced inputs while increasing output. This import from Japan combined teamworking, continuous improvement, speedups, just-in-time delivery, multitasking, extensive outsourcing, “reengineering,” and Total Quality Management (TQM) to produce a constant tightening of the production system. It was not a replacement for mass production or Taylorism, as many of its exponents argued at the time, but a means of removing barriers to faster production with fewer workers.40 The introduction of lean norms in the United States was led by Japanese firms adept at it. Between 1979 and 1989 Japanese auto companies opened eleven “lean” assembly plants in the United States, only two with a union workforce, while the US Big Three closed nine unionized assembly plants. With the UAW failing to organize these new plants, by the end of the 1980s 39 percent of the industry was nonunion. In the parts sector of the industry non-union facilities proliferated as outsourcing increased, bringing the nonunion workforce to 76 percent of that sector.41
The new competition from Japanese firms producing in the United States forced the US automobile companies to introduce lean methods as rapidly as possible.This typically involved the carrot of employee participation or labor-management cooperation, schemes that were rapidly embraced by most union leaders. Although originated in 1982, it was, once again, in 1984 that General Motors negotiated its fully elaborated “Jointness” program, giving the union representation on a complex of committees meant to consult, though not bargain, on production problems and plans.42 The following year, NUMMI, the GM-Toyota joint venture, was opened in California with the entire range of lean production procedures and record-breaking speeds of production.43 From their incubation in auto, lean norms, including TQM and other “quality” programs, “reengineering,” teamworking, and the extensive outsourcing associated with lean production, spread across manufacturing in the 1980s. Estimates of the extent of lean methods vary from at least one-quarter of all US firms to 80 percent of industrial firms having some version of these by the early 1990s.44
Lean methods would spread beyond manufacturing in the 1990s. In 1993, for example, lean hit the telecommunications industry at US West in the form of reengineering, reorganization, and flexibility. In the same year, AT&T adopted its “Workplace of the Future” program of labor-management cooperation and lean reorganization.45 Greenbaum’s study of office work found that by the early 1990s, TQM, “broadbanding,” work reorganization, “reengineering,” and flexibility were invading office work.46 In the 1990s they had spread even to the nation’s healthcare industry. As Kumar wrote about US hospitals, “Over the years, they have adapted Lean Manufacturing, Six Sigma and supply chain strategies in order to become more efficient.”47
Did lean production, enabled by HRM, TQM, and employee involvement, aid the sustainability of the 1980s expansion? I would argue that it did. Smith’s review of the literature on the effectiveness of lean methods shows that most studies judge it more effective than older production methods or other strategies, such as downsizing, in terms of productivity.48 While overall productivity growth during the 1980s was not impressive, in manufacturing, where lean production was now common, it was. There, productivity rose by 37 percent or 4.6 percent a year from 1982 to 1989, twice the average rate for the 1960s and 1970s. In the automobile industry, incubator of lean production, it rose by 47.4 percent from 1980 through 1988, an average of 5.3 percent a year.49
Smith’s review of the literature also concludes that “the most significant contemporary attempts to legitimate the contemporary social order all invoke the lean production model” (emphasis in original).50 In other words, not only is the cluster of new techniques associated with lean production more successful in terms of productivity measures, but it also plays an ideological role in legitimating the competitive arguments put forth by management. It thus seems clear that working under lean conditions, driven by new management tactics, and, given the reality of plant closures, fearful of job loss, US workers in manufacturing not only involuntarily initiated the expansion that began in 1982 after the collapse of union activity but sustained it through the 1980s under a regime of work intensification and a continuing fall in real wages.
There was, to be sure, some resistance to all of this. High-profile strikes in the 1980s at Hormel in Minnesota, Watsonville Canning, International Paper, and the shipyards at Jay, Maine; the successful mobilization strategy at NYNEX in the Northeast in 1989; and the massive civil disobedience in the UMWA strike against Pittston, also in 1989, all signaled that the labor movement was not quite dead yet.51 In some unions, notably the New Directions Movement in the UAW and the Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU) in the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT), rank-and-file reform movements fought consistently against the increasingly cooperative attitudes of the leadership toward new management methods.52
Nevertheless, the level of resistance and even of conventional strikes in the 1980s remained low. Aside from the exhaustion of the upsurge discussed above and the obvious fear of job loss that prevailed in many restructuring or shrinking industries after the 1980–82 recession, two other economic factors allowed for a low level of resistance from the ranks. The first was the relatively low level of inflation that followed the recession. The Consumer Price Index would fall from a high of 13.3 percent for 1979 to 3.8 percent in 1982 and then to 1.1 percent in 1986, rising again to 4.6 percent at the end of the decade.53 While this was high enough to wipe out real gains in wages, it was far below the rising levels of the 1970s. Second, compensating for the loss of real buying power was what Shaikh calls “the extraordinary fall in the interest rate,” which, among other things, allowed working-class families to continue consuming through the accumulation of household debt.54 This relative lack of grassroots resistance also allowed most union leaders to accommodate to labor- management cooperation and subsequent implementation of lean production norms. In the face of continually falling union density in all but a few industries, the survival “strategy” of the leaders of most large unions in this period and beyond was based on three practices: bargaining concessions not only on wages but on benefits and working conditions as well; various forms of labor-management cooperation or “partnership” usually associated with lean production methods; and union mergers to bolster falling membership figures.55 The first two represented accommodation to capital’s new management strategies and practices, while the latter tended to reduce the urgency of new organizing for many unions.
Nevertheless, new organizing became a major issue in the 1990s as several unions turned seriously to new organizing techniques. As a result, significant leadership changes would take place in the AFL-CIO, as Service Employees International Union (SEIU) president John Sweeney beat old-guard standard-bearer Lane Kirkland and TDU-backed Ron Carey became president of the Teamsters, leading to one of the most important anti-lean strikes of that decade at UPS in 1997. Grassroots militancy in the face of drastic lean methods would explode once again on the prairies of the Midwest, this time at A. E. Staley in Decatur, Illinois.56 Yet the basic practices of labor-management cooperation adopted by most business union leaders in the 1980s would continue into the 1990s.
With resistance low, productivity gains would increase somewhat, in some recovery years very rapidly, real wages would continue to fall until a brief reprieve in the late 1990s, and increases in the exploitation of labor would remain a central factor in the expansion of the 1990s, as Mohun’s figures on the rate of surplus value cited earlier indicate. In that decade and later, financial and overseas profits would play a growing role in holding up profits as the epicenter of capitalist investment moved from West to East, above all to China, until the drop in the mass of profits that began in late 2006.57
To summarize the analysis, the collapse of union resistance beginning in 1979, intensified by the recession