Re-engineering, lean and agile production, Total Quality Management (TQM), team concept, flexibility. These are the buzzwords of late 20th 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. At the time of this writing, members of the Pulp, Paper, and Woodworkers of Canada (PPWC) and the Communications, Energy, and Paperworkers (CEP) are on strike against three mills owned by Fletcher Challenge Canada (FCC). FCC is demanding that these workers gut their collective agreements to allow for the implementation of the team concept through the elimination of job demarcations, unlimited contracting out, and other concessions. Public sector workers know first hand the struggle to resist these and other characteristics of lean. The Harris government in Ontario is fully committed to applying the lean paradigm to the public service, and bringing government operations in line with business and the private sector. Many of the issues currently being negotiated between Canada Post and CUPW centre around work intensification and lean production.
In brief, lean production involves removing the "rigidities" that are associated with tradition Fordist-style production. 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 take 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 labour 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 longshore 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 labour at some times and a shortage of labour at others. This problem can only be overcome by rationalizing the transportation sector, the so-called "Liverpool solution;" what the dockers call casualisation.
This is the broader context behind the Liverpool dispute. As longshore workers everywhere recognize, Liverpool is not an isolated phenomenon. Longshore workers are facing what they have identified as a coordinated, concerted, and international attack by shipping companies against their traditional union rights. Only when this context is understood does the significance of Liverpool crystallize. Why else would shipping companies tolerate millions of dollars in losses as a result of secondary industrial action against their firms taken in solidarity with Liverpool dockers in their struggle against Mersey Docks and Harbour Company (MDHC)? Why would the MDHC continue to sustain such heavy losses over two years against which the savings from employing scab labour must appear minuscule?
The reason is that Liverpool is setting the stage for a monumental struggle to implement lean in the shipping industry that is just beginning to be unleashed. If the Liverpool docker can be broken, shipping companies will be confident that any other port can be taken on. They will know the exact extent which they may have to take their struggle and they will know that victory is possible. If the MDHC suffers a defeat in Liverpool, the agenda of all shipping companies will start to unravel. The Liverpool dockers' example will be in the mind and on the tongue of every longshore worker who is told that there is no alternative to concessions and defeat.
Perhaps more importantly, a Liverpool victory will demonstrate how victory elsewhere can be achieved. It will show that the enormous odds staked against the dockers were overcome by rank and file initiative that developed a means of coordinating international action. This coordination draws a link between the principle of standing up for one another regardless of nationality with the need to resist the same lean agenda on a local level. If this solidarity produces tangible results in Liverpool, there will be a basis for its replication, and shipping companies would come under tremendous pressure to make concessions, under the threat of secondary industrial action.
Such a scenario could throw the whole lean agenda into question. In addition to resisting the extension of lean production and re-engineering, the successful struggles of transportation workers could create an organizing model for manufacturing workers that is internationalist and rank and file led. The example of Liverpool demonstrates that it is possible to fight the lean agenda from below, even as labour's official leaders accommodate themselves to capital's desire to assert of complete control over the labour process. It is important that the lessons of Liverpool be embraced by those working in a similar direction, in initiatives like the trilateral Coalition for Justice in the Maquiladoras, for instance.
With these objectives in mind, their are two tasks that face labour and social justice activists in regards to Liverpool. First, we must ensure that we do everything in our power to deliver a victory to the dockers. In Canada, that means above all directing our attention to Canadian Pacific subsidiaries CanMar and CAST, and applying maximum pressure to force them from the Port of Liverpool. At the same time, the implications of the outcome of the Liverpool struggle need to be disseminated widely within the labour movement, beyond transportation, to all victims of lean, be they in manufacturing, the service sector, or the public service. By building on and emulating the example of Liverpool, it is conceivable that we could witness a new phase of international class struggle and ensure that the dockers' campaign becomes a living legacy, rather than simply a closed chapter in the history of the working class.
