The Industrial Relations Perspective on Lean Systems, Workers, and Unions

Abstract

The impact of lean systems on workers and unions was fully intertwined with the overall attention to the rise of lean production as an alternative to Fordist mass production in the late 1980s and 1990s. With “lean” as the name given to the Toyota Production System (TPS) by MIT’s International Motor Vehicle Program in The Machine That Changed the World (Womack, Jones, and Roos 1990), the link to the global automotive industry and specifically Toyota was clear. At that stage of the industry’s globalization, the transfer of TPS outside of Japan to “transplants” in the USA and elsewhere was riveting the attention of industry executives, plant managers, investment analysts, and academics alike. Transfer of TPS/lean in such a highly unionized industry immediately necessitated dealing with issues of worker and union acceptance or rejection of that transfer, particularly given striking institutional differences between Japan and the West.

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