Lean production is a daily reality for tens, perhaps hundreds, of millions of workers around the globe. Originally known as the Toyota Production System, lean management spread from Japan in the 1980s and had diffused across the global auto industry by the end of the 2000s.¹ Today, lean management has been adopted in some form by nearly every manufacturing concern in North America and Western Europe, and it is increasingly spreading to other sectors, from health care to civil service to education.²

The rise of lean management has taken place within a broader transformation of Western capitalism since the 1970s, including internationalization, deindustrialization, and financialization, alongside the rising hegemony of the neoliberal political project. A core factor driving this transformation has been class struggle: in response to declining profit rates, American capital took the lead in the Western world, launching a multipronged assault on labor via anti-unionism, whipsawing, concession bargaining, outsourcing, internationalization, and marketization.³ The outcomes are by now well-known: wage stagnation, rising inequality, increasing labor market insecurity, and widespread work intensification.

Many on the Left see lean management as an inherently capitalist management system that necessarily increases management control, undermines unions, and is the primary cause of work intensification. This view has been articulated in this journal by distinguished labor activist-scholars Mike Parker and Kim Moody, who champion the view from the radical wing of the labor movement.⁴ The theoretical foundation of this position is the neo-Marxist theory of management, which holds, in the words of Michael Yates, that “the essence of capitalist management is control: control over the labor process and therefore control over the worker.”⁵