Conditions for Cooperative Relations of Production
Contextual Quote
"The solution that Toyota developed was to institute a sort of ‘social relations bubble’ – to simply protect workers from any negative consequences arising from their self-organized improvements to the production processes, regardless of how costly doing so may appear. They instituted a long standing ‘no layoffs’ guarantee to their production workers, which was observed by the company for many years. I think of this guarantee as the ‘golden rule’ of cooperative relations of production, because it means that work teams can freely improve their processes without concern for any negative implications of doing so. Fundamentally, without this guarantee, it is virtually impossible to cultivate cooperative labor conditions. This guarantee, therefore, is essential to the success of self-organized production, because, in the words of management expert Paul Adler, “90% of people, if you give them a chance to work smarter and improve their jobs, and if they find that by doing that they have created free time for themselves, will spontaneously look for new things to do. I’ve got hundreds of examples [my emphasis].”
This was also Toyota’s conclusion: under the appropriate regime of social relations, people innately enjoy success in challenging situations, especially in the context of group dynamics and teamwork. They found that, using algedonics and the Kanban system, along with the no-layoffs policy, their work teams were extremely innovative at redesigning production processes over and over, in order to keep production going under ever higher standards of precision. This could never have been achieved under traditional means of factory management, which instrumentalizes labor to do a particular and predefined job."
- Dónal Ó Coisdealbha [1]
Discussion
Dónal Ó Coisdealbha:
"Logically however, the attitude of the worker to process improvements (and therefore to using algedonics) should be at best ambiguous and at worst hostile. When a production process is improved, it creates space for the company to realize the efficiency gain as profit by firing any workers who are now surplus to requirements. Under a Fordist and Taylorist production management system, industrial engineers would recommend improvements to production processes in reports to management based on exactly this kind of calculated cost saving. Doing so in the context of the TPS would, however, very clearly damage the motivation of the workers to self-organize further improvements to the production process, as doing so endangers their future employment. The difference in TPS, therefore, is that in contrast to the former case, management now actually needs the workers’ creativity.
The solution that Toyota developed was to institute a sort of ‘social relations bubble’ – to simply protect workers from any negative consequences arising from their self-organized improvements to the production processes, regardless of how costly doing so may appear. They instituted a long standing ‘no layoffs’ guarantee to their production workers, which was observed by the company for many years.4 I think of this guarantee as the ‘golden rule’ of cooperative relations of production, because it means that work teams can freely improve their processes without concern for any negative implications of doing so. Fundamentally, without this guarantee, it is virtually impossible to cultivate cooperative labor conditions. This guarantee, therefore, is essential to the success of self-organized production, because, in the words of management expert Paul Adler, “90% of people, if you give them a chance to work smarter and improve their jobs, and if they find that by doing that they have created free time for themselves, will spontaneously look for new things to do. I’ve got hundreds of examples [my emphasis].”
This was also Toyota’s conclusion: under the appropriate regime of social relations, people innately enjoy success in challenging situations, especially in the context of group dynamics and teamwork. They found that, using algedonics and the Kanban system, along with the no-layoffs policy, their work teams were extremely innovative at redesigning production processes over and over, in order to keep production going under ever higher standards of precision. This could never have been achieved under traditional means of factory management, which instrumentalizes labor to do a particular and predefined job.
Another important optimization parameter within the framework of ‘cooperative relations of production’ was found to be compensation for labor, where greater equality produces a superior implementation of the system. I have seen in my own workplace why equality of income acts as an optimization parameter in this kind of system. Paying people unequally to work on different lines (or, what is the same thing, compensating people with different levels of education and training unequally), systematically makes some tasks attractive relative to others. This introduces a negative incentive into the self-organized work scheduling system, by creating competition for places on certain lines and a scarcity of workers on others. With equal pay, it is relatively easy for workers to share out relatively more and less onerous production roles through cooperation. Cooperative production relations demand equality of payment–payment as participation in teamwork–which in turn reinforces cooperative production relations.
With the protection from layoffs in effect, it is equally in the interest of all workers to figure out how to reduce the existing amount of unpleasant work by finding efficiencies in the tasks that everyone is obliged to do but no one wants to do. If a bonus system is being used instead for workers who are doing unpleasant jobs, it becomes in the interest of the workers to actually maintain the amount of unpleasant work as well as to compete for these better paid roles. Under the TPS, workers are interested in upskilling through training and education not because it increases their individual salary but because it guarantees them the ability to simply switch to other production lines when they raise the process efficiency of their current line, thus removing all apprehensions that would normally exist about full participation in doing so. This is why to be “multi-skilled to work across different manufacturing processes” became “a requirement in Toyota plants.” Cooperative relations of production require highly cross-skilled labor, again, the opposite to instrumentalized labor (that which is purchased for a wage to do a specific job).
The experience of the New United Motor Manufacturing Incorporated (NUMMI) factory in Fremont, California is the textbook example of the realization of these policies. Originally owned by GM, its management was then taken over by Toyota in 1984 as part of a joint ownership agreement. It was also a factory with a militant, effective trade union representing its workers, and it was precisely under these conditions that the TPS achieved one of its most pure implementations. The no-layoff policy meant that during an economic downturn in the late 80s, there were at one point 264 more production workers than needed at the plant.7 Toyota maintained this policy regardless, understanding its fundamental importance to the TPS’ underlying social relations of production.
Speaking about pay at the NUMMI plant, one worker commented that “[t]here used to be 80 hourly worker classifications with varying pay rates under the old system. This caused workers to grumble over why one worker got 5 cents an hour more than someone else for what looked like equally strenuous work. We don’t have those kinds of arguments any more. And that makes a big difference to our productivity. Furthermore, there were no more seniority, performance, or merit-based bonuses.”8 In optimizing the conditions for cooperative labor to occur, Toyota agreed with the union that “all production workers get the same hourly rate—currently $17.85—regardless of their jobs, except that team leaders get an extra 60 cents.”9 While all individual bonuses were eliminated, the Toyota company in Japan did pay “a large portion of salary in semi-annual bonuses” which were “tied to company performance, not individual performance.”10 In the factory where I work, a more convoluted pay-scale and bonus system ends up also generating highly equal incomes for production line workers, as a logical consequence of management trial-and-erroring their way to optimizing pull production.
What Toyota had learned, quite by accident, was that when you create a protective ‘bubble’ in which cooperative labor relations can be cultivated, away from the normal logic of the capitalist market, this will systematically outperform production carried out by instrumentalized labor in the long run. Cooperative labor will actually improve on the process itself over time, something previously unimagined. This was found to be qualitatively superior in the same sense that free, waged labor was judged to be more effective than slave labor in an earlier phase of capitalist development.
...
Pull production in the circumstances of socialized industry would, I believe, be used just as in modern factories and supply chains, but without the contradicting social relations which hold back its development. The problems of economic organization would be solved through the local regulation of rates of supply, but now under the generalization of conditions best suited to stimulate cooperative relations of production. The levels of labor productivity which are required by the economy as such would not be dictated by profit and competition but rather by information signals given directly by production itself, propagating through supply chains, like sensory nerves in the body. Supply chains would become fully integrated single systems to a much greater extent than today. A single integrated algedonics system in the context of socialized production would mean that any notable events in production anywhere are responded to immediately and incorporated into how the system works, creating a finely tuned machine of mutually interdependent associated producers.
Today factory algedonic systems exist only as their own small islands in the economy, while the vast majority of producers are tiny in scale and separated by relations of private property, and so cannot establish such systems. In a socialized economy, any bakery or repair shop would use algedonics just as a factory work-team does today, to normalize any emergent problems and standardize the most precise cooperative methods of working. What appears under capitalism to any given producer as a huge number of competitor or indifferent firms would be transformed into an inexhaustible source of material assistance and technical knowledge, subordinated to each other’s needs. Meanwhile factory production scheduling, taken to the social level, would mean that, in contrast to a situation like in East Germany where a state builds a wall to prevent its workers from leaving (while keeping many more employed in make-work), the problem of a high turnover of labor, to whatever extent it exists, is tackled just as in modern factories. The turnover rate is simply accounted for in advance algorithmically for the self-organized scheduling system, ensuring that training and education maintains a persistent local skills surplus in each area. This implies that socialism requires not only the generalization of a suitable environment for cooperative labor to flourish, but also a highly skilled population compared to that required by a capitalist economy.
In summary, by looking at how modern industry is organized, we can see that it is precisely those same conditions which are required to overcome the remaining fetters on production today which are also the basic requirements for the establishment of communism: the de-alienation of labor, the self-organization of production processes by the direct producers, and the cybernetic systems which facilitate both."
(https://cosmonautmag.com/2024/08/modern-industry-and-prospects-for-socialism/)