The Story of Stuff - Annie Leonard [81]
To look at this stage in the story of our Stuff we need to go way beyond investigating the modes of freight (via land, water, and air) or the routes Stuff takes around the globe, in and out of factories and containers and warehouses. Distribution includes vast information technology systems (Wal-Mart, for example, supposedly has a computer network that rivals the Pentagon’s, in order to keep tabs on the Stuff it moves). It encompasses the immense multinational retailers whose economies of scale are a key ingredient in making modern distribution systems feasible. And all of this activity happens against the backdrop of economic globalization, international trade policies, and international financial institutions, which set the larger context for how Stuff moves around the planet.
The Skinny on Supply Chains
To understand the path our products have taken to reach us, we need to understand their supply chains, which involve far more than merely getting something from point A (where it is made) to point B (where we buy it) but encompasses all the suppliers, component producers, workers, middlemen, financiers, warehouses, loading docks, ships, trains, trucks—basically every stop along the way from natural resource to retail outlet. In today’s globalized economy, a product’s supply chain can cover multiple continents and scores of businesses, each of which is trying to maximize its profit at that link in the chain. To that end, a whole complex science of supply chain management has evolved that fine-tunes every detail, to make and move things as quickly and cheaply as possible.
Probably no one has more knowledge about supply chains than Professor Dara O’Rourke. During the years I was visiting polluting factories and dumps around the world, O’Rourke was investigating garment and shoe factories—sweatshops—in Honduras, Indonesia, Vietnam, and China. He says that while much has changed since the Age of Exploration, even more radical change happened in just the last decade. O’Rourke boils the revolution of the last ten years down to two ideas: lean manufacturing and lean retail.2
O’Rourke points to Toyota as the prototype for lean manufacturing; the company is famous for reconfiguring work stations so that assembly line workers wouldn’t waste an extra second or use one ounce of extraneous energy in reaching for a part they needed. Toyota kept refining their assembly, shaving off seconds at each step along the way, until the process was airtight. An important breakthrough in their model was empowering any worker along the line to pull the “stop cord” if they detected a problem with the product. Immediately the root cause of the problem (faulty machine, sick worker, bad design) would be investigated and fixed; this kind of troubleshooting is way more cost-effective than waiting until an inspector at the tail end of the assembly line finds flaws in the finished products. This innovation is credited for giving workers a greater sense of responsibility and job satisfaction, although it led to some workers accusing one another of “speeding up the line” and negated many of the pro-worker concessions that the labor movement had won in prior generations’ struggles.3
Over the years, lean manufacturing has gotten uglier. Manufacturers analyzed assembly line production ad nauseam to figure out every possible way to cut any expense that didn’t add value to the end product. When that expense is toxic waste created by a particular technology, then its elimination is a good thing. However, when that expense is safety equipment or bathroom breaks for workers—as is often the case—then reworking factory operations to eliminate it is just plain scary.
And this efficiency-über-alles mentality spread beyond the factories. It was applied to the whole of the supply chain. How? Well, here’s the key revelation: most companies from which we buy Stuff are no longer actually making anything