The Story of Stuff - Annie Leonard [83]
Michael Dell once famously said that “inventory has the shelf life of lettuce.”12 His company has been an industry leader in reducing inventory time. Dell computers aren’t made en masse and stored as inventory until they are sold, as in the old distribution model. With complex computer tracking systems, any purchase or order from a customer is communicated back to the factory where the components are waiting. The specific kind, color, and style of computer that’s desired is assembled and shipped; production is now based on individual demand. (This model is often called just-in-time, or JIT, in business lingo.)13
The attempts to reduce superfluous production through more surgical, “small batch” production, “niche marketing,” and associated distribution all sound good, and from a business perspective they are, and even from an environmental perspective they might be, but the system is terrible for the workers. The combination of constantly changing styles plus consumers’ expectation of immediate gratification adds to the already sharp pressure on workers. Under these circumstances, a rising share of the workforce can pretty much forget any hope of safe, steady, sustainable work and instead end up in short-term or part-time contracts, or “casualized,” as political economists term it. This means reduced or completely eliminated benefits, lower wages, and less job security overall.14
The toy industry is among the worst examples. Most toys are sold during the Christmas season. Every retailer wants to stock plenty of whatever the hot toy is, but each year’s hot toy isn’t identified until just before Christmas. Manufacturers can’t keep workers occupied steadily throughout the year preparing for the Christmas season: they have to wait until the hot toy is declared. Workers in toy factories end up working grueling long hours in the weeks before Christmas—and with this kind of time crunch all kinds of corners are cut in terms of factory conditions and workers’ ages. There is built-in motivation for the workers not to complain since they don’t want to be among the one-half to two-thirds of the workforce that gets cut in the offseason.15
Lean doesn’t have to be mean, O’Rourke says. There could be a “green lean” instead of a “mean lean” system. In the same way that Toyota workers were empowered to pull the stop cord on their assembly lines, we could have an entirely transparent system of supply chains in which all the stakeholders are encouraged to identify flaws throughout the system and halt production until that problem has been taken care of. The stakeholders include not just workers but members of communities who live near factories. Under such a model, if they saw stinky brown gunk flowing into their fresh-water source, they could “pull the cord.” The stakeholders also include consumers who, if they found out that a product contained toxic ingredients, could cry foul and give their feedback. And until the problem had been dealt with, the supply chain for that product would come to a screeching halt (which would provide incentives for brand-name companies to respond quickly). “Imagine a system in which firms would be pressured to produce goods not as cheaply as possible, but in ways that optimize labor, social and environmental benefits,” O’Rourke says.16
That vision led him to take a sabbatical from his tenured Berkeley professorship to focus on realizing a long-term dream. For years, as O’Rourke visited factories and analyzed health and safety data on consumer products, he wondered what kind of information, delivered at what point in a purchase decision, could change a consumer’s action. He explored ways to deliver this information to