https://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/

Toyotism

Totyotism (or Toyota-ism) is the term often used, by analogy with Fordism and Taylorism, to refer to the management culture and labour processes dominant in Japan, the US, Europe and other developed capitalist countries in the latter part of the twentieth century.[...^]

This division of the workforce into a relatively privileged, full-time relatively secure core of loyal, male, skilled workers on one hand, and a mass of part-time casual, often female or immigrant, labourers on the other, is however one of the features of what is called Toyotism. Toyotism depends on this culture of labour-management cooperation, multi-skilling and cross divisional problem solving, and the creation of such a culture is the first requirement. Concessions such as employment security, seniority-based wage systems, twice-yearly bonuses, regular promotion from the shop-floor to senior management, as well as management bonuses tied to the bonuses paid to blue-collar workers and a strict work ethic for white-collar employees and managers were used in Japan to cultivate this spirit of cooperation.

In part because the union leader of today may well be the manager of tomorrow, large firms generally practice union-management consultation over broad strategic decisions. They also endeavour to elicit employee participation in day-to-day problem solving and quality improvements in the workplace. Quality circles and employee suggestion systems are widespread. Problems in product and technological development are tackled by cross-functional teams.

Toyotism also alters the relationship between buyer and seller. While demanding of its suppliers just-on-time delivery of components, the producer tirelessly polls its market for direction about the product to be produced. Instead of producing a product and then drumming up a market, the market is found first, and then the product produced to fill the demand.

Toyota is one of the largest automobile manufacturers in the world. It began in 1933 as a division of the Toyoda Automatic Loom Works, Ltd. and during the 1960s and ‘70s expanded rapidly. From a negligible position in 1950, Japan surpassed West Germany, France, Great Britain, and the United States to become the world’s leading automotive producer. During the late 1970s and early 1980s, Japan’s principal auto makers enjoyed such impressive export gains in North American and western European markets that restrictions were imposed on Japanese imports.

The Japanese industrialists learnt the new approach to manufacture off the American management consultants who were sent to help restart the Japanese economy under the Occupation. Foremost among what the Japanese learnt were the theories of Elton Mayo [George Elton Mayo, Australian psychologist, born 1880, Professsor of Industrial Research at the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration, author of The Human Problems of an Industrial Civilization; died 1949]. The origin of Mayo’s theory was an experiment he conducted between 1927 and 1932 at the Hawthorne plant of the Western Electric Company, in Illinois. The drift of his discovery was a kind of placebo effect [the "Hawthorne effect"]: if workers believed they were being consulted about their work, then they worked harder. It should be emphasised that there was nothing in Mayo’s theory which suggested that workers actually had anything useful to contribute to organising production; his theory was solely concerned with motivating workers.

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These methods allowed automation to be used in a quite new way: instead of the production workers’ role becoming more and more abstract, workers were responsible for the final product and small numbers of highly skilled workers could achieve very high levels of productivity, subjecting production methods to continuous improvements. It is this kind of labour, and its complement in the labour of the casual contract labourer outside the corporation’s core of permanent employees, which began in the Toyota factory in Japan and provided the basis for the "knowledge worker" of the postmodern world.

This kind of labour process generates its own class structure: a working class divided between a mass of very poor, utterly alienated workers who have no job security or on-going relationship with their work on one side, and a core of skilled workers with relatively satisfying work and good employment conditions on the other. At the same time, the boundaries between commerce and production, manufacture and service, worker and manager, all become very murky.