"Lean Manufacturing" Comes to China: Its Impact on Workplace Health & Safety

China has become the factory floor for the global economy with giant industrial plants of thousands of young, migrant workers from rural areas producing an ever-growing share of consumer goods in the world market. Until now, these plants have been organized in traditional "assembly line" layouts with commonly-recognized (if unevenly controlled) health and safety hazards. The factories in China are now incorporating the latest industrial organization techniques, including "lean manufacturing" where the assembly lines are broken down into production cells or modules where multiple assembly steps are all done by the same group of workers in a small space. While lean manufacturing is substantially more efficient and productive, it also concentrates health and safety hazards in small areas where large-scale engineering controls of hazards in spread-out assembly lines are frequently no longer possible. The mixing of hazards and increased speed of the production process means that workers can have significantly increased exposures to health and safety hazards within their "lean" cell or module. This presentation will examine, complete with photographs from the factory floor, the experience of a 10,000-worker sports shoe factory north of Guangzhou, China. The successes and weaknesses of this plant's efforts to evaluate and control health and safety hazards in a lean manufacturing format hold lessons for other industrial plants in China and throughout the global economy.