Companies feel an obligation to be cost efficient, of which, typically one of the highest cost components of corporations is the labor component; so that, companies are forever trying to come up with concepts that will reduce their labor costs, which therefore provides them with not only a leaner organization, but typically also an improved bottom line, including their profitability. The fact is that nowadays a significant amount of the largest multinational corporations in the world outsources a meaningful amount of their work to third world countries, so as to take advantage of significantly lower labor costs, along with typically seeing lower costs for the infrastructure so utilized, and often far more lax environmental regulations enforced. The upshot is that a lot of that work so outsourced, utilizes at an absolute minimum any direct employees of that corporation, and relies almost exclusively instead on that work being truly outsourced and therefore subcontracted to an authorized company, under the criteria so set by the controlling corporation; in which, in truth, those that are the labor product for that outsourcing, are pretty much treated as just-in-time labor, because these subcontracted companies are often so necessarily lean, that they hire, dictate the hours so worked, insist on overtime, as needed, and lay off or fire their workers at will.
That said, there is also essentially just-in-time labor in America; which, of course, could not and would not even exist if labor unions were materially relevant, to wit, at Amazon, or Walmart, and so many other companies, that seem to be a perfect fit and vulnerable to a strong labor union force, which would thereby provide benefits and protection for those that labor at these companies that sale billions upon billions of dollars of goods each and every year. Instead, we have something akin to just-in-time labor, so demonstrated by the fact that a significant amount of the workers at these powerful corporations do not receive a fixed working schedule on a weekly basis, but are instead subject to having their hours changed week to week, not only just on the days of the week so being worked, but also the actual time schedule of the hours so worked on a given day in a given week. Not only does this mean, that an employee so working under those conditions, does not really know how much or how little that they will receive paycheck to paycheck, but they don’t even know for a certainty what their schedule actually is for the coming week, until they are notified by management, which clearly is indicative of what just-in-time labor functionally means.
Clearly, when corporations are permitted to staff up when workers are needed, and to staff down when workers are not needed, so done even on a daily basis, perhaps even hourly, then their efficiency of the use of that labor, materially improves. Perhaps this even seems fair to some people, but recognize this salient point, that these powerful corporations are essentially treating human beings as if they aren’t really human; but rather as someone not really worth the fair and proper consideration that they are real people, worthy of having a voice, of a steady job with steady hours, benefits, job security, and a living wage.