Disassembling the Line

No problem in industrial psychology has received more attention in both scholarly studies and barroom bull sessions, yet prompted less action, than the monotonous life of the assembly-line worker. Nowhere is the trouble greater than in auto plants, where repetitious, single-task jobs so bore workers that United Auto Workers Vice President Douglas Fraser often tells members that they have "half the day licked" once they have managed to get to the plant. Sweden's two biggest automakers are testing ways to make the job a bit more interesting by, in effect, disassembling portions of their lines.

In some areas Volvo and Saab-Scania are using a team-production method, in which auto and truck components are assembled by semi-autonomous groups of four to seven workers each. At times they can decide in what order to tackle their tasks and even who their foreman will be. In another method, the men move along the line with the cars performing each successive assembly operation. The automakers are also rotating some assembly-line workers to different jobs. An employee may attach seat headrests one day, bore holes in the seat framework the next, connect back supports and lift seat cushions onto conveyor belts on subsequent days. At Volvo, some female assembly workers even spend one day every two weeks doing office jobs.

The Swedish automakers are pleased with the first results of their experiments. They report improved production quality and lower absenteeism. The workers no longer suffer from the muscular aches that came from performing the same operation at the same speed day after day, and executives have been encouraged enough to plan larger-scale tests. Saab this month opened in Soedertaelje an engine plant that contains only a short conventional assembly line; most of the assembly work will be completed by seven teams. Volvo officials are studying alternatives to the present assembly line in an auto plant scheduled to open in Kalmar in 1974.

The executives' main goal is to lure more young Swedes into the country's chronically insufficient pool of blue-collar laborers. At present, "the kids want to go to the university or into civil service, not industry," complains Volvo's Chairman Gunnar Engellau. Already, more than one-third of Volvo's and Saab's blue-collar jobs are filled by Finns, Danes, Norwegians, Yugoslavs, Italians and other foreigners.

Warning by Film. The need to make assembly jobs more interesting to better-educated blue-collar workers is not peculiar to the Swedish auto industry. Roughly 40% of the hourly paid workers in U.S. auto plants are under 35, and virtually all of them have completed at least twelve years of school, compared with ten years on the average for those 45 to 64. Industrial psychologists are sure that it is these young workers who have caused the U.S. auto industry's absenteeism rate to climb. At Ford, the rate rose from 2.8% in 1960 to 5.3% in 1970. And it is largely absenteeism that has put a lid on Detroit's ability to build cars faster. Productivity per man-hour in the U.S. auto industry increased an average of only 3.6% annually from 1957 to 1970.

Executives of General Motors, Ford, Chrysler and American Motors all insist, however, that team assembly would not work in U.S. plants. The method, they say, simply is not fast enough to produce the 10,471,800 cars and trucks that the four automakers turned out last year. (Volvo and Saab together assembled only an estimated 316,500 vehicles in 1971.) The American automakers have not been exactly prolific with ideas of what to try instead. One GM plant in California experimented briefly with rewarding regular attendance by passing out initialed drinking glasses. Ford's approach is to show each new assembly worker a film illustrating the tough and monotonous nature of the line. Apparently the company figures that the worker may be less discontented if he is at least forewarned about what he is in for.

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