Word: saab
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...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...
...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 Södertälje 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...
...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...
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...
Changing Roles. As wage costs balloon, a growing list of companies in Western Europe and Japan are seeking similar savings-sometimes next door, sometimes at the other end of the world. Sweden's Saab has just completed a plant in Uusikaupunkt, an undeveloped area of Finland, to roll out 15,000 cars a year, about one-third of which will be sent back to Sweden; the Finnish workers get about half the pay that Saab's Swedish employees do. West Germany's Daimler-Benz has invested $6.6 million in a Yugoslav truck and bus plant and supplies...