You are the secretary to an executive in a car-manufacturing firm. He asks you to prepare a brief summary of the changes in working conditions that Volvo have introduced, the reasons for such changes, and how far they have been successful. Read the following extract from the New Statesman and in not more than 150 words prepare the required summary.

They're building a new car factory at Kalmar in south-eastern Sweden to produce the successful Volvo saloons and station wagons. It is completely unlike any existing motor plant anywhere in the world: in fact, the Kalmar factory is something of a reaction against Henry Ford against Detroit, against the moving line production system, the regimentation of workers, the soul-destroying monotony of industrial work.
But it's not against productivity, profit-making, mass production. It is a gigantic Swedish compromise.
The idea is that workers cannot be expected nowadays to put up with Ford's concept that each step in the production of a motor-car should be broken down into its simplest form, taking the worker a few seconds to complete a tiny process before it passes along the conveyor belt to the next worker, who in turn adds his own diminutive but vital contribution to the whole. Workers need wider horizons and a greater involvement if they are to continue to produce good Volvos. So Kalmar has been contructed to reintroduce the small workshop concept of the early industrial era, to increase the amount of responsibility each worker has for the product, and to give him a much larger share in the production process - perhaps up to 30 minutes to complete a job assignment instead of 30 seconds. Swedish managers are certain it is all going to be an enormous success.
Each group of 25 to SO workers will form an industrial team, with their own factory entrance, their own canteen area and their own sauna bath. And each will be responsible for the construction of a substantial amount of the car and be allowed to work at their own pace.
More than a thousand such job-enrichment projects are being tried out in a whole range of industries, though no one has gone as far as Volvo. Why Swedish management have brought in the psychiatrists, the sociologists and the behaviourists is simple: the increasingly better·
educated Swedish working class is rebelling against factory life. Absenteeism - the 'silent strike' - is o~ the increase, recruitment is down and labour turnover is high. So job enrichment is a way of luring young workers into factory life or keeping them there.
The Swedish trade union movement takes a guarded view of the whole development. In many instances the unions are co-operating -
but then, Swedish unions are accustomed to co-operating with management.
But there are underlying tensions, which are seeking expressions in other ways than just the Kalmar method. Since 1928 Swedish workers have been virtually forbidden to strike except at three-yearly intervals when wage contracts are nationally negotiated - and even then, only when instructed to do so by their unions. The result is that workers are being alienated from trade unions as well as production line monotony.
The Kalmar system may well solve the latter problem, but it does nothing to change the former.
Swedish employers resignedly assume that giving the workers more responsibility will eventually lead to a more insistent demand for workers' control of the whole firm. Meanwhile, the frustration at not being able to strike has been reduced by the increased satisfaction enjoyed by Volvo workers