Preliminary Translation into English of Summarisation of Wage Earner Consultant Assignment to Document and Evaluate the Volvo Truck Company’s Assembly Plant in Umeå Dated 18 of January 2006

Rapport, 2006

Consumer report ("avnämarrapport" in Swedish) for the company and union in question, which is financed by the company and partly also by a research foundation (but based on an initiative of the Swedish Metall Workers Union Metall). The problem area (or research question) was focused on a conversion back to assembly line work. Before was an early sort of, less sociotechnically advanced, parallel workgroups practised not the far more sociotechnically advanced alternatives to assembly line work, which was at hand at the defunct Volvo Automobile AB:s plant located in Uddevalla or the so-called assembly docks located in the Volvo Truck AB:s plant in Tuve (i.e. the sole two real-life assembly system of this very calibre). This report was an initiative from the authors' side to process our experiences and findings further.

This was actually a wage owner consultant initiative performed with Logistic and Transportation as the sole base (no private consulting). It was a matter of combined data collection (collections of company data, interviews, questionnaire surveys, video-registration, etc. among other this thereby prospection many of our scientific methods developed during several decades. For example, involving two so-called total surveys of all blue-collar employees dealing with assembly work. The authors and their other colleagues were thus, in many respects, using a wide repertoire of scientific methods.