In 1964 Volvo opened a new car plant at Torslanda, in Gothenburg. Five years later, according to a history by the Uppsala business researcher Thomas Sandberg, the plant was so hard to staff that some departments had no Swedish employees at all. Wildcat strikes broke out between 1969 and 1971.
Pehr Gyllenhammar became Volvo’s president in 1971. That year he replaced the group planning a new assembly plant at Kalmar, on Sweden’s Baltic coast, whose first plan had been, in Sandberg’s words, “rather conventional.” In 1973 Gyllenhammar wrote that the most important change was “a shift from individual, monotonous work to work in a group.” Perhaps the most critical step, as he saw it, was replacing the assembly line.
“If you are a supervisor experiencing the situation where people don’t turn up in the morning, you grow more willing to change,” he told New Scientist in 1974. “You wonder every day if you have 15 or 20 per cent of your workforce to replace.”
Kalmar opened early in 1974. There was no conveyor belt, and each team assembled one part of the car. Each car rode on its own battery-powered platform, big enough to carry the car and an assembler, which followed magnetic tracks in the floor and could tip the car on its side so nobody had to work underneath it. Groups of about 20 worked along the outer walls, each area with its own entrance, and two groups shared a foreman, a sauna and a coffee room. A worker was a “door expert” or an “electrical system worker,” the magazine reported, rather than a mere “auto assembler.” A team’s work on each car took 15 to 40 minutes. Buffers between team areas gave people some room to work ahead and vary their pace.
Competitors, Gyllenhammar said a decade later, saw the plant as an “exotic little venture.” Inside Volvo, he said, it “had to be rejected by all those who defend stability, including my own colleagues in top management.”
The first results were a letdown. Workers liked the teams, the chance to vary their pace and the working environment, Christian Berggren, a professor of industrial management at Linköping University, wrote later. But each car took as many assembly hours as at Torslanda. Volvo’s profits fell, plans for a similar plant in the United States were shelved, and Kalmar went through a rationalization programme.
By 1984, ten years in, Kalmar needed 25% fewer assembly hours per car than Torslanda. Work intensity had risen too. Around 1988, with absenteeism and turnover climbing again, teams began taking over tasks that had been separate posts: materials handling, inspection and adjustment, instruction, some maintenance. In parts of the plant a work cycle grew to around an hour. For the 1993 model year, Berggren reported, J.D. Power counted 54 complaints per 100 Volvo 940s built at Kalmar, against 90 for the same car built in Gothenburg.
Not everyone was persuaded. MIT researchers, in The Machine That Changed the World, dismissed Kalmar and Volvo’s newer Uddevalla plant as “neo-craft nostalgia.”
In November 1992 the Volvo board decided to close both. The company said it would shut two plants and lay off 4,500 workers. “Our assessment is that the demand for cars in the foreseeable future will remain low,” said its president, Lennart Jeansson. Researchers who had studied the plants argued that Volvo’s cost figures did not hold up. Kalmar closed in 1994. By then, Sandberg wrote, Volvo’s sales had grown so fast that the plant would have been needed.