Swedish Workers on the Line

Lars Henriksson is an assembly worker and the elected union representative for 600 trim line workers at a Volvo plant in Gothenburg, Sweden. The plant employs 11,000 blue collar workers 98 percent of whom are members of the Swedish Metal Workers Union. Henriksson has worked in the plant on the assembly line for 16 years. This interview was conducted by Dan La Botz.

Multinational Monitor: What's the Gothenburg Volvo plant like?

Lars Henriksson: The Gothenburg plant has among the highest numbers of immigrant workers of all the plants in Sweden. When I started in 1978, Finnish and Swedish were most commonly spoken. Now, whenever the plant is leafleted, either by the union or the opposition, the leaflets must be translated into Finnish and Serbo-Croatian. There are huge contingents of Yugoslav and Finnish workers coming to Sweden.

In the 1980s, the economic situation in Finland was better than Sweden, so people moved from Sweden to Finland. Today, we have a primarily Swedish workforce, with large contingents of Iranian workers, as well as second generation Finnish and Yugoslav workers.

About 30 percent of assembly plant workers are women. A slightly smaller percentage of women make up the entire local.

MM: What sorts of activities is your union involved in?

Henriksson: Our union is involved in taking care of day-to-day problems - if somebody is being bullied by his foreman, forced to work overtime, or if somebody has an insurance problem and so on. But on top of that, we also try to perform kind of guerrilla trade union activities. We try to mobilize people around the issues, like when there's a wage negotiation coming up, or a contract. We try to mobilize people on the grassroots level.

We also spend a lot of time producing our factory newspaper, a very simple bi-weekly leaflet. It's extremely important to educate membership. When management had this big drive for kaizan [a management system emphasizing worker involvement in "continuous improvement"], we explained what it was and passed on experiences from the United States and other places. We engaged in a kind of ideological struggle that we think was extremely important.

After this issue of the newspaper had come out, we had a meeting with an unusually big attendance. It was almost like a religious meeting. People came up and said, "Oh, I believed in what they said, but now I've seen the light." Like the turn of a hand the whole thing almost collapsed for the company. It was amazing.

At Volvo, all through the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, there was a huge turnover of people on the assembly lines. In the 1980s, there was a turnover rate of about 100 percent a year, with people coming in, many 19-year-old kids, working for six months and then going off for a real job because they didn't earn more money here than any other place and the job was tough. The plant had been kind of a bus stop, with people just waiting for a job to come by. And then there were no buses all of a sudden.

For union workers, it was excellent, because in all my 16 years in the plant, this was the first time I had had the same working mates. People were beginning to understand that they might be working here for a longer period; they're not just passing by. It was easier to talk to them about why we should have a union and why we cannot engage in the kaizan strategies, for example.

MM: Over the last several years, have there been many strikes and job actions in Sweden?

Henriksson: The class struggle in Sweden for many years has been carried out by the bourgeoisie and there's been very little response from the workers. There's not been a significant strike for years. In 1980, there was a one-week national strike - that was the last big strike. The white-collar workers, who have about the same level of unionization as we do, struck in 1988. The Social Democratic party and the unions have had a social contract with the capitalists to strengthen the export industry and transfer capital and workers from less profitable sectors to the big industrial corporations working in the export market. Sweden is now extremely dependent on exports.

Because of the social contract, the role of unions has historically been to peacefully negotiate slow but steady wage increases. In the 1950s and 1960s they even had a special formula they had agreed upon with the capitalists on how to calculate the year's wage increase, based on the general situation in the economy, Swedish exports, increased productivity and so forth. The unions have not been very active at the shop floor level. It's seen as some apparatus above our heads: they're the ones in the union, somebody up there, arranging things for you.

MM: In the United States, new management methods such as quality circles and the team concept have created new issues for labor unions. Does team concept exist in Swedish plants?

Henriksson: We've been flooded by this in the last three or four years since the economic crisis hit Sweden. They're into using all kinds of management-by-stress techniques: kaizan, the Andon system, just-in -time, quality management. They even use the same English words.

MM: How have labor unions and workers reacted to these techniques?

Henriksson: Regrettably, the unions have accepted most of this in the name of competitiveness. The worst example is Saab, the other big Swedish car producer that was bought by General Motors. Saab was hit harder and earlier than Volvo by the economic crisis. Management made a special agreement with the union to do away with seniority rules in layoffs, and then the union made further concessions. The company managed to buy workers out, those with work injuries and women with little children. And they introduced all of these Japanese management techniques such as kaizan and so on.

That was three or four years ago. Since then, the speed up of the assembly line and the overtime workers are putting in is wearing people out.

They are now introducing this at Volvo too. The union says, "Oh, we're not going to have it the Japanese way. We're going to have a good mix with Swedish things." The union says that every rise in productivity will benefit workers, because we will have more time to do more interesting things than just working at the assembly line. This is bullshit, of course.

MM: What other kinds of changes in work organization are taking place?

Henriksson: Well, Sweden might be facing a maquiladora problem in a couple of years because a lot of Swedish companies are now looking southward to Estonia and Latvia. Some companies now send semi-assembled parts to Estonia, where they do simple assembly work for between 50 cents and one dollar an hour, and then send it back to Sweden and do the rest of the work there. Estonia is one of the best-educated areas of the former Soviet Union, so if companies can arrange for transportation and infrastructure, they will very likely be building plants there in a couple of years. I know that Saab has been looking there for subcontractors.

MM: Is contracting out a big part of the quality programs in Sweden?

Henriksson: Sure. In my factory, the assembly plant currently employs about 3,500 workers. I've seen similarly sized plants that adopt these programs and, in two years, reduce their employees to 1,500 mostly by contracting out.

In Sweden, we don't have the same driving forces for contracting out as in the United States or Japan, because we have a very egalitarian wage structure; the difference between a Volvo worker and somebody working at McDonald's is not so great. The McDonald's worker would have two-thirds of our wages, and a subcontractor would have almost equal wages. But if you have an alternative of putting your production in Estonia with a twentieth or a tenth of our wages, then you have a magnificent driving force for subcontracting.

MM: What do you propose as an alternative to the team concept and quality programs?

Henriksson: The first thing I try to tell workers is that the terms "quality" and "competitiveness" are not neutral. Instead of using the word "competitiveness," we should use the word "profitability," because it's easier to see that there are different sides to this term. It's almost impossible to say that you're against quality or that you're against efficiency. But profit, everybody knows where the profit ends up. That's the first ideological level, that there are different sides to this, that they have their interests and we have our interests.

Then, more concretely, there are two ways of handling the discussion. One, I call the English way, is to say, "No, we're not participating, we refuse. The company can do what it likes, but we won't participate." We discussed this, but didn't think this tactic would succeed, since the company would likely forge ahead, and people would be unable to resist.

So we participated in the kaizan group and, rather than disclose all the little secrets that make life on the assembly line bearable, we told them all the things that were wrong with the machinery and working conditions. If they didn't listen to our propositions, then we disclosed very little.

The company wants the teams to balance the tasks that everybody is supposed to do on the assembly line, without assistance from the industrial engineer. Management says this part takes so and so many seconds to assemble, so you must do it in that time frame. We decided to say, "Okay, we'll do this, but we will not do it the way that you would have done it. We'll make up our own assignments so that they will become decent jobs." Management has a goal of using 95 percent of the time spent on the assembly line. We say, "The hell with that, we'll create jobs that we think are decent, and if they end up being only 75 percent, it doesn't matter." If the company comes in and says, "But this is not 95 percent," then it's their problem By saving these things, management reveals what die v truly want, and we don't need to tell people about it. We're trying to take the cheese without letting the trap catch us.

MM: What if the company says you'll either go with this or we'll have to transfer this work to another plant in Sweden or in another country?

Henriksson: We haven't faced very much of that yet. Volvo's not General Motors and it doesn't have that many plants. But we're constantly told about our Volvo sister plant in Belgium where they do everything much faster and much more efficiently. In Belgium, for a long time they've had unemployment of about 15 percent. People are afraid, and companies can do anything they like there.

MM: Have you been in touch with the Belgian workers?

Henriksson: The union doesn't have very good contacts. They always ridicule the Belgian unions, saying, "Oh, they have a Christian union, a socialist union, a French union and a Flemish union and so on." But now they have created a council of Volvo unions in Europe.

They also tried to engage die Renault unions when Volvo was going to merge with Renault. But when they met the Renault workers, Renault workers said, "Earlier we had to compete with the Belgians, and now we have to compete with the French. So this will be a [labor versus labor] war on the knife with the French." That's how they see it.

MM: Is your union affiliated with apolitical party formally or informally in Sweden?

Henriksson: I was elected on an opposition slate for a more democratic union, a fighting union, and one of our programmatic points is that the union must be independent from the Social Democratic Party. We call ourselves the "Trade Union Opposition." But just to counter us, the bureaucracy 10 years ago or so changed the by-laws of the union nationwide so that you're not allowed to have just a caucus name on your slate, you must have a party name on it. So we called ourselves "Socialist Party and Independents. " Most workers are not a member of any party, but we have to have this party brand because they want to make a political issue of elections.

It used to be that whole regions or locals were collectively in line with the Social Democratic Party. That was officially done away with a couple of years ago, but the bureaucracy is still very closely tied to the Social Democrats, almost down to the shop floor level.

MM: And is that a good thing or a bad thing?

Henriksson: Because the Social Democrats have been carrying out very right-wing policies in the last 10 or 15 years, I think it's very bad. The unions don't fight back because they're so closely tied to the Social Democrats.

This might be cracking up a little bit now because the Social Democrats have been cooperating with the current Conservative government on austerity in a way that really shocked the unions - lowering unemployment benefits, raising the pension age, cutting back on vacations, etc.

MM: Does that mean the unions are becoming a little more independent of the Social Democratic party?

Henriksson: We haven't seen that yet. There's a conflict about the level of unemployment benefits, but it's mostly talk, and when it comes to action, nothing very much happens.

MM: What does it mean to call yourselves "socialist" in a society that many people would say has been run for years by a Socialist government?

Henriksson: People in Sweden don't see the Social Democrats as Socialists. If they do, it's more in the sense that the party is for some degree of equality. It's very obvious that Sweden is a capitalist country. It's one of the most concentrated capitalist countries in the world. We have a few select families who run the monopolies through a few huge companies.

Dan La Botz is a Cincinnati-based writer on labor and politics. He is author of Mask of Democracy: Labor suppression in Mexico Today (Boston: South End Press, 1992).