The fear of corporativism that has occasionally manifested itself may be dismissed as irrelevant.

The experiments under way in the Swedish civil service were initiated by Cabinet and are in charge of a special committee, on which I sit as secretarygeneral. Co-determination is being tried out at some ten government agencies, among them the National Telecommunications Administration, the Post Office Administration, the police establishment and certain administrative departments. Since the experiments entail important changes in the normal administrative hierarchy, Cabinet must give its consent to each experiment. The committee members and Cabinet Ministers are keeping close tabs on the experiments. Today, virtually every organized activity of any respectable size is shot through with the hierarchical system. What effects does co-determination have on this system?

Since the hierarchical structure presupposes that all decision-makers constitute the top management's prolonged arm, it is necessary to appoint all decision-makers "from the top"-how shall they otherwise be regardable as the prolonged arm? The experiments with co-determination break the hierarchy, since it is the employees who appoint these decision-makers, or at least half of them. The prolonged arm is partly that of the employees. As a result the hierarchical structure is modified, and with that the centralized power function is weakened. The responsibility for personnel policy is shared between top management and the employees.

The decisional content is obviously affected because many of the individuals taking part in the decison-making process will hold other value judgments. The unilateral shaping of values is replaced by a bilateral system for decisionmaking. We already have experience of certain consequences. In one case a more social value pattern fed through than the one which would have been applied in the traditional decision-making system.

But the effects will be many more than these. Since the decision-making units have taken over some power from once solely deciding bosses, new interpersonal relations are bound to arise. The boss who used to take important decisions all by himself, and who must now yield in a decision-making unit to a majority opinion that conflicts with his own opiniɔn, will not be the same man he was before. That sort of situation will certainly confront him when he is called upon to implement the unit's decision.

Another very important psychological effect arises where promotions are concerned. Since half the members of the decision-making units are appointed by the employees-without interference from top management-persons from the bottom of the hierarchy may enter into such a unit even at summit level. A typist, a cleaning woman or a janitor may join a decision-making body at the top manager's level. (This is actually the case in several of our experiments). In other words, promotion to a high post may occur with the participation of a person who in the normal organization is subordinate to -and perhaps directly serves under-the applicants for a high post. This would seem to pose a fascinating dilemma. I myself have had such situations described to me by the individuils directly affected. To speak of radically new roles is an understatement in

this context.

As a matter of course, corresponding phenomena appear in other relations, too. The spokesman for the employees who takes part in a decision which affects them very negatively-for instance, the dismissal or punishment of a colleague will get to feel first-hand the strains imposed by the new role.

To a great extent tasks that in the normal organization are concentrated on the personnel manager will be divided among several individuals. This is also new, of course. The personnel manager's functions will be among the most interesting to study in the future.

The examples of new situations I have just described are by no means exhaustive. The experimental models contain a great many other aspects which as yet we have been able to define and observe no more than partially. Developments are being followed with methods taken from various disciplines: sociology, administrative law, constitutional law and organization theory. Cabinet is not least interested.

What result may be expected from these experiments. It stands to reason that we who are directly responsible for their progress look forward to a successful outcome. What we have been able to observe to date gives cause for optimism. Managers who have already acquired experience of collective decisions on a bilateral basis confirm-not seldom with enthusiasm-that the system has big advantages. More often than not, employee participation improves the data base for decision-making, and this is not least important in a field as delicate as personnel policy. The information released after decisions are taken will also be more detailed, not least thanks to the employee representatives. The decisions come psychologically closer to those who are affected by them. The employees get to feel that they are directly involved in management-and that feeling rests on a basis of facts and not on a psychologically manipulated attitude.

The last-named factor is perhaps the most important of all. In a modern society, where the aspirations of individuals keep rising constantly, the assumption of responsibility and the exercise of responsibility must be extended to the job world. This is a growing need, which I believe to be universal and bound up with both the individual's social development and the nation's technological advance. But it can become destructive if it is not harnessed to the ends of commitment, creativeness and responsibility. The efficiency of working life need not be strangled or impeded because an individual is going to be conferred with human dignity, as within the meaning of the Employment Act. I am not convinced that radically changed organizational models-for instance, different forms of collective management, autonomy or the like-offer the only passable road. My belief is that we can retain a large part of today's efficient forms for the organization of work, provided other provision is made for the division of power within these traditional forms.

Every employee must become a co-worker, and this not only in a psychological sense but also in a real one. He must be assured of the power to control his perso nal situation. The only means towards that end is co-determination: this is my conclusion based on the experiments we are now making in Sweden's civil service. Not until every employee-whether directly or indirectly-shares in the actual exercise of power over every aspect of industrial relations can he be called a coworker in the true sense of this word. And when that happens, industrial democracy will become a reality. My belief is that this will also become a guiding model for the coming century.

[From The Wall Street Journal, Friday, October 25, 1974]

WORKING HAPPIER

MORE SWEDISH FIRMS ATTEMPT TO ‘ENRICH' PRODUCTION-LINE JOBS

Giving Workers More Say, Variety Are 2 Methods; So Are Saunas, Chalets 'We Don't Promise Heaven'

(By Bowen Northrup, Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal) MALMO, Sweden.-There's a clang of hammers on metal in the air. Towering over Malmo Harbor is the giant crane, 460 feet tall, of the Kockums shipyard. It is moving big sections of a supertanker's hull into place.

Squinting in the sun to watch is Magna Larsson, a husky blond fellow who has been working here for 18 years. He is astride the rusty old bicycle he uses to get around the yard, and for a union official, which he is, he is saying unusual things. "There's a tremendous difference here," he says, "a complete change of spirit." Five years ago, Kockums management was on collision course with its production workers. Now even the union likes the way things are going. It is a case of what the social scientists call "work enrichment" (or "job restructuring," or "redesigning the work organization").

Faster than industrial enterprises elsewhere, companies around Sweden have been coming to grips with a nasty fact of modern industrial life: High pay does not necessarily a happy blue-collar worker make.

A VOICE AND CHALLENGE

Then what does? Giving the worker a say, and giving him a challenge. The idea is to put some variety and some responsibility into the crushingly tedious but crucially important production jobs of this world. The prototype of the worker yearning for "enrichment" is the one who does the same basic task hundreds of thousands of times a day at the same workbench.

Swedish industrialists see the same symptoms of employe disaffection-high personnel turnover, absenteeism and malingering-as their American counterparts. What distinguishes the most ambitious Swedish efforts to cure the problem are the dual themes of decentralization and dialogue.

The worker is given more responsibility: thus, he feels more responsible-and more tied to the company. His opinions are solicited, and taken seriously. "We want to widen the feeling of responsibility in this organization," says Lars Fredholm, personnel director of Kockums.

"We want each and every man to feel that he has a chance to guide and influence the place where he is working. Most companies think of their workers as a gray mass, but we must think of them as every man an individual. Every man has his problems."

That is very high-sounding, but Kockums apparently means it. And it seems to work-especially if you make a comparison with 1969. Then, turnover was running 50% a year and management's efforts to correct the situation-calling in efficiency experts and pressing for more production per man-only had inflamed the situation. "If the situation was allowed to go on, this company could have gone bust," one executive says.

A RADICAL MOVE

In desperation, managing director Nils-Hugo Hallenborg took a step that horrified his colleagues: He turned the entire situation over to the unions. Find out what is wrong and tell us how to correct it, he told them.

They did, in a public report that had some acid messages for management from the workers, plus many specific requests for changes. Kockums says it acted on them all. The workers wanted-and got an end to piecework pay. The medical staff was increased, and safety precautions were improved. There were many on-the-job changes. For instance, management acted to ventilate places where welders' torches created noxious fumes and to provide cover for working outside in wintertime.

There is now a staff of social workers to deal with personal problems, and some handsome perquisites such as saunas and cut-rate vacation chalets in Scandinavia, Europe and Africa. There also is a physiotherapist who shows manual

workers how to lift heavy objects safely and "how to treat your body in the best fashion," says Sven Lindahl, personnel service manager.

Most of all, Kockums asserts, the company listened to the workers, and asked for their suggestions in solving problems. It even asks them, through joint committees, for advice on scheduling construction of the half dozen or so supertankers that the company turns out each year.

"People like to work when they know why they are working," personnel director Fredholm says. "Your only chance is to take people with you when you are making your plans and your budgets—the things that will guide the future.”

A DOUBLE GOAL

The double goal is to increase production while increasing worker satisfaction. Kockums believes that it has achieved both. Worker turnover, for example, which was running 50% annually five years ago, is down below 20%. Productivity is definitely up, both management and union agree, though they aren't able to provide specific figures.

The experience hasn't been cheap. "It costs a lot of money, but it brings a lot of money in," says Lars Helsing, a company spokesman. (The average production wage at Kockums is about $5.36 an hour.)

Along the way, the company has acknowledged a sobering fact: The tough jobs of this world-digging for coal, assembling autos or welding a ship, for instance-remain basically dirty, no matter how much you "enrich" them.

"We don't promise heaven," Mr. Fredholm says. This thought is echoed by Folke Schoon, a weathered man of 64 who has been a Kockums welder for 40 years. "The welding is the same, but all the things around it have changed," Mr. Schoon says with a smile and a shrug.

Sweden's blue-collar labor problems began in the late 1960s-ironically, during a boom. With labor in demand, workers were deserting the tedious jobs on the production line. There were a number of wildcat strikes, many of them focusing on workers' rights, and the press began to write about the problem.

Amid generally growing affluence, the hard jobs simply got harder to fill. Young people were particularly choosy. A report from the Swedish Employers' Confederation points out that young people "now have at least nine years of basic education behind them."

Also, increasing specialization was making the dreary jobs even drearier. "There was more variation in the old days," says Mr. Schoon, the welder. "You lived with a ship from start to finish." Working on a supertanker, a man can spend weeks in the same place.

At the same time, says Jan Edgren, a management specialist at the Swedish Employers' Confederation, "new ideas were popping up." Some of them, originating with the Tavistock Institute in Britain and already familiar in Norway, focused on "autonomous" or "self-managed" work groups in which the workers defined their roles and created their own methods for getting tasks done.

Swedish industry already had an impressive record of innovation in industrial democracy. "Swedish companies traditionally have been more interested in improving work conditions than companies in other countries, particularly around Europe," Mr. Edgren says.

The interest was heightened by "turbulent market conditions," Mr. Edgren adds. Customers for Swedish products were making specialized demands and asking for deliveries on short notice. All of this made decentralized work groups look attractive.

"The more flexible the work organization, the better it can cope with these disturbances and variations," Mr. Edgren says.

Now there are work-enrichment experiments all around Sweden. Best-known is the Volvo automobile plant at Kalmar, where the conventional assembly line has been scrapped for a number of computer-directed trolleys, each manned by a group of workers who together assemble an entire auto rather than repeat a single operation as an auto moves along a production line.

"This is a very tangible change-most people know what an assembly line is," Mr. Edgren says, but he points out that "the solutions to the problem are different in different companies, depending on technology." Some examples in various industries:

Asea, the big manufacturer of electrical equipment for industry, has "moved the office onto the factory floor" at a plant in Vasteras that makes relays. Engineers, salesmen, product-design people and other white-collar workers share

facilities with production workers. This helps lead to "product identification," Mr. Edgren says. And it gives the blue-collar men a sense of parity. Curt Nicolin, Asea president, notes that the experiment has spurred efforts to reduce noise, improve lighting and correct other "evils which stem from the manufacturing process."

At Hallstavik, just outside Stockholm, the Hollens Bruk Group has enlisted its workers to help design and build a big paper mill. The idea is to make the working environment as attractive as possible and shape it to the workers' needs.

At Vasby foundry, a die-casting shop in the Granges group, the 60 production workers have been reorganized into eight semiautomous groups sharing equally in production bonuses for work turned out by the foundry.

The Orrefors glassworks, which was suffering from uneven work flow in the grinding and polishing department, turned the operation over to the workers, who reorganized it into three separate production groups. Jobs are rotated to make for variety and interest.

At the rock-drilling machine assembly department of the Atlas Copco group, outside Stockholm, workers have replaced the assembly line with a round table for group work and a system of shared monetary rewards.

To a white-collar observer, changing from assembly line to round table may not sound very thrilling. For the assembly-line worker, it can revolutionize his job. Instead of doing one operation endlessly, he may do several, or assemble an entire unit. If he learns several operations, job rotation becomes possible.

"When you don't have a set-up job to do all day, then you can do other things," Mr. Edgren of the employers' confederation says. The work groups, he points out, can become "not self-managed, but independent in some ways." Soon the department finds itself "planning on the group level."

Around Sweden, workers have been clamoring for an end to the old piecework wage system (except for younger workers with abundant energy and a short-term view). But they don't want a complete switchover to fixed wages. Swedish employers agree that the best configuration seems to be a pay package in which 70% to 90% is fixed, and further pay comes from premiums, or production bonuses.

If the bonus is shared by the work group equally, that drastically changes their relationships. Each man becomes responsible to the others. Some work groups are given control over the hiring of new men.

"They want to get a good guy that they can get along with," Mr. Edgren says. Workers clearly consider the piecework pay system demeaning. Similarly, workers find it hard to retain their self-respect when they are tied to a single mechanical operation all day. Lars E. Bjork, a Swedish social scientist, relates the case of a worker he met in a sewing-machine factory.

The worker's daughter had been scheduled to visit the factory with her school class. But the man told her to stay home that day. "I did not want my own daughter to see how I sit here like a fool making these little pièces," he said. "I think this is a humiliating job for a grown-up man."

Work enrichment aims to replace humiliation and boredom with respect and variety. Swedish managers and workers report cautionary lessons from their experiments in the field.

Soliciting workers' ideas on their job environment naturally tends to make them focus on the things that make them unhappy. "At the beginning all you get is complaining," says Gunnar Welinder, a works manager for Atlas Copco. "You have to listen to that. You have to be patient."

Making workers responsible to one another rather than individually responsible to the management can introduce new tensions into the shop. It also can complicate the positions of the foremen and of union officials. In the most successful experiments, however, the may be freed for new and challenging tasks.

Kurt Modig, production director at the Atlas Copco Sickla works, believes that the two critical periods for new production workers are after one month's work and after two years. Thus, the company has elaborate procedures for introducing and integrating new men, and conducts exit interviews with those departing to find out why they are leaving.

Winning over the workers isn't necessarily easy. Gote Andersson, one of the workers in the Atlas Copco experiment and a union official, worries that soliciting workers' ideas could just be a public-relations exercise.

"There is a risk that the company will tend to give the employes a feeling of influence, rather than real influence," he says.