ABSTRACT
A Cambridge University research team studied assembly workers who worked in the Luton plant of Vauxhall Motors Limited. 2 The findings of their research were derived chiefly from interviews with workers employed in six assembly departments of the Vauxhall plant. The assemblers worked on a number of motorised assembly lines or ‘tracks’. The overall task of assembling vehicles was minutely subdivided into a large number of individual job tasks. Each individual assembly job contained few operations in a brief work cycle, and was highly repetitive. The jobs had low skill requirements on the part of the assemblers. The tools and techniques used in assembly-line production were predetermined. The rhythm and speed of the work was mechanically controlled by the pace of the assembly line, which was set by company management. Control was exercised in the first instance by the technology: ‘the track is the boss’. By means of the assembly-line methods large numbers of workers were brought together in the Vauxhall plant who differed little in skill-level, rates of pay, status, or prospects of advancement.
