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About 40 U.S. companies have started a four-day week of nine-and ten-hour days; they report that productivity is up and absenteeism and turnover are down. In Germany, Messerschmitt-Boelkow-Blohm has achieved much the same results by allowing its workers to choose, within limits, their own hours of work. The men themselves arrange their schedules without disrupting the production process. The practice is so successful that 50 other German companies have copied it, and unions are asking for a raise because of increased output.
Many companies are reluctant to embrace new ideas, largely because of the inertia of management in large organizations. Foremen resist any challenge to their authority, and plant managers, who figure that they will be transferred in a couple of years, are reluctant to undertake any long-term program that will not show immediate results. But there is a powerful incentive for top management to press for new ways of doing things. One of the best-known advocates of job enrichment, Industrial Psychologist Frederick Herzberg of Cleveland's Case Western Reserve University, suggests that strikes are often welcomed by workers as relief from their mind-numbing jobs and could be drastically reduced. As Herzberg puts it: "Managers must get more men going home to their wives saying, 'Honey, do you know what I did today?' instead of 'Honey, do you know what they did to me today?' "
Fitting the Job to the Man
The apostles of enriched labor insist that the idea can be profitably applied even to auto plants or steel mills. The cost would be high, since the assembly line would have to be redesigned to give each worker at least some responsibility for assembling an entire component rather than tightening a single bolt. In Volkswagen's Wolfsburg plant, for instance, groups of workers put together large components. That allows for more human contact and freedom on the line, relieves the boredom and permits a worker to take several minutes off from time to time. Comparisons with Detroit's plants are not wholly valid because Volkswagens are much simpler than almost all American cars, but Wolfsburg produces autos at three or four times the rate of U.S. plants. In Detroit, the U.A.W. has suggested that teams of workers assemble whole cars, but the notion was dropped by the union when the auto companies concluded that it was not feasible on present assembly lines. But in 1970 it is not too soon to suggest that the nature of the job should be changed to fit the man rather than the other way around. The time may come when it will be cheaper for the companies to enrich the workers' jobs than to pay ever higher wage increases as the price of continuing discontent.