Doorless cars, with their respective powertrains yet to be fitted, slip seamlessly onto the line and the first work station. Each station has a cycle that lasts for one minute before the cars scooch on to the next station. There are three eight-hour shifts in a day, with a target of 440 cars to be made each shift.
As we visit, it’s 45 minutes into the 2pm-10pm shift and monitors in aisles say that, as per target, 43 cars have been produced so far. In contrast to the welding or paint shops, this final assembly is accomplished mostly by hand.
Teams of six to eight workers beaver around each station and each of them has a team leader who will have been voted in by the rest of them. Different crews are dressed in different T-shirts: Skoda staff wear green sleeves, blue tees represent agency staff, orange is worn by logistics personnel and red denotes maintenance staff. Skoda will hope it doesn’t require too many of those. Shutting the factory would be tremendously expensive.
Breaks, then, are rather better if scheduled. There’s a half-hour break during each shift but, while there is a canteen (I couldn’t tell you if it serves whatever the local equivalent of Volkswagen’s currywurst is), the size of the place means that most of the workers wouldn’t be able to walk there and back, let alone stop to eat, within the half hour.
Instead, there are multiple breakout rooms dotted around the site, more than 2000 vending machines, plus 200 small shops, so they can maximise rest time. Despite rubberised floors to ease stress on joints, specialist chairs or lifting equipment, electric wrenches and more, putting cars together remains hard work.
People are treated much better than they used to be, of course. Robots or machines are there to assist carrying and installing heavy items like wheels and radiators (both towards the end of the assembly process), but still, the average age of the worker is only 38.
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