The job cycle is thus about 20 minutes for any group of operators in either straight-line or dock assembly.

The work is therefore not paced by the track, and the job cycle time is extended from seconds to about 20 minutes.

Mercantilist Germany is at an entirely different stage of the long-term job cycle at 5.5pc, the lowest in 20 years.

Unemployment, which stands at a four-year high of about four million people, could rise to 4.5 million by February because of the seasonal job cycle.

The second was to do with the design of the machinery to increase job cycle times and to reduce the extent to which work would be machine paced.

It increases job scope; that is, it increases the number of different operations required in a job and the frequency with which the job cycle is repeated.

For Remington, a tunnelling operation is like a factory production line: the aim is to maximise the amount of tunnel dug during each shift by reducing the job cycle time.

During the three-week job cycle, which was designed to give every student who wants to work an opportunity to participate, about 25 children serve as postmaster, assistant postmaster, sorters and carriers.

The flexibility achieved by extending worker responsibilities and enlarging job cycles reduces idle machine time, the factor identified by Ford's management as the main cause of low British labour and capital productivity compared with the company's continental plants.

"The rate for men tends to be more volatile because they're concentrated in blue-collar industries like manufacturing and construction, which go up and down with the job cycle," said James Brown, an economist with the New York State Department of Labor.

The combination of several workplace trends - including shortened job cycles, the increase of project work, the acceptance of a new lifestyle and the emergence of the Internet and other technology - points to free agent workers becoming more of an employment norm in the coming years.

Not only had SAAB innovated with their use of the line-out system, they had also, as previously mentioned, used group working to operate the welding machinery, and they had also taken care, in the light of union concern about the matter, to minimise the extent of machine-paced short job cycle time working.