Automotive workers: staffing an automotive operation

What is specific to an automotive operation

Automotive is characterised by work on assembly lines at a set takt, high quality requirements, and continuity across shifts. A gap in people, or a lapse in quality, feeds through the whole line and into the deliveries that depend on it.

Operations often sit inside supply chains with pressure on reliability and stability, which is why cover is a supply question rather than only a staffing one.

How to recruit for automotive

Agency employment helps cover ramp-ups and peaks, and a willingness to work on a line matters here.

What works for an automotive operation:

• A permanent core for quality and continuity
• Flexible capacity for ramp-ups and swings in production
• Recruitment from abroad for shortage occupations
• Emphasis on reliability and on the shift pattern

Training for the line and for quality

Alongside initial health-and-safety training, onboarding concentrates on working to the line takt, on quality standards and on the specific operations. A prepared and repeatable onboarding matters most during a production ramp-up or when several people start at once.

Planning shifts and ramp-ups

Capacity planning has to reconcile line takt, shifts and production ramp-ups. Cross-trained cover, a margin for gaps and securing flexible capacity in good time all help. Immediate availability is not something we promise. Where recruitment from abroad is involved, allow for the time permits take.

Current labour-market data is published by the Czech Statistical Office, the Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs and the Czech Labour Office. No figures are stated here.

Continuous operation and how working time is distributed

Automotive typically runs multi-shift or continuously. The Czech Labour Code distinguishes even from uneven distribution of working time and sets the framework for shift and continuous operations, into which a line’s roster has to fit.

A working-time account is, under the Czech Labour Code, a particular method of distributing working time that may be introduced only by a collective agreement or an internal regulation. It suits operations with fluctuating output — new model ramp-ups, swings in call-offs — because it allows hours worked to be balanced across a reference period.

Night work and the night shift have their own treatment in the Czech Labour Code, and employees working at night are entitled to particular protection, extending to health and safety and including an assessment of medical fitness.

Uninterrupted rest between shifts and in the week, and breaks at work, are minimum standards set by the Czech Labour Code that a line’s shift roster has to respect. No specific lengths are stated here.

For work at night, at the weekend, on a public holiday and in overtime, an employee is entitled to premiums under the Czech Labour Code. No rates are stated here: they follow from the statutory provisions and from any collective agreement.

• Compliance with working time and rest, and the records kept of them, is checked by the labour inspection authorities under the Czech Act on Labour Inspection — the State Labour Inspection Office and the regional inspectorates.
• Workers assigned to the line by an agency are entitled to working-time and rest conditions comparable to those of the company’s own employees.
• The employer sets the shift roster within the limits of the law; the form is best chosen to match how the operation actually runs.