“the England of arterial and by-pass roads, of filling stations and factories that look like exhibition buildings, of giant cinemas and dance-halls and cafes, bungalows with tiny garages, cocktail bars, Woolworths, motor-coaches, wireless, hiking, factory girls looking like actresses, greyhound racing and dirt tracks, swimming pools, and everything given away for cigarette coupons.”

Priestley, 1984 [1934]: 375

These factory girls were an object of concern and scrutiny, troubling the established categories of class with their outspoken, performed femininity. A new, light, industrial labour force destabilised the established understandings of gender and class. The Bata factory in East Tilbury was staffed, in part, by this kind of woman: making shoes in order to pay for new shoes and handbags and lipsticks. And to keep their families: women’s work is not all about pin money and frivolity, J. B..

There are, or have been, Bata factories all over the world, making shoes for Africa, Asia, Europe and the Americas, as well as the Czechs. Haresh Khanna, the shoemaker-suitor of Lata Mehra in Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy has Bata at the top of his list of preferred employers “I’ve been trying Bata and James Hawley and Praha and Flex and Cooper Allen” (2003: 620). Haresh eventually negotiates his way to taking a supervisor’s position with the efficient Czechs, and stands out from fellow Indian employees by moving into the compound with the ‘Prahamen’ in ‘Prahapore’, pseudonyms for the real Batanagar. In 1932, Bata arrived in East Tilbury, UK (and in the 1940s in Maryport, Cumbria), down at the bottom end of the Essex coast, the dirty part, near where the Thames spews out.

Bata built a new, modern factory, and a new, modern town around it. It brought Czech managers, men, and their families from HQ in Zlin, and recruited local women and men to work the production lines. East European migration isn’t such a new thing. The company wanted a productive workforce, and a productive workforce must be happy. Neat and modern boxes for living in were built, along with leisure facilities – including a swimming pool – a hotel, a bar a grocers and a post office, as in Zlin. Everything you might need, designed for the future.

There are echoes of those nineteenth century paternalists, Cadbury, Salt and Lever, and their company towns, Bournville, Saltaire and Port Sunlight. But with a difference that reflects the mid twentieth century’s “second spirit of capitalism” (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2007), where the gambling of the bourgeois entrepreneur gave way to mass production, mass consumption and massive organisation. Management understanding of the benefits of rationality and planning mark the building of the Bata factories and company towns. And what felt like institutional benevolence for those in charge seemed to have a sound footing in science and logic.

The second spirit drew on techniques of scientific management, developed by F W Taylor, and the Gilbreths, amongst others. Workers were measured and assessed to design productivity improvements through rationalising work activity, or replacing human with machine. The production line, with work divided into discrete tasks, is one legacy of this. However, as Eva Illouz argues, rationality was not all-conquering. The new sciences of the emotions, psychology in particular, gave rise to techniques of emotional capitalism. Elton Mayo for example brought the techniques and presumptions of therapy into management. The good manager would listen to his workers, would pay attention to how they felt (Illouz, 2007: 13–15). Bata had vision and ideals. “Friends and fellow workers” said founder Thomas Bata in one of his Mayday speeches…the contemporary equivalent is ‘we’re all in this together’.

So the difference between Saltaire and East Tilbury is not merely in the contrast between brick houses and a Yorkshire stone factory on the one hand, and the square white boxes of East Tilbury’s working and living spaces, but in the understandings of production, work and life that were presumed. Salt’s employees worshipped in the church he built, and it’s not certain whether god or Salt seemed the most powerful. Bata’s employees were freer, to swim in the pool, and to send their children to scout groups. Forward looking international companies in the 1930s managed with science, offering rationalised work and sensible leisure, rather than direct command and control. Scientific management met emotional capitalism. “Work together, live separately” was one of the Bata family slogans, but living in the company town wasn’t such a separation.

East Tilbury Bata was the temporary HQ of the operation during the second world war, and it made boots for soldiers for this time. Production for the domestic market resumed after the war, and generations of Essex girls and boys worked there. Production continued in East Tilbury until 2005, when the factory was closed (Maryport had gone in the 1980s). Now only one of the twenty Bata ‘production units’ are in Europe (8 in Asia-Pacific, 7 in Africa and 4 in Latin America, see www.bata.com. So, like other company towns founded in era of the ‘third England’, the factory building is decaying and some of the houses – still lived in – are starting to bear witness to the long term unemployment or underemployment that can mean a paint job is out of the question. Of Essex’s modernist legacy, these places of work have come off worse than the genteel, expensive houses of Frinton, or the curved splendour of the Labworth Cafe, Canvey Island (Rose, 2012).

Bataville: we are not afraid of the future is an documentary made of an art project by Karen Guthrie and Nina Pope around 2004, just as East Tilbury Bata was on its last legs. Former workers from Maryport and East Tilbury, and a group of ‘others’, travelled by coach through Europe to Zlin, the birthplace of Bata (now based in Bermuda…how times change). They stop in the Netherlands Bata, to see how robots replaced people, and then onto ‘Bataville’ to have a look round.

In the Netherlands, some of the passengers were tearful. These machines, “wonderful to watch”, have replaced people, people who had skills, who prided themselves that they could go “right down the whole shoe”, not just stick on the sole. And of course,” you can’t have a conversation with a robot.” So despite the pace of the line, where a shoe would pass you every 6 seconds and you had to do your operation on it, there was something that felt good in the work.

I liked this film. I liked the planning the artists had done to get the groups of strangers to talk to each other by asking each to provide some entertainment for the long coach. Some told stories about their working lives, now over, others played games or got everyone to make something, and some talked about the things they loved. I liked one of the artists talking about her worries that the people they took on the bus were left behind in plans for regeneration of post-industrial areas like East Tilbury.

The world we live in is one where production is subcontracted by branded firms, one where cheap goods are made by low paid workers, and where all kinds of footloose manufacturing industries leave unemployment behind. We see in Bataville the long historical roots of how the local is captured by the global. Bata might still be the company that counts in Zlin, but its experiments in work-life omnipotence in the UK didn’t hold out against individualised globalised capitalism. The ongoing ruination is not beautiful decay, but an emblem of post-industrial Essex, where the only jobs left for lipsticked would-be stars are not those of making something, but those of selling something.

This is a revised version of a talk I gave to introduce a screening of Bata-ville, at Manchester Metropolitan University on 26th January 2012. The event was organised by Morag Rose, on behalf of The LRM and the Manchester Modernist Society, in conjunction with Manchester Metropolitan University. Thanks to all involved, especially Morag.

References

1. (2006) Bata-ville: We are not afraid of the future A Somewhere project by Nina Pope and Karen Guthrie, developed by Commissions East.
2. Boltanski, L. and Chiapello, E. (2007) The New Spirit of Capitalism. Verso, London, trans Gregory Elliot.
3. Illouz, E. (2007) Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism. Polity Press, London.
4. Priestley, J. B. (1984[1934]) English Journey, Penguin Books.
5. Rose, M (2012) ‘The Modernists’ Guide to Essex’, The Modernist, issue 3.
6. Seth, V (2003 [1993]) A Suitable Boy. Phoenix Books, London.

George Perec’s The Art and Craft of Approaching your Head of Department to Submit A RequestFor A Raise tells the tale of a man’s decision and indecision as he worries and wonders and wanders around his office looking for the right time and the right way to ask Mr X for a pay raise. He visits Ms Wye at times. He pays attention to what was on the cafeteria menu. He hopes Mr X’s daughters are well and don’t have measles. He circumperambulates the office waiting for the right moment. This comes at “the two hundred and fifty-fifth bid” (2011:79) and it isn’t an instant success.

What I love about this piece is how all those moments of uncertainty that make up organisational life, all the things that go through your mind when you’re at work but not working, the posturing and the wondering and the positioning are brought into a formula of no/yes, 0/1, recursion and slight development. The book’s about the systems that lie within the messiness of living and working. It is prefaced and inspired by a flowchart illustrating computerised decision making produced by Perec’s fellow Oulipian, Jacques Perriaud. Perec makes ‘real’ the grey media of the flowchart adding the uncertainties, false steps and coincidences that make up a working life. Almost real: it’s a story with just one full stop.

Play the game yourself theartofaskingyourbossforaraise.com

Reference

1. Perec, G (2011) The Art and Craft of Approaching your Head of Department to Submit A Request For A Raise, trans David Bellos. London: Vintage Books.

Carly was appointed to do eyelash extensions and was trained to do this at college. She has since been taught to thread by her Beauty Plus colleagues: there just weren’t enough takers for the extensions to keep her busy. She learned waxing during her NVQ, an altogether more brutal and messy hair removal technique. The shift to threading doesn’t come easily to her– as Ingold says, part of skill is the “coupling of perception and action” (2011; 53), and Carly can’t help but to stop and think. Whilst the other women who do the threading are employed because of their ethnicity — they learned to thread as a matter of course, as part of being a girl with Indian heritage — Carly is employed despite her ethnicity. She has her qualifications but few of the skills of her colleagues.  It’s been a few months since I saw her working there.

Reference

Ingold, T (2011) Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description. London and New York: Routledge.

At a house-building site, the kettle was abandoned, as was the empty bottle of that Scottish staple, Irn Bru. Work is powered by hot and cold sugary drinks.

Domestic appliances and accoutrements helped my carpenter-friend’s work A hot iron made stikcing things together much easier; cling film over the paint tray stopped it skinning over whilst he took a tea break, and dishclothes wiped up the spills and splashes of paint and varnish.

In these three male worlds of paid work, there existed small moments of domesticity.

1

2

* and so I admit they were not ‘seasonal workers’, properly defined, being employed by the security firms for other events; I used the term ‘seasonal work’ to make the point that many work tasks are not jobs for life.

** a non-commercialised version of Halloween, and (more devilishly) Mischief Night goes way back to a time before fancy dress shops were around to hire out sexy Zombie costumes.

The car is the “quintessential manufactured object” (Urry, 2006: 17), and its production the object of some curiosity, whether from Goldthorpe, et. al. (1968) wondering what these affluent workers were like, or from Durand and Hatzfeld (2003), what working on the Peugeot line was like. The road on which the car’s success rests so heavily is less fascinating, existing as a frustration for the traveller and a taken-for granted by researchers. There needs to be more gratitude for this work, and more attention to the affordances offered by roads. They make possible being a tourist in the Trossachs, and getting to work in one Highland village from home in another. The kinds of roads that exist in rural places don’t have the promise and frustrations of the motorway or the by-pass: they don’t carry as much traffic, and they don’t have traffic lights and roundabouts, just passing places and warning signs. They make hills manageable.

In contemporary accounts of movement and change in social life, the way movement relies on the fixity and certainty of the road beneath our tyres is not much thought of (see Sheller, 2004). In the city, tarmac is taken for granted. Joe Moran’s On Roads tells us about the politics of road building, and the organisation of road systems, but tells us little about road work as part of the everyday (though its lovely to hear how road bases are formed from the detritus of industrial life: broken up tarmac from elsewhere, or crushed Robbie Williams cds (Moran, 2010: 256).)

The Pochain digger sits up high on a pile of gravel, with its own tracks visible on the leftover gravel, though not on the smoothed out road surface it will leave behind. It sits above the mountains, having opened them up to drivers. It’s been parked for a while as, though the road it built is finished, it’s no easy matter to get it back down the mountain. The rainy Highlands weather is taming the machinery, rusting it up.

References

1. Durand, J. P. and Hatzfeld, N. (2003) Living Labour: Life on the Line at Peugeot France Palgrave Macmillan.
2. Goldthorpe, J.H., Lockwood, D., Bechhofer, F., and Platt, J. (1968a) The Affluent Worker: Industrial Attitudes and Behaviour. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
3. Moran, J. (2010) On Roads: A Hidden History. Profile Books, London.
4. Sheller, M. (2004) ‘Automotive Emotions: Feeling the Car’. Theory, Culture & Society. vol. 21 no. 4–5 221–242.
5. Urry, J. (2006) ‘Inhabiting the Car’. The Sociological Review. Volume 54, Issue Supplement s1, pp 17–31.
6. Richard Wilson/Jonney Steven Britain’s Best Drives, BBC4, October 25th 2011.
]]> http://nowaytomakealiving.net/post/1959/feed 3 http://nowaytomakealiving.net/post/1943 http://nowaytomakealiving.net/post/1943#comments Sun, 16 Oct 2011 12:15:06 +0000 Lynne Pettinger http://nowaytomakealiving.net/?p=1943 Wester Ross in Scotland is a sparsely populated and beautiful area of mountains, lochs, heather and midges. I went there on holiday. Here at nowaytomakealiving.net we don’t like to blog about our own lives too much, but I’m going to break with tradition in this post, and a couple more in the future. I like to notice work, even when – as here – work is not obviously present.



At Loch Coire nan Arr, just up from the photographic opportunity provided by Russell Burn, there’s a water management system that drains from a reservoir down to a loch that’s farmed for salmon. On this August day, the water was low.

The unspoiled wilderness of the tourist brochures turns out to be a highly managed environment, with walkways and raft.

It’s managed by solar panel and radio control, though there are a few signs that human intervention is needed: the wheel can be turned when there’s someone there who knows the padlock combination.

]]> http://nowaytomakealiving.net/post/1943/feed 0 http://nowaytomakealiving.net/post/1907 http://nowaytomakealiving.net/post/1907#comments Mon, 19 Sep 2011 15:10:59 +0000 Lynne Pettinger http://nowaytomakealiving.net/?p=1907 The shelters on platform 3 are behind royal blue plywood. National Express ask for my patience. I can’t see work, but I can hear it. Around the side of the hoarding, away from the wind there’s the entrance: a door propped open by a trailer filling up with knocked down walls, some bricks still cemented together. I catch the guy inside the shelter pulling up his reflective safety trousers and tightening the drawstring. He pretends not to see me until they’re properly fastened.



His mate, a Geordie, comes up and says to me – I know, you’re looking for a bit o shelter. No, I say, I’m just being nosy. Trousers says ‘nothing’s going on here’, and we all laugh. I listen in. The Geordie has a bit of A4 paper he’s found tucked behind the seats in another shelter. It’s someone’s university work.

‘Your task today is to explain and discuss Divine Command Theory’.

‘Aye’, says Trousers. ‘After I’ve spent the day knocking down bricks, I’ll do that’.

‘That’s your thesis, is it?’ Geordie says. He folds the paper neatly and puts it into his pocket.

‘Sci-Fi’ says Trousers, and they take it in turns to list sci-fi films. The train arrives as they’re squabbling about whether Blakes 7 can count because it was on the telly.

The new shelters are transparent all the way: there’s nowhere to sneakily pull your trousers up, or to leave your essay on Divine Command Theory.



]]> http://nowaytomakealiving.net/post/1907/feed 1 http://nowaytomakealiving.net/post/1890 http://nowaytomakealiving.net/post/1890#comments Wed, 31 Aug 2011 11:37:14 +0000 Lynne Pettinger http://nowaytomakealiving.net/?p=1890 Blue collar: maker
White collar: manager
Pink collar: data processor
Green collar: recycler
Open collar: homeworker
Scarlet collar: sex worker
Gold collar: consultant
]]> http://nowaytomakealiving.net/post/1890/feed 1 http://nowaytomakealiving.net/post/1863 http://nowaytomakealiving.net/post/1863#comments Wed, 27 Jul 2011 15:33:47 +0000 Lynne Pettinger http://nowaytomakealiving.net/?p=1863 A simple form of direct taxation, intuitive: you work a week, you pay a proportion of your week’s wages. You work a month, then you pay a proportion of that month. No calculations at the end of the year, no need to keep a piggy bank to put it by. It goes before you know it’s there.
A bureaucracy lies behind it, a bureaucracy of rules, codes and tiny slips of paper, where individuals are identified by name, address, number and bank account, employers by name and code, and amounts and justifications are numbered: 620 means basic rate. The slip is covered in a jumble of numbers, not all readable. Part human, part machine. In part a story of my past, and in part nothing to do with me.

BEEFEATER STEAK HOUSES — I was a barmaid, later promoted to a waitress. I was a vegetarian.
03/01/97 — The first paycheck of the new year. Those two hours of overtime counted as my New Year’s Eve bonus.
HOURLY RATE £3.2800 – not much of a living wage.
DO NOT DESTROY – I took this seriously.


There are plans afoot for a new bureaucracy, an updated computer system enabling ‘RTI’ (Real Time Information) so that deductions are reported by employers to the HM Revenue and Customs as they happen, not at the end of the year – the idea being to avoid over– and under-payment. This new computer system is a new a grey media you wont often think about, but which will re-write your payslip.

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