“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.

Like many newcomers to China before me, I struggled to comprehend the scale and ferocity of the productive forces that have changed Dongguan forever. According to my travelling companions, a young academic and four young female labour activists, Dongguan’s 10 million inhabitants form one physically indistinct node along an urban corridor that stretches for hundreds of kilometres beyond Guangdong province and across south China’s manufacturing heartlands. Perhaps as recently as 20 years ago, the broken concrete pavements upon which we walked and the broad roads along which our minibus rattled would have hosted fertile agricultural lands producing some of the region’s most cherished rice crops. Instead, the descendants of the villagers that once worked this land have found a new and on occasion spectacular source of wealth in the rents derived from the arrival of the factories and their workers.

The scale of what I surveyed was matched by a sense of its brutal functionality. These factories are no dark satanic mills but rather stark utilitarian places of labour, austere physical units of production barely indistinguishable from one another; and possibly from thousands of others in East Asia. Buildings both cheap and quick to erect, and fenced in by high block walls topped with broken glass and barbed wire, there was little visible to betray any effort to create some sense of corporate identity, pride or purpose beyond that conveyed by an occasional national flag fluttering in the warm breeze or by the Spartan, sometimes tatty corporate signage.

Perhaps this functionality could be equally understood in terms of instability, as Dongguan’s current predicament hints at an underlying impermanence. The 2008 financial crisis hit the area hard as orders were lost and the factories let workers go. Since then, according to my companions, few of the factory’s workforces have returned to pre-crisis levels and continuing labour shortages now besets Dongguan. Among the most visible signs of this, for me at least, were the numerous billboards, posters and leaflets pasted to factory walls and doors, or tied to street signs and lampposts proclaiming opportunities for employment. Work, these advertisements announce, is readily available for healthy workers aged 18 to 40 and the pay on offer for a 40-hour week is well above the local minimum. In the most conspicuous examples, the large lettering and bright eye-catching colours also seek to tempt itinerant workers with promises of social insurance and paid holidays, alongside vistas of the seemingly model factory beyond the high walls and the varied entertainments on offer to its workers. And yet the factories of Dongguan continue to struggle to recruit. Wages remain insufficient to meet the spiralling costs of rent and sustenance, the living conditions inside and outside the factories are lonely and unwelcoming, and the work insufficiently engaging. Labour turnover, I am told, can be as much as 50% each year. It is to deal with this labour ‘problem’ that some of Dongguan’s factories, themselves no more than a few years old, are looking to relocate to other parts of mainland China where labour is more plentiful and cheaper.

For the time being at least, the workers still muster a conspicuous presence on the streets of Dongguan’s industrial enclaves. Leaving the factories for lunch or when their shifts end, they spill onto the streets looking for somewhere to eat, refresh themselves, watch TV, telephone a loved one or simply escape their workplace. The ‘uniform’ of this new working class is the ubiquitous polo shirt, its youthful, preppy western signification reconfigured into a utilitarian industrialism that attributes the workers to their factories, and thus to the products that they make, according to the shade of blue, mauve, yellow or orange that they are wearing. To my eye, the bearers of these bright colours are young; some look very young indeed. And perhaps it is only the young that are willing and capable of uprooting themselves from families and friends in order to traverse China’s vast distances in search of a better life in Dongguan’s industrial districts.

It’s dangerous work, yes. You can guess that from seeing how far away the ground is. Though it’s the insouciance in the face of danger that we admire from where we sit comfortably inside our offices, 80 years on. Construction work is perilous work, always was, always is. There are ways to make it safer: hard hats and care: a zero approach.

Although as Johann Hari wrote in the Independent in 2008 when he told the story of Patrick O’Sullivan and of Kieron Deeney, these tokens mean little in the face of attacks on even small protections.\ In 2011 he wrote again, as powerfully, as angrily, about other threats to life at work, setting the story of Mark Wright against mocking attacks on the very idea of health and safety at work, and alongside cuts to the already fairly toothless Health and Safety Executive.

If you die at work and it’s your organisation’s fault, then (in Britain, and since 2008) the employer could face a charge of corporate manslaughter. This means that the company can be held responsible, not one individual. The 1st case came to court in February of 2011, though it didn’t really test the legislation’s possibilities (Cotswold Geotechnical Holdings was run by one man. No chain of command). The power of the act to scope up and down the ladder of senior management to determine culpability is yet to be tried. But one day, perhaps, the minions will be held to account.

Staying indoors
These are deaths in hazardous jobs. Mining, construction, fishing and the like are inevitably risky – people aren’t strong in the face of gravity, big machines or powerful waves. Indoors, though, in well-inspected factories producing high-end consumer goods, you’d be safer…hopefully. Though not if your workplace, say a Foxconn factory in China, explodes whilst you’re in the middle of a long shift making i-pads for tech-hungry Apple addicts. Then you’re a victim of the ‘terrible necessities’ of consumer capital.

And what if it’s not that the machinery’s at fault, it’s not that you’ve tripped and fallen, nor have you been hit by a reversing truck. It’s that the day-after-day existence surviving long working hours, living in overcrowded dormitory accommodation, being bullied by management, feeling insecure, hating work but not being able to leave it, well, it all gets too much. Suicide. Whose fault is that?

In both the Foxconn suicides of 2010 and the recent years of ‘suicide contagion’ at France-Telecom-Orange, relatives and workmates – and suicide notes — have blamed indecent working conditions for the deaths. In the most recent case at France Telecom, a man set fire to himself in the work car park. Corporate denial here is easy – as it is in the case of Karōshi in Japan (‘death by overwork’). It’s easy to blame the individuals, not companies, or economic structures. Choice, personal responsibility, finding the man who made the mistake that led to the explosion: these are easy explanations, but they’re not enough.

The situation is ripe with ‘infernal alternatives’:

“that set of situations that seem to leave no other choice than resignation or a slightly hollow sounding denunciation” (Pignarre and Stengers, 2010: 24).

Accept deaths as an inevitable product of the crazy pace of production in this competitive world of commerce? Callous. Regulate to protect vulnerable bodies? You’re an “Elf ‘n’ safety zealot” (Daily Mail).

“Let us recall the Black Book that added up all the deaths ‘caused’ by communism. This type of calculation is impossible with capitalism, because there are always other actors on stage who seem much more concrete… Danone closes a factory? One can criticise the directors of Danone, or – to hear them talking – the terrible necessities of international competition, or the selfish demands of shareholders.” (Pignarre and Stengers, 2010: 12).

‘Capitalism kills’ sloganeering doesn’t suit any better than ‘shit happens’: neither grandstanding narrative nor depressing (and insulting) fatalism are helpful in examining the tragedy of death at work.

Reference

• Pignarre, P. and Stengers, I. (2011) Capitalist Sorcery: Breaking the Spell. Palgrave Macmillan. Trans. Andrew Goffey.

And the new Fordism? Well, Santos has left the US army and gone to work for Ford. Santos checks how much work a body can manage on the production line. How many tyres can he unload in the heat before he collapses? Can he turn far enough to pick up that tool? Does that hurt? How long can he work for? But don’t worry, this Santos isn’t having his physical limits tested in some hot maquiladora. Santos isn’t a person. Santos is cyborg: software given human form to produce a “dynamic evaluation” of what sort of strain a person would be able to take. Understanding strain, say the research team at the University of Iowa, lessens the risk of injury to assembly line workers, and improves efficiency.

The body is modelled, its joint flexibility measured, its strength assessed and quantified. The fleshy materiality of a body is transposed into data, data, data. And in the end this will change the experience of working on the line. It will standardise work schedules and restrict movement — because science will have generated the best way of doing work. And I’m all in favour of saving strain and lessening damage. But I’m not quite sure this is what Santos will do; Santos-data enhances Taylorism; it treats the body as a machine and makes no allowances for what it is to be a working man on that line. To be tired one day, to feel.

The film also has a pedagogic point to make. Most documentaries of the time, including the ones we saw on British TV on the Czech rebellion, worked really hard to make their depictions seem realistic. In the process, they reproduce an ideological ‘reality’, for marxists. One way to show this ideological effect is to break the usual conventions, which is what Pravda does in a determined way. In the most-often quoted scene, some Czech workers appear on screen, speaking Czech. No subtitling or dubbing is provided for the viewer, unlike in the usual documentary – ‘Vladimir’ tells ‘Rosa’ ‘If you don’t speak Czech, you had better learn fast!’

The work scene is also disturbingly unusual (forward to 46min 30 seconds in this version). We see a young man tending a large rotary cutting machine in the Skoda factory (which made weapons as well as cars, the commentary reminds us). The machine cutters move slowly up and down the piece they are working on. We get extremely noisy natural sound. There are no edits or shifts in camera position, and no other sound for 5 or 6 minutes(a very long time in cinema). The worker tends the machine, lubricating it occasionally, but largely just watching it as it does its job. There are no ear defenders, no guard rails, and no other workers to talk to. After a couple of minutes, we are all longing for it to end.

My students often nominated this scene as the most annoying and challenging in the whole of a very unenjoyable film (but it did them good!). That was the whole point, of course. They found 5 minutes enough, so what of the poor guy who spent 8 hours a day doing that?

References

1. Monaco, J ( 1976) New Wave: Truffaut, Godard, Chabrol, Rohmer, Rivette Oxford: Oxford University Press.