I walked past here a while ago, and amused myself — if not my companion — by pretending that whoever lived at this house was a very active user of the telephone.

This was just a weak joke on my part. These are to be unwrapped and delivered, and someone was going to deliver them. Are they safe outside? Well, no-one’s going to steal something that they’re about to be given for free, are they? And it probably wont rain.

I didn’t meet the person who pushed one through my letterbox that week. But a day or so later, I saw the fruits of their work elsewhere in the neighbourhood, neatly propped up, too big for the letterbox.

Ref­er­ences

1. Stark, D. (2009) The Sense of Dissonance: Accounts of Worth in Economic Life Princeton University Press.

“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.

According to Williams, the Isotype charts used in the book are ‘not introduced for decoration, though their colours do certainly enliven the page’. She continues: ‘if you look at them with attention you will find that they suggest all sorts of relationships between different bits of our complex society that probably would not jump so vividly into your mind simply from looking at rows of figures or reading descriptions of facts’ (1945: 10). Visual sociology in a nutshell!

The charts that stuck me most were two entitled, ‘The Changing Home’. The first, immediately below, represents a pre-industrial world in which the home is centre-stage. With the establishment of schools, and the extension of production including food production beyond the home and for more than subsistence needs, there is an overlap in what takes place ‘Inside the Home’ and ‘Outside the Home’ by the ‘19th Century’.

In the second chart (below), the first half is devoted to ‘Today’ (as in 1945). There is a strict and persistent gendered division of labour and recognition of work performed in different socio-economic modes and spatial contexts inside and outside the home: childcare and education, cooking and baking, laundry, making clothes, and food production. What is especially fascinating is Williams’ exploratory representation of ‘The future?’ (in the second half of the chart below) imagined in a context of the scarcity of workers (1945: 110–111). It shows an ever-increasing shift to all activities (except cleaning) taking place outside of the home, with men and women equally positioned in the public sphere. We might also read her chart to imply that the vacuum cleaner is an autonomous object, the agent as well as the instrument of its work!

What we now know is that there are many combinations of the activities in Williams’ charts taking place as paid or unpaid work inside or outside of the home, as formal employment or as informal activities undertaken by friends, family or voluntary workers (Glucksmann, 1995, 2005). Perhaps what Williams didn’t fully anticipate was the complexity and variety of these relations — or the ongoing gender segregation in who does what, wherever it takes place.

References
1. Glucksmann, M. (2005). ‘Shifting boundaries and interconnections: extending the “total social organisation of labour”’, in L. Pettinger, J. Parry, R.F. Taylor and M. Glucksmann (editors) A New Sociology of Work? Oxford and Malden, MA.: Blackwell Publishing/The Sociological Review.
2. Glucksmann, M. (1995). ‘Why “Work”? Gender and the “Total Social Organisation of Labour”’, Gender, Work and Organization 2(2): 63–75.
3. Williams, G. (1945) Women and Work, London: Nicholson and Watson.

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.

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.

Tuesday night in North London. The pub is already shut despite 24-hour drinking. We head to a Tescos Extra store, bright lights and bustle whatever the hour. Late evening shopping has peaked but the place is still busy. It’s workers rather than shoppers that predominate now. In the first isle, music is blaring, helping to maintain the rhythm of the work required to replenish the shelves. As we head towards the far side of the store, we see men and women, mostly middle-aged, putting cans, boxes and packets in their places. The ‘Beer and Wine’ aisle is almost fully occupied by trolleys packed with tomorrow’s drinks. We squeeze by to make our selections then move towards the checkouts. But they are almost completely obscured by more trolleys piled high with stock (as in the image). The night-time shift in the character of the space from one geared to consumption to one geared to work is clear. It’s mostly self checkout at this hour.

Our experience of watching, for most of us fans, is one mediated by the cameras that scoot alongside the race. The close up shots of the breakaway and of the agony on the face of the climber are produced: this is not Baudrillardian hyperreality, simulations of simulations. There must be a zoom lens near the race, carried on a bike or car travelling at the same speed as the cyclists. Check out the motorcyclist’s pillion rider in this picture (and yes sharp-eyes, this isn’t France, it’s Colchester… it’s the best I can do). He’s facing backwards, holding that heavy camera, gripping the motorbike under him, trusting his driver. This isn’t easy work; it needs a combination skilled camera operation and the tacit knowledge of how to move your body with the moving bike, as well as a fondness for speed.

Stage 9 of the 2011 Tour de France saw more crashes than it should. The most horrific involved barbed wire, Johnny Hoogerland and Juan Antonio Flecha and a French tv car that swerved around a tree and in doing so knocked a man sideways. The other, Hoogerland was tossed into the air and onto a fence.

Drivers who follow the tour are usually ex-pro cyclists, well aware of how to prioritise the man-bike hybrid over the 2 ton car (and given the previous week’s accident where the Danish champion Nicki Sorenson was knocked over by a motorbike, you’d think everyone would be being careful). And so the newsmaker is the news at the moment. You can find pictures of Hoogerland’s flanks torn by barbed wire all over the internet; I have no desire to force you to look.

Sociologists such as Thomas Scheff, have been good at exploring the importance of the “inner contagion” (1990: 76) of shame as a marker of social bonds. We often speak of feelings like shame –and guilt — as individual, not shared, but Scheff argues that shame is a social emotion: something we’re keen to avoid feeling in ourselves in order to justify our belonging and we’d exclude those who were shameful. Guilt shares with shame the sense of being about self and other. After his tears on the podium, getting his King of the Mountains jersey, Johnny Hoogerland said:

It’s horrible, I can blame everyone, but I think no-one did this on purpose. I think the people in the car will have a very big guilty feeling and they will for sure apologise to me … and nobody I can blame for this, it’s a horrible accident and I was in it, and I just say to Flecha, we still alive.

Hoogerland’s understanding of the feelings of the other and the way he avoids looking for responsibility or to attribute cause, are notable. He leaves others to be angry for him, and he understands that he need not express a desire to know that someone else feels guilty; they will feel it regardless.

Reference
Scheff, T. J. (1990) Microsociology: Discourse, emotion, and social structure. Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press.

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.

The photographs in the presentation are extracts from the two works I made. One, “Every Night The Same” reflected the experience of having the same dream, night after night, and the experience of seeing only a part of a place as big as a university: however long I work there, it’s never graspable. I can capture only a glimpse. What I see is repeated, though not replicated elsewhere, in the straight lines of buildings, and blinds, and crushed cardboard. These images were shot on my Canon F1, 50mm lens using Kodak black and white film, 3200iso at ankle height, 13th Feb 2011.

The second work, “Actual Occasions”, used Impossible Project film for a polaroid camera. Polaroid doesn’t make film for its cameras any more, and so Impossible have tried to work out how. They haven’t quite got it right, and so the photos are unstable, full of light leaks and odd shadows. That suits this project admirably, as the properties of the things that are shot are not stable. “Actual Occasions” is taken from Alfred North Whitehead’s philosophy, which seems to me to argue that events and objects are not fixed and immutable but create moments of time and space, which are then experienced by other actual occasions. These other occasions involve a recurrence of experiences, times and spaces. Objects therefore, have something of a life themselves.

A few other images are present in this slideshow, and they’re interspersed with dreams recorded by staff and students at the university. Even the most nightmarish dream sounds funny written down, and it’s not surprising that many dreams are about work.

Thanks to Michael Halewood for the commission and the curation.