Anne Marie Greene - Voices from the Shop Floor: Dramas of the Employment Relationship

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VOICES FROM THE SHOPFLOOR: DRAMAS OF THE EMPLOYMENT RELATIONSHIP

For Hilary and Steve, who daily break down the binarism, and to whom I thank for a polycentric upbringing.

Voices from the Shopfloor: Dramas of the Employment Relationship

ANNE-MARIE GREENE
Lecturer in Industrial Relations, University o f Warwick

First published 2001 by Ashgate Publishing

Reissued 2018 by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

Copyright Anne-Marie Greene 2001

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Notice:
Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

Publishers Note
The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint but points out that some imperfections in the original copies may be apparent.

Disclaimer
The publisher has made every effort to trace copyright holders and welcomes correspondence from those they have been unable to contact.

A Library of Congress record exists under LC control number: 2001022162

ISBN 13: 978-1-138-72065-7 (hbk)
ISBN 13: 978-1-315-19497-4 (ebk)

Contents

My greatest debt is to all those managing, representing and working at LockCo, KeyCo and the Lockunion, without whom this book would never have been written. In particular, I would like to thank Margaret Grieco for endless encouragement and helping mould the research thesis and move it forward in new directions. I would also like to thank John Black and Peter Ackers for their support, friendship and mutual industrial relations interests. I owe a huge debt of gratitude to Peter Gillam, who has offered constant emotional support throughout the trials and tribulations of both the research and the writing of this volume. I acknowledge the guidance and collegial friendship offered by the members of the Odyssey Group, Gill Kirton and the help of those involved in the production of this book series especially Pat FitzGerald and, at Ashgate, Val Rose and Anne Keirby. The photograph on has been reproduced with kind permission of the photographer Nick Hedges. Finally, I would like to thank Mike Terry, Ed Heery and Alan McKinlay for their helpful comments.

The aim of this volume is to demonstrate the utility of ethnographic research methods to industrial relations in the developing world. The volume makes use of an ethnographic account of an occupational community based around the lock manufacturing industry in England, plus a number of ethnographically-informed industrial relations accounts from the developing world. This is in order to illustrate the vitality and richness of the ethnographic method, connecting such accounts to emergent themes, which have relevance for industrial relations in the developing world and attempting to break down the existing binarism which rigidly separates developed and developing world contexts.

This Prologue illustrates the kind of ethnographic material that informs this volume. We firstly present some examples from the lock industry ethnographies, exploring the experience of work on the assembly line in a lock factory from both the perspective of an ethnographic observer and then from the perspective of two of the assembly line workers themselves. Secondly we present a developing world example, offering citations from Ramaswamys (1994) study of a rayon spinning factory in Delhi, India; once again from both the perspective of Ramaswamy himself as an ethnographic observer and then from the perspective of a factory worker.

The Ethnographic Researchers View at the Lock Company

Conditions are hard at the factory. Walking around, the noise of machinery is deafening. The most prominent image of assembly work is its fast pace. The effects of this are demonstrated by watching the women at their benches, as they rock their torsos as they work, getting into the rhythm necessary to keep the piece rate up to speed. Their hands move like lightening, picking up a component, adding it into the machine and pressing levers in a fluid motion lasting only seconds. If you talk to the women minutes after they have been working, they continue to rock in the rhythm of the line. People are machining on hand presses, sparks and splinters flying everywhere, while others are hand filing locks and keys. It is mostly the women you see on the shopfloor, many of the men are tucked away in the tool rooms, or the warehouse. Foremen, distinguishable by their red-collared blue coats, instead of overalls, walk around the shopfloor overseeing, stopping now and then to talk to the women or to consult their clipboards. These are the lock workers.

Two Lock Assembly Workers Views

With the miller, you put a component in, you lock your tool, you start a handle and it goes through and cuts that cut, then you have to wait for it to come back. Usually youve got your next one ready, sometimes theyre pretty quick, and that might be waiting for you so the quicker you pick the next component up and get it in the better it is I mean I went on like a Wells press, and it aint the original foot pedal what they used to use, and youve got to sort of sit, so you can see inside as the guard opens, the chairs are too high or too low, and me being pretty tall, you know, youve got to sit on the edge of your seat, you were sort of having to really press down before anything would happen, and then as the day wore on, my back, every time I touched the treadle, I could feel it jarring my back.

when I joined here when I was fifteen, I thought Id got the world, but I wanted to look after children, and I thought, When Im sixteen, Ill leave and do what I want to do, but I got into a crowd, and they was near enough my age, eighteen upwards, and they made me feel that welcome, and you sit in a group sort of thing, and we had that many laughs and that much fun, it werent like coming to work, it was a pleasure, you know I love coming to work, I love it here, I do, ask anyone, theyll say Im bleeding mental, gotta be, aint you cock, to get on.

The Ethnographic Researchers View at the Indian Rayon Spinning Factory

Important differences in technology and the structure of work in the three segments of the factory pulp, fibre and yarn have always influenced the thinking of both labour and management. The pulp plant is by far the most highly automated of the three. Manual work here is largely confined to the start of the process, where crane operators load logs onto chippers, and at the end of the line where unskilled labourers stack the pulp boards. In between lies typical process technology which makes few demands on workers during normal times. They have little work, except to watch instrument panels and note down readings. The pace of work is distinctly easy. For both workers and management, in sum, pulp represented a better place (Ramaswamy, 1994, p. 27).

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