One
 of my duties at the end of each shift was to clean the dye kitchen 
which required the use of neat industrial strength bleach. I had to pour
 the bleach from a heavy and bulky 25 litre container into a smaller 
container. One day while doing this I slipped and the bleach splashed 
upwards into my left eye. The pain was unreal and it scared the hell out
 of me. They tried to wash some of it out but it was quickly agreed that
 I had to go to hospital in Leicester. The supervisor seemed to delight 
in the fact that I had given him the afternoon off work to drive me 
there in one of the directors upmarket sports cars.
Having
 the beach washed out was horrible but they agreed I was ok in the end. I
 had to go back for a checkup a week later and was given the ok. I also 
discovered that getting an alkali in your eye was worse than acid.
The
 accident was of course my own fault because I didn’t use eye 
protection, it was one of them things I (and most other people) did 
dozens of times without even thinking about. However the incident did 
make me more aware of what the place was like. One person privately told
 me that I could have taken action against the company because several 
of the first aid boxes were empty and I had no formal training with the 
chemicals I was using. I didn’t know until later that the bleach I used 
was 80% Sodium hypochlorite
 instead of the 4-8 percent you get in common household bleach. We 
didn’t have a formal training on the chemical until I had been working 
in the dyehouse for 5 years!!!!
Charnwood
 elastics was just an accident waiting to happen, safety guards were 
often missing from machines and electric cables often trailed on the 
floors in puddles. The incident which sumed the company up most of all 
for me was when one of the management (Malcolm Martin) asked one of the 
lads to stack a pile of dye boxes. When the person in question pointed 
out that he would be blocking a fire exit if he put the boxes where 
Malcolm pointed to he replied "so what it's only a five thousand pound 
fine" and walked off !!!!!
Another
 unusual aspect of working at Charnwood was the workers carefree 
attitude to attendance and timekeeping and the managements slack 
attitude to properly deal with it. To arrive at work at 6:00 and being 
the only person in the dye house until 06:30 was nothing unusual. 
Especially on Monday mornings when people often arrived up to an hour 
late bleary eyed and stinking of alcohol. What baffled me the most is 
that nobody hardly ever seemed to get in trouble with the management.
There
 was a couple of occasions (in 7 years!!!!) that the management did have
 a bit of a word with people. Once everyone with an absence rate of more
 than 3% were called up into the office which was everyone in the 
dyehouse except me. One of the lads had a 5% absence rate and every day 
he had off was a Monday on early shift or a Friday on late shift, it 
couldn't’ have been any more obvious. 
Looking
 back over a decade later most management I have met wouldn’t have 
tolerated a quarter of what people regularly got away with at charnwood.
 A couple of people did eventually lose their jobs but it was only after
 years. My own supervisor lost his job once only to be given it back a 
day later when he came in to empty his locker. 
Charnwood
 was a lot different to “normal” workplaces, but at the time it was the 
first long term employment I had so I didn’t have any proper basis for 
comparison.  
My
 job was in no way directly affected by other peoples lateness or bad 
timekeeping as it was one man per machine. It did however go against a 
lot of things I had been taught growing up. As early as the age of 6 or 7
 I had my own alarm clock and never needed any kind of prompting to get 
up for school. The concept of oversleeping just didn’t exist not for 
school and certainly not for work. I was always dedicated to my job, if I
 was in the pub on Sunday night and I decided that 8pm was the time to 
go home for early shift 99% of the time I did it even if I had a dozen 
other people trying to persuade me to stay out for “one more” 
I
 did naively believe at the time that I would stand out from the rest of
 the workforce and somehow be rewarded for it at some point in the 
future. The dyehouse manager did once comment that he wished he had a 
dozen clones of me working on the machines but that was about it. Just 
as nobody hardly anyone got punished for being bad I didn’t get any kind
 of reward for being good. If anything I got pushed into jobs that the 
management would never have given the slackers to do.
Within
 6 months at Charnwood elastics all the warning signs were saying that 
it was going to turn into the job from 
hell............................  
 
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