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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