CHARNWOOD ELASTICS - THE BLEACH ACCIDENT

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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