leaflet on parker/newhaven

text in german
This is a copy of a leaflet in english and spanish distributed by workers at the Parker Pen factory in Newhaven near Brighton, UK on Thursday 9th November, 2000. For contact and more info please mail:
undercurrent00@yahoo.co.uk

STOP THE CLOCK!

Do you ever get the feeling you're being watched? If you do, that's because you are: a technician has been carrying out time-and motion studies on our work. The reason for this, according to management, is to make our work more efficient. They claim that they need to do this in order to speed up the operations that are going too slow, and to slow down the ones that are going too fast, so as to improve the co-ordination of the assembly lines. Of course they need an efficient flow of production, but this is not the only reason for these tests. They also want to find out how fast we can work and to use the information to speed up the work. The tests will enable them to fix new production targets, which they will then hassle us to meet.

Time is against us
Ever wondered why smoking is banned except during the designated (unpaid) time? It isn't because of concern for our health. It's because the bosses don't want to pay us for any time that we're not making more profits for the firm. This is also the reason why, when the generators failed to kick in during the power cut, management were falling over themselves to find ways of keeping us working even though the machines weren't. At one stage, they were thinking of handing out torches to the night shift, so that they could continue inspecting the pens!
Higher production targets could give them an excuse to come down even harder on the small pleasures that help us to ease the boredom of long hours on the assembly line: snacking, flirting, general fooling about, dragging the job out, dragging out trips to the vending machine or the toilet.

The time-and-motion men are not our friends and "fellow workers": though they try to come over all matey, they are sadistic bullies who take delight in subjecting us to the stress and indignity of their "tests", and whose job is to make our job harder, by studying us like laboratory rats. The pressure to work fast is already leading to injuries, and speed ups can only make things worse for our health and safety. We need to resist this pressure, but although we have every reason not to co-operate with these overfed bureaucrats, purely individual resistance will lead to people being picked off one by one - particularly agency workers, who can be sacked at the drop of a hat.
For workers, this "scientific" way to organise production makes our job more and more repetitive and tiring. The only aim of studying every movement of our job is to increase production, regardless of whether the result will be a more boring job. So technology and organisation are not used to improve our working conditions but only to increase our exploitation, reducing us to mere instruments of production, machines for making a profit.

(Team)working - for the Rat Race
The time-and-motion studies are part and parcel of the "teamworking" system in operation on Parker's assembly lines, in which senior workers (on top of their existing duties, and for no extra money) become the eyes and ears of the management. This system, developed in Toyota car-plants, encourages the different lines to compete in the rat race (to the bottom!) to see who can make the most pens, i.e., the most money for the bosses! The atmosphere in the workplace becomes a bit like the "Big Brother" house, with the workers who are high up in the pecking order nominating other less secure workers for "eviction", based on their personal prejudices and dislikes. It is a system which turns worker against worker, so that people get more worked up bitching about the quality and speed of colleagues' work than they do about injury to fellow workers. But solidarity will do more to improve our health and safety than canteen displays with moronic "spot-the-potential-accident" competitions!

Full-time staff, although paid more than temps, have to suffer the bullying of team leaders and their stooges, always looking over their shoulders and keeping their mouths shut in case they are selected as a target for that day. On top of this are the irreparable injuries to wrists and hands and backs, the result of performing the same mundane task day-in day-out for years. Many work long hours so they can retire early, in other words, to get out of the factory as soon as possible. But these individual solutions may provide some relief one day but at what expense. By increasing their normal work load in the hope of some pleasure time in the future they are only putting more pressure upon themselves, and speeding-up the time it takes injuries to develop. But this will do nothing to improve the situation now. So far Parker has been successful in fostering a lack of common perspective between full time and agency workers. But the improvement of conditions in the factory is the common interest of all workers.

Just in time - to be sacked?
Most of the workers of this factory are temp/agency workers, hired when the needs of production demand it, and fired when market conditions change. So working overtime - and working faster in the "normal hours" - only brings the day closer when management lays off the agency workers, except the "lucky few" who survive long enough to become fully paid-up Parker temps.

The time and a half paid for working over the "normal" daytime hours only helps to increase the firm's profits. If workers had refused to work over the normal hours they would have been forced to hire more workers which would have cost them more money - instead of paying the extra half they would have to pay the full rate that late-shift workers receive! So obviously they prefer not to have to do this as this would bite into profits.
But, although as agency workers, we have a collective interest in resisting speed-ups and longer hours, our continual insecurity compels us to accept whatever shit working conditions we are faced with. So it is normal to do a lot of overtime, to work from 6 am to 6 p.m., because with wages at the level they are, we need the money. The overtime bonus of time and a half is a sprat to catch a mackerel: Parker makes far more money out of us working longer hours, than we do out of them.

This is the condition of the working class in this and other factories, and in every work place (hotels, call centres, supermarkets). Leaving the job for another, in the hope that it will be better is a path leading to a dead-end. Everywhere workers are divided, bosses force us into competition the one against the other using different ploys: different contracts and wages for skilled and unskilled workers, bonuses. They flatter and patronise us, and when that doesn't work, they just bully us. The only way to improve our lives is to pool our individual survival strategies, and to transform them into collective actions.

Overtime and Flexibility: "Stretching the Workforce" - and the Working Day
Most factories are organised for production flexibility, which means that they try to keep stocks to a bare minimum, producing only what they intend to sell immediately ("just-in-time"), and externalising part of the flow of production. That creates a link between workers in different factories. Moreover we can see when they need to increase production because they take on more temp workers, so we can tell when industrial direct action is likely to be more effective: because they keep stocks to a minimum, the interruption to production that such action causes can get us what we want. If we get organised and stick together, we can use the bosses' precious flexibility against them.

What we need is to start to meet both inside and outside of the factory in order to discuss our working conditions, to find out how the company is using the organisation of work against us and how we can use it against bosses to get what we want. Meeting each other, socialising our problems and trying to find a solution together against bosses, managers and every kind of bureaucrat is the only way to start to trust in ourselves and to improve our lives. Let's begin by distributing and discussing this leaflet with other workers.

Photocopy it, leave it where others can see it!


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