PART-TIME WORKER
By BETTY ASKWITH
ifIE first thing that struck me in the factory where I have worked
for some time was the friendliness and helpfulness of my .workers. In my early inexperienced days, when things kept going ang, no one was ever too cross or too busy to help me out of a is and to cover up my mistakes. This niceness, possibly an inte- il part of the Enghsh character, was either the cause or the result a certain lack of urgency. The women worked .hard and well, a no one could be said to be really working all out. No one ever wed a moment after the whistle blew to finish up a job or put Oa a fault. In fact, by tacit consent everyone stopped working least five to ten minutes before it sounded. Everyone took ten five minutes off in the cloakroom during the afternoon, washing ads and smoking cigarettes.
The full-time girls were worse about all this than the part-timers. his was very understandable. They were.. on the whole much anger, and this wasn't war-work to them, it was their regular b. The little privileges and traditions, the surreptitious relaxations what is after all a fairly strenuous life, were not to be lightly sandoned. In the factory I and most of my fellow part-time takers were doing a job because of the war, a job we should never °again, for a definite limited period. It was more natural for us think of it as part of the war effort and not as just a rather boring it necessary way of earning a living. This is one of the advan- es of part-time workers.
The lack of urgency is also due to another cause difficult to ove. This is the feeling of separation between the workers and management. It is difficult to assess- until one has actually self worked in a factory. For one thing, it is completely, or in my factory, without animosity. It is reasonable, it is tern- ate. But it is there. The solidarity among workers resembles solidarity of children against grown-ups. A bad worker can by with almost anything because her fellows cover it up. The gement inflicts as much discipline as it can. It insists on the er being on time, on the ten-minutes' tea interval being strictly ved, it frowns on your clocking-out for a friend whose bench long way from the clock. The worker accepts all this, and in
m gets as much back as possible, dawdles in the cloak- and would no more dream of not having her hat and coat ready for the last whistle than of blowing up the shop with smite.
Is it possible to combat this? Is it possible to treat a factory full diverse types, not as children to be disciplined, but as reasonable le working on the same side? Explanation should be a great of the management's task. Our bench was intensely interested n we were told that a certain consignment we were on was as priority order to Russia. When the Atlantic sinkings were all our South American consignments were packed up with sad little foreboding that they would give the fishes indigestion. enheless, we worked urgently on that order, and it did mean ething to us that the ordinary routine work, useful as we sup- d it to be, did not.
Lain, if work is held up for lack of material, the whole matter 'd and should be carefully explained. Everybody hates having ling to do. It is almost impossible to get people to work urgency on a Thursday and a Friday if they have been sitting drIg on Tuesday and Wednesday. And once the feeling and r of urgent work is lost, it is a bad thing. In what way, how- , does the management maintain contact with the workers in to provide these explanations? On a big occasion the head the factory can make a speech. This was done by the manager ray factory on the introduction of part-time workers. He spoke gh a dictaphone in every department, explaining the urgency the case, and appealing to the full-timers to make things as easy Possible. This had a very good effect. But, plainly, it cannot done often. Calling people together and making speeches to is alien to the English character. The key to the problem lies the charge-hands.
It is not, to my mind, sufficiently realised how immensely important a position the charge-hands hold in the life of a factory. They are
the vital link between the management and the workers. They have to distribute the work, see that the bench moves in an even rhythm and that there are no bottle-necks, sort out the good workers from the bad, give out the pay-checks, explain the system of bonus, find a place and a job for the newcomer. It is they who rea113,suffer under such difficulties as part-time work presents. In the ordinary way, they are in charge of a bench-full of skilled workers, who know their job from A to Z, whose average age is probably about 23, who do not wish to lose their jobs, and who work from 8 a.m. to 5.30 p.m. Under the part-time system the charge-hand has just got his bench running smoothly and the flow of work evenly adjusted when it is all broken up. and, half an hour before his dinner, he has to arrange everything again. Moreover, the women he has to handle are quite different from the usual factory girls. They may be old enough to be his mother. They have run their own homes and brought up their children, and they have their own ideas about how things should be done. It is quite vital that in such cases the young man should have the ability, not to impose a disciplinary standard, but to appeal to the reasonableness and common sense which nearly all these women possess.
It is strange there are not more women charge-hands. The managements think the girls don't like working under them, and, indeed, I have heard most workers also express that view. There was one in my factory. She was only 20, and she seemed very popular with the bench, rather to the surprise of everybody. It seems to me that intelligent women would make a success of the ,ob. One thing, at any rate, which women could and should do in factories is starting the newcomers. Most part-time work is un- skilled. It would be unnecessary and wasteful for women to take a training course before they come into the factory. On the other hand, endless time and material could be saved if there were someone whose job it was to show newcomers the right way to work.
At present in most factories no provision is made for this at all. The duty devolves on the charge-hand, who is far too busy to attend to it properly. He puts the newcomer on to a place on the bench, shows her roughly what to do and then leaves her to pick up the rest from her next-door neighbour. If her next-door neighbour is a bad workman she may never learn how to do the job properly. A friend of mine was placed at a bench next a girl we will call Doris. Doris was, of course, amazingly kind and helpful, though afflicted as so many factory workers are with a complete inability to explain how anything is done. " You just twiddle it till it goes," is a usual form of explanation. My friend had been there about a fortnight when she discovered that 8o per cent, of Doris's work turned out to be rejects. It was not till she had pursued the work over to the reject bench and got hold of the man who adjusted it and forced him to explain to her what was wrong and how the job should be done that she discovered that what Doris was " twiddling " in a completely slapdash way were in fact points that had to be most carefully adjusted. Her work is now all right, but Doris is presumably still turning out rejects.
On my first job, which was a semi-skilled one, the management had had the idea of appointing an instructress. Unfortunately, they had chosen one of their own full-time girls who was a phenomenally skilled worker. It was a real pleasure to watch her at the job handling her tools. But, as it happened, she could not teach. She had no idea of explaining anything, and found it boring to try. If you asked her, she would simply take the thing away from you and say quite kindly, " Like this, see? " and it was done; but one hadn't the faintest idea how. The girls responsible for showing newcomers need not be elaborately trained or even highly skilled, but the management should pick out those who have a gift for explanation, who have pleasant personalities and who have common sense. The system of learning as you go from your next-door neighbour is wasteful and incompetent. With the sudden expansion of industry and the influx of new workers, thought and planning must be given to this problem.
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