Featured image is of the windscreen of my car on the road from Etwall to Mickleover, Derby, taken sometime around 1994. Scan of 8”Agfa Record Rapid FB print from Rolleicord 6×6 cm Ilford HP5.
Mickleover is only a couple of miles down that same road from the Toyota plant at Burnaston, Derbyshire. There is a spurious segue here, even by my standards, telling of a darkly amusing cautionary tale about working on the car assembly line at that factory.
In around 2004, I was a self-employed photographer / web designer / HGV driver / jack of all trades. Unfortunately I suffered a bad attack of gouty arthritis in my left knee (clutch leg), which made it impossible for me to drive an HGV for several weeks.
Always being the sort of guy who will do anything for money (but I won’t do that) I went along to a Derby employment agency in response to an advert for ‘quality control inspectors’ at the Toyota factory on the A38 between Burton on Trent and Derby. The hourly rate was excellent, at about £10. Great back then. I was given the impression at the interview that I would be sticking my head under the bonnets and inside the passenger cabins of brand-new cars, only a few minutes old, to check the quality of workmanship when they came off the production line.
Bullshit. It couldn’t have been further from the truth. ‘Quality control inspectors’ in this context needed to be well-paid and brain-dead so that they didn’t expire from the mind-numbing tedium of doing nothing other than inspecting tiny parts before they go onto the assembly line. All day. For eight hours.
A halted conveyor belt of cars gets VERY expensive in terms of opportunity cost, apparently. Many thousands of pounds per minute in fact, so something as simple as an M6 nut and bolt not fitting together seamlessly when the robot tries to assemble them can cost a huge wedge for Mr Toyota. Consequently, some poor bastard like me had to stand or sit at a desk with a huge blue plastic tub of nuts to their left and another blue tub of bolts to the right. The person must manually ensure that the fastenings don’t cross-thread or jam. Provided the components are perfect, the human then has to unscrew them and throw the bolt into a green tub, and the corresponding nut likewise into its green counterpart tub. Any nut / bolt pair that doesn’t work smoothly first time gets thrown into a red tub to be returned to the manufacturer.
So that was me. With a relatively high IQ, easily bored, and possessing an extremely mischievous nature, with pretty much zero respect for authority, after about 25 minutes of screwing (good by anyone’s standards – to be fair) I was determined that I wasn’t going to return to the job the next day. But in order to get paid I had to work the full eight-hour shift and get my clock card stamped at 5pm. Only seven hours 35 minutes to go…
But it wasn’t all so tedious. After the lunchbreak I was told that I was going to spend the next four hours inspecting tail-light assemblies for cracks and potential bolt hole blocks. Oh joy!
After what seemed like a decade, the lunch-siren sounded. I headed for the canteen with my Tupperware box of sandwiches, intending to get a free hot drink from the coffee machine.
I sat down in a vacant chair. One of the established Toyota employees, as opposed to me being ‘agency’, soon informed me regarding his inalienable ownership of that particular chair. I learned quickly that the people who work on assembly lines most definitely prefer routine to variety. They always sit in the same place, tend to eat the same sandwiches on given days and find the prospect of the unplanned terrifying. I’m quite the reverse. Clearly, I was going to find it difficult working with these treadmill-bound twats for the next four hours.
The next incident was genuinely disturbing. Had someone related it to me without my first-hand experience I would not have believed them in a month of Sundays.
As I sat eating my lunch, one of the regular Toyota employees wanted to reach something like a pot noodle or something off a shelf but couldn’t quite reach. He was slightly vertically challenged at about 5’2”. He pulled up a stool, stood on it, retrieved the comestible and started to boil the kettle. Within two or three minutes, from seemingly nowhere, two guys in hi-viz tabards appeared and took the stool-balancer away for a chat. By the afternoon 15-minute break, it turned out on the grapevine that the unfortunate employee was taken to receive a lecture from the H&S police for not seeking assistance or fetching a proper pair of step ladders.
Worse still, there seemed to be a weird form of informal workplace bullying that did not seem to be discouraged by management.
I’ve since discovered that this is a unique form of peer pressure in Japanese companies known as ‘Morahara’ or ‘moral harassment by colleagues’. By the time the shift finished at 5pm, a Polaroid photo of the poor bloke was pinned to a cork board in the canteen, like a wild west ‘wanted’ poster, with a message stating something like: ‘Today our colleague acted in contravention of Health and Safety legislation. His behaviour is disappointing. Only by our unity in safe working practices can we be a happy healthy workforce’. I can’t believe it can have been put there officially by management. Or could it? There must have been some odd stuff afoot.
Worse still, people had been pinning scribbled ‘post-it note’ messages under his photo – either admonishing or encouraging better behaviour. One stated in scrawled uppercase:
“DON’T BE A FOOL, DON’T USE A STOOL.”
Fuck me. I thought I’d stepped into an episode of the ‘Village of the Damned’. I retrieved my holdall from my locker and started to head for the car park faster than Jacob Rees-Mogg from his local tax office. But just before leaving that canteen forever, I noticed a suggestion box on the wall, much favoured by Japanese companies under their popular principle of Kaizen. Don’t get me started. You can Google it if you like, or see this link:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Toyota_Way
The locked metal container, with a slot atop the lid, not unlike a ballot box in a polling station, had a wad of A5 pieces of blank lined paper next to it, and a pencil on a neat chain for people to write helpful suggestions. Leaving one’s name was optional.
I wasn’t shy and gave my full name, not forgetting to include the agency that had sent me there for the day. I wrote proudly in block capitals:
Tom Hill – Workforce Agency Derby, QC operator. “DON’T BE A KNOB – JACK THE JOB”
Having posted it into the Kaizen Container I limped back to the car park feeling oddly liberated.
Fuck it. I got paid my 80 quid and I lived to tell this tale. What’s not to like?
ciderfreezone 