for nearly three hundred years, and the legacy of some of those changes – the bankruptcies and the works closures – is evident in the vacant lots and boarded-up buildings in nearby towns.
The predominantly female workforce of Saltfillas have lived through some of this change, with husbands, fathers, brothers and neighbours who once worked down the pits or at the steelworks. The global economy has ripped out the economic entrails of these towns in the last two decades, and unemployment is above the national average. Survival is a precarious business. That’s certainly true of Saltfillas; it’s had few spare resources to buffer itself from the pace of globalisation – deregulation, increasing competition and the rapid expansion of European trade – so it’s some achievement for Dick and his father, who founded the business in the early sixties, that it’s still thriving on a modest but secure footing.
The reason I went to visit Saltfillas is not because they work long hours – on the contrary, the company instituted a 7 a.m.-3.30 p.m. shift pattern because the workforce wanted to get off early, and by 5 p.m. it’s empty bar a few evening-shift workers. They can’t afford to pay overtime, and they’ve even managed to stop a long tradition of management coming in on a Saturday morning by reorganising rotas. I went to Saltfillas because the company offered to explain to me how competition drives the intensification of work, how and why they have exacted more work from fewer people, and to give me some insight into why the workforce has gone along with it.
This is not bleeding-edge new economy, and this is not a cut-throat company trying to work its labour force into the ground; on the contrary, it’s an old-fashioned firm in many respects, which still holds to a sense of loyalty, and a relationship in which the management will treat employees fairly if they do a fair day’s work. Staff turnover is low, and Dick joked that he was buying gold watches for twenty-five years’ service in bulk this year.
Saltfillas started out packing salt, and now packs other dry products such as washing powder. It’s high-volume, low-margin packing. On the factory floor the noise is deafening, with the clatter of machinery which fills, labels and packs in a mesmerising Heath Robinson-style series of movements. The factory workers’ job is to keep the lines moving, sorting out any glitches, ensuring supplies are ready and removing the finished product. It’s ceaseless, repetitive hard work. A radio blares out over the noise of the machines, everyone is in hats and overalls and no jewellery is allowed, in order to meet exacting hygiene regulations.
Next door in the office, Tracey has been with the company since she started work at fifteen; in twenty-five years she’s risen from the factory floor to being production and quality control manager. She is responsible for making sure the company is always using the available labour to its full potential. It’s a constant, complex juggling act as she moves from factory floor to her computer terminal and back. There’s no doubt in her mind that the workforce have to work harder now than they did when she first started: ‘When I first started, we’d go on a line and after a couple of hours, we’d stop the line and all go off for a toilet break. Then we’d be back to work for a while before it was another break, and then the same thing happened in the afternoons. Between 8 and 4.35, we’d stop the lines two or three times on top of the two breaks we were allowed. Sometime in the early eighties, they offered us a bribe – a pay rise in return for stopping that.’
She reckons the toilet breaks were probably not much more than ten minutes or so – perhaps occasionally someone would have a quick cigarette at the same time. That added up to twenty to thirty minutes a day off for each employee. ‘No wonder they stopped us. We’ve had to get more efficient, and there’s some long-term employees who’ve been stuck in a routine who don’t like the change. But we talk to them individually and we try to be as honest as we can with them; sometimes you have to say, “If we don’t do it like this, we’ll lose the contract.” We do work harder. In recent years – about the last six – we’ve never had people with nothing to do, because we now have such a range of products. It’s always busy.’
Ed, a senior manager, explains how the ‘machines have to work all the time now, there is no quiet time’, and any cleaning or maintenance is done after hours. If someone needs to go to the toilet, other packers have to cover for them – the line is never turned off. Computers assist the speed-up of the flow of work to ensure the lines and packers are constantly being juggled to meet orders by the deadlines. The company has diversified into dozens of different products, so the process of aligning into a continuous stream of work the machines, packers, supplies, orders and deadlines is immensely complex. The essential prerequisite for such a system is that employees are ‘multi-skilled’, so they can work on different lines doing different jobs at different times.
‘The labour has to be more intensively managed so that people work more continuously. We’ve always had every packer trained on every line since 1980 – it’s much more flexible. We avoided job descriptions; perhaps if we’d had unions involved, we wouldn’t have had that kind of flexibility,’ says Ed. ‘Two years ago we explained to them that they would have jobs they hadn’t done in the past; we told them that “We can give you the pay rise, but that may mean cleaning sometimes.” We kept them informed all the time. When people leave the company, they’re not being replaced: their jobs are shared out between people, and that might mean new tasks for people, but they understand that. We’ve not recruited in three years. We tell them that the survival of this company depends on you, and that wins their co-operation. They saw a big company locally which went down – that wakes them up. They see it’s a very competitive environment.’
Dick chimes in enthusiastically: ‘There’s a big change in attitude from the seventies when they’d say, “I’m not doing that, it’s not my job.” They don’t say that now – probably because of the Thatcher years. The attitude now is that we’re all in it together. They see workers on the television saying they’ve done everything they could and yet their companies are going bust. We share much more information with the supervisors, and the pressure from customer complaints and machine breakdowns drips down the hierarchy. The supervisor knows that if we don’t get this order out, we’ll lose the business.’
The turn-round times have become much tighter as well. Just-in-time delivery ensures that no stocks are sitting around in warehouses (it’s a waste of money storing and buying products before they’re needed), so the whole system is always working on tight deadlines of a few days – as the petrol blockade of 2000 brought home so powerfully. An entire supermarket network can be a week away from running out of salt. ‘We used to say we’ll deliver an order in fourteen days, but now it can be expected in three. If they said it must be done in two days, we’ll do it. We try to negotiate, but they keep a record of our performance,’ said Dick.
Even with the most sophisticated planning, demand can still be unpredictable, leading to sudden intense periods of work: ‘There was a marinade powder and they put over £1 million into advertising it, and we went from an order of 5,000 cases to 30,000. We’d bought machines to cope with their predicted capacity, but the demand caught the manufacturers off guard and we were running around like headless chickens. If you can react quickly to unexpected demand, you can do very well.’
For small suppliers like Saltfillas, the relationship with their customers has been revolutionised. For a start, there are far fewer of them, and consolidation and concentration mean that the balance of power has shifted away from the supplier; supermarkets hold such a grip over them that they can pretty much dictate their terms, making or breaking a company on the strength of a few contracts. This is the sharpest contrast for Dick from the days when his father was negotiating with dozens of different co-operative societies. Now he has no relationship of any kind with the supermarket buyers. He’s lucky if he gets through to them on the phone. When a European company undercut him on a bid with a long-standing customer, he was told to match their price or lose the contract. He couldn’t afford not to, and the company packed the line at a loss until it could invest in more sophisticated machinery which enabled it to cut labour costs.
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