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Molly's Boy
Down The Long Road
A little bit of love
Excerpt 8
Back at Honda the car section was getting very busy. I had been promoted to section-head and was technically in charge of the warehouse side of things. Fred Joyce had become too ill to come to work and I did not have his wise head to guide me in dealing with all the pressures as they arose. I did not have any real interest in the spare parts and never fully mastered the intricacies of storing them in an ordered safe fashion where they could be easily retrieved. I was much more interested in the personnel side and believed that if you treated people properly they would respond and work well. I started off with the theory of lots of love and a little bit of discipline. Then it was lots of discipline and a little bit of love. Then I finally concluded that what this lot wanted badly was a good boot up the seat of their pants. There appeared to be nearly a mathematical sequence. Out of every ten people in the warehouse, and it did not seem to matter where they came from or who employed them, there would always be three good workers, four average workers and inevitably three shirkers. If I moved one of the loafers on it seemed to operate a vacuum and another dosser materialised out of the woodwork.
You had the conversationalists. At any point of the day, first thing in the morning or in the wane of the evening, they could discuss any topic from the history of the Indian Raj to the price of bitter in Wandsworth for any length of time providing it was keeping them and any number of other workers from performing any task particularly when the warehouse was busy. If any member of management was passing by they would indicate by a rustle of a picking sheet or a rock of a packing trolley that they were about to launch themselves into work but then when the danger had passed by they relaxed and resumed a heated discussion on the ethnic make up of Southall or the importance of the bumble bee in nature's cycle. I have never been able to understand how they kept their minds occupied and as the fellow said they wouldn't work to keep warm. They would have been brilliant chat show hosts; they could talk on any subject under the sun with a second's notice and involve and fascinate any number of people indefinitely.
I carried on as best I could and the warehouse was running reasonably well. But there were moments of great anguish for me. One Friday evening the card school in the canteen was taking longer than usual beyond the allotted time. I went over and asked them to break it up and get back to work. This was a real intrusion into their affairs and they were particularly morose and grumpy and sullenly left the canteen with muffled mutterings. When it came to clocking out we would wait in line at the clock for the final hand movement and then there would be a surge to get out and start the weekend. There would be pleasantries and humour and comments about the weekend and some people would say have a nice break. On this occasion I waited with the rest of them and they all shuffled past with not a word or acknowledgement and I felt that there is a high price to be paid for trying to get the job done properly. What especially irritated me was that management would often walk past and see somebody dossing around or breaking the rules of the warehouse and nothing was ever done or said. They never wanted to make themselves unpopular by biting the bullet and having a go. Let some other sucker take the flack was their interpretation.
Yet behind the scenes matters were changing. When Honda first started the Japanese were trusting and stayed in the background allowed the British management to control the running of the organisation. The Japanese were sensitive to the atrocities, which had occurred in the second world war and kept well away from any political involvement in English affairs. Some of the older English workers would not work for a Japanese company on principle and there was still some legacy left from the horrors that had been committed. We were approaching the mid eighties and British management was having a real shake up and trying to modernise its operations. Honda brought in a new personnel and operations manager called Patrick Hooper and whereas on the surface he looked sympathetic in reality he was a human bacon slicer. He started immediately bringing in the latest technological equipment and then he looked closely at the people set up in Honda. He began to prune and there was the smiling face concealing the executioner's mind. He was described by one of the other managers as the only personnel officer he had met who did not like people. Everything was the balance sheet and if money could be saved that was the bottom line; people did not come into it.
All texts are ©1999
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