The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work - Alain De Botton [20]
This mechanisation had been introduced not so much because human beings were unable to perform the tasks in hand, but because labour had grown prohibitively expensive. Economics dictated the superior logic of hiring a few engineers to develop three-armed hydraulic machines, then firing two-thirds of the staff and paying them unemployment benefits so that they could stay at home watching television, subsidised by revenues from corporation taxes paid by the likes of United Biscuits.
One felt in the presence of so much that consumers who slit open their packets of Moments would be unlikely to imagine. For example, the windowless hall, filled with a gentle aroma of sugar and chocolate, where two middle-aged women in hairnets sat facing each other over a moving rubber carpet, looking out for the smallest fault in the texture of dough, and occasionally reaching over to pick out an offending biscuit, their concentrated stares suggesting that they were engaged in a tense game of drafts. Their work nevertheless left them with enough energy for conversation: one was telling the other that her son was, in spite of his family’s advice to the contrary, still going out with a slut obsessed by clothes and the tanning salon (she didn’t sound uninteresting), as serried ranks of biscuits passed by, to unsung fates in boardrooms in Dundee or nursing homes in Poole.
Then there was Hassan, whose job it was to keep watch on a mixer as high as a house, adding vegetable fat to flour as necessary, and who had arrived in Belgium from a village in western Algeria three months before. There was also the forlorn bus stop outside the factory, from where workers departed to neighbouring villages and towns, and the remarkable presence of nature all around the factory, with a horse in an adjoining field gazing lazily up to the corporate flag of United Biscuits, which flapped like a flannel in an icy breeze.
The factory was an economic entity, no doubt, but it was also a product of architecture, psychology and ethnography. One wondered whether its owners at the Blackstone Group were aware of the full implications of owning a tract of the earth and the largest share of the lives of two hundred people in eastern Belgium, and whether an imaginative recognition of these facts ever crossed their minds when they glanced at the profit-and-loss figures in their offices in Manhattan and whether they might even, at the close of their careers, derive a particular pleasure and a sense of responsibility from their investment unconnected to any financial considerations.
Most of Pottier’s efforts focused on keeping the factory line rolling at all times. The previous summer, when temperatures had reached forty degrees centigrade indoors, he had had to borrow a row of air-conditioning units from the Belgian air force to protect his chocolate. Stray hairs were a constant concern and necessitated weekly lectures to staff on the correct use of their cotton hats. Nevertheless, there had been three expensive interruptions to the line in the run-up to Christmas, caused by false alarms when black hair-like bristles fixed to the ends of certain machines had come loose, incidents which had prompted Pottier to install a set of new brushes, finished in a vivid orange colour seldom seen on the human head.
The care and skill which Pottier brought to his occupation reinforced the point made in the book I had been reading the previous evening, with its analysis of two contrasting