EU-tal i Bryssel 2009-12-09 av Gabryel Blom, truckförare Paroc Hällekis
Gabryel Blom, truckförare vid Paroc Hällekis, inledde EU-konferensen Creative Clash i Bryssel 9 dec 2009 med följande ord:
For those that don’t know I am a worker. I load trucks with building insulation. 8 hours a day I operate a 7 ton heavy fork lift, manage the storage and I manage the administrative work with delivery notes and orders. What has this have to do with culture and arts? Why do I, a blue coller worker stand here today?
I am a worker and with that I belong to a special kind of culture. And I don’t mean a national culture or a religious culture. I believe that every worker in any part of the world have similar ways on interacting with each other, similar ways on looking on problems or basic work routine. Even if we are or don’t are friends with each other or belong to different religion or nationality we share a common way of thinking. How this culture is expressed differs from work place and is based on the individuals and the history of the city or in this case our village.
Sadly, in Sweden fine culture and arts is almost defined by an small group of people, all from acting, music, fashion etc is picked out and everyone that don’t understand this fine culture is left out. This is sad because people don’t recognize that there everyday life as culture. You maybe practice some sort of sport, or likes to read novels, watching sitcoms or spending time with your family. This is also culture, this is our culture. But what has this have to do with the workers culture in a company?
A famous philosopher was expressed this:
“A man isn’t human until he clocks out from his work. He becomes human when he goes home, when he is a father, or when he goes to the pub or when he spends his free time doing that what pleases him.”There is, what I believe, the definition of being human: Culture. Spending our free time on what pleases us, what enriches our minds, our souls. In a way humans souls is her culture.
Now we come to the first part of the quote. Why are you not a human in the same way when you are at work? If we take the factory where I work, it is a normal company and it is built up for one purpose only: making money. Nothing wrong with that, because of that I can make money on my work effort and therefore get food on the table and fill my free time with whatever I please. But a company is an economic structure that has bought not a human but her workforce and therefore a human is only one part in the process. I strongly believe that a human is more then just the part that makes the machine work.
With this in mind I would like to talk about AIRIS.
First of I want to explain the nature of this project. Where I work we have natural barriers between people. These barriers is created by the structure of the company. Why is that? Paroc have never intended of building these barriers yet they still exist. They are in form of people not respecting each others work effort. For example. The plant in Hällekis is divided in 2 divisions, Base production and Technical Insulation. We are employed by the same company, the company has the same goal for the 2 divisions. Here is the deferens: Technical Insulation is a customer to Base. This is a common constellation in a company. Due to small, very small details, for example Base made some materials that was a millimeter wrong and of course these were sent to reclamation. This leds to irritation from both the personal in TI and in Base. How come? The people that worked with this never meet in person. When a problem arrived management handle it according to procedure. A natural barrier was built up. This is just one example. There are hundreds, small problems leads less conversations, less on changing of routine. Another barrier is the feeling that the management don’t care or listen to the employees, they follow routine (or in some cases don’t follow it). The opinion is that the management do as they please and there is no idea of complaining or even trying to change this.
From both the management and the unions there is a common will to change this.
Paroc bought the idea about an artistic intervention. A new idea, a different perspective. The project was presented to us in the chosen project group, where I was picked out, as a blank piece of paper. It was the workers in the plant that had the task of filling this paper with ideas on how to brake the barriers, how to make people meet in person.
I, just as my coworkers, looked at this project as just another stupid way of spending money. Why spend money and time on something that from the beginning didn’t have a goal? The meeting was held in the morning and I’m not a morning person. I even found it so boring and a waste of time that I fell asleep during the meeting. I was sitting beside the artist. She saw me and when it was here turn to speak she instantly woke me up and shoved all the tables and chairs to the wall and began to do acting exercises. The point of these exercises was first off to bring in more oxygen to the room and make us move so we became more alert. The second thing was that making these exercises we explored a different way to communicate, by release a new kind of energy we where more open to new ideas. And I guessed it worked because now I could se the potential in this project.
Grand meeting
To be as democratic as possible we collected ideas from everyone that had one. One observation we had was that people had a habit of communicating by writing on the walls, small notes left in the break room. So we put up graffiti billboards around the factory for people to write what ever they wanted, ideas, feelings and critique against the project. There were a lot of critique and skepticism among our coworkers. All from this is pure bullshit to why spend money on this when we need… people had lots of ideas on how we could have spent the money in other ways. What we had to focus on was to make people think not of what we could use the money in other ways but how can we use our own ideas in our work.
It was clear that people was locked in separating there lives while they where working and there personal life.
Of course some people stud out and actually came with ideas and thoughts. We collected a lot of ideas. Now we did something that had never been done before in the Hällekis plant before. We called a meeting with the entire management and all the teamleaders and foremen, from both divisions. Think that this never happened before. All though the 2 divisions lays side by side, we as workers share the same chaningrooms, the 2 divisions had their own hierarchy of management they had never sat down in the same room at the same time together with the teamleaders and foremen that represented there workers on the floor. In this meeting we presented the peoples ideas and feelings about this project, some of the ideas was directly pointed to the management and some to us in the project group.
We wanted their approval to go ahead with these ideas and we also toke the opportunity to talk to all of them about the difficulties we felt we had while we were working on this project.In one meeting we had created a new platform of communication that wasn’t there before.
Kickoff
But now we wanted the same opportunity to meet all the workers to present their ideas and how we would work with them. Now we didn’t want to do this in a room indoors. At that time it was summer outside. So we divided up the factorys all employees, all from the management down to the line personal, in to 4 groups, all mixed up, we were careful of picking people from all the shifts and divisions and mix them all together, this was about meeting your coworkers. One group at the time we went out to a big tent with no windows or doors and there we presented the our plan for this project and also encouraged them to join in to the project to help out. And of course, inside the tent we had competition. We divided the group in to 4 teams that had to work together in solving word puzzles etc. We had a contest where the teams had to build a human constellation by putting different bodyparts on to his or hers team member, example chin to knee and then build up the constellation one person at the time and not losing the grip. In this teambuilding people actually had to touch one another witch is a big thing for us stiff Swedes and also communication is much easier when u know a person a bit better.
Songs of the machines:
The story behind this is that during the project we decided that we wanted to do a documentation about our workplace but keep the focus on the workers, the individual, much inspired by similar photo projects done in the 70s. This projects showed the people, there life story and the only common ground they had was that they all worked in the same factory. We wanted to do a grand documentation for our coworkers, a tribute to the hard working people that we share 8 hours a day with. The song is a symbol of the work process from the beginning to the end in Paroc. It shows our collaboration every day. It starts with a machine that put the raw material in to the owens. Then it follows the complete chain all the way to finished product that loads in to the trucks. The song is more for an outsider, to get a glimpse of how it feels or at least how it sounds to work in a factory such as ours. But of course the song also tells a true story. Because if the stone isn’t melt, the line personnel can’t cut and pack the insulation, and with no finished products we as fork lift operators cant load any trucks, and if we can’t do that we won’t have any costumers. We are all linked in to each other. Each worker plays an equal part in the process. And also the most important is, without the human work force, without her knowledge, without her experience the machines would just be silenced, nothing would be produced. A human can never be just another part of the machine, but a machine can come to life only and only by human hands.
Thank you.