Phosphate Rocks Chapter 42: Unskilled

They called them unskilled men. John always bristled at the lazy language. Some of the most highly skilled men he had ever worked with had been labelled ‘unskilled’. Management-speak for someone without paper qualifications. No good ‘O’ grades in Maths and English, no Highers, no university degrees. No connections. No uncle in the lodge who could sort them out with an apprenticeship as a fitter or sparky or process operator. Men left out, men left over, men who were glad of manual work at the plant. 

Labourers like Brodie, who operated the bulldozer in the Granny plant and knew the analysis of every pile of granules and how to blend it so that the end product was always within specification, mixing in the crap and avoiding the hidden bottles of whisky, a man who caught herring from a trawler in the North Sea on his days off and farmed winter wheat in his spare time. 

Scaffolders’ labourers like Parky who worked in four dimensions, time being of the essence, able to cast one eye up to the leak in the pipework and whip up the optimal access platform in the shortest time while avoiding the acid cascading down. The trained scaffolders and engineers always condemned the scaffold the next day, but by then the pipe joint had been nipped up, wrapped in gaffer tape and the scaffold had served its purpose and was ready to be taken down. 

Greasers like Becksy who couldn’t communicate with men, but understood machines, able to diagnose an incipient fault by the lightest of touches. 

The end began with the closure of the PhoSAI plant. It was the simplest plant of all, just a big pin-mixer. Phosphate rock was moistened with sulphuric acid for superphosphate and with phosphoric acid for triple superphosphate. It took a lot of a labour to fill and empty and pack and clean, and the products could be easily copied by anyone with a bucket and stick, and made more cheaply by those with a lax approach to process safety or clean air. 

A vigorous new management took the opportunity of the PhoSAI plant closure to carry out a factory reorganisation, snappily titled ‘The Way Ahead’. 

The first casualties of the reorganisation were the greasers. When the management consultants advised head office that decentralised maintenance was the way to improve efficiency, head office told the works manager to ‘make it so’. After the predictable over-my-dead-body stand-off, Tall Willy, the chief engineer, was encouraged to take early retirement and the rest of the management team realised that the best way to preserve their own pensions was carry out the recommendations of the management consultants to the letter. They didn’t just decentralise maintenance, they transferred maintenance responsibility to the shift teams. A programme of multi-skilling was agreed, with the proviso that graduate engineers from head office would join the shift teams to ensure quality and safety were maintained. Some work would still require a qualified electrician, or a time-served mechanic, but simple tasks like oiling and greasing could be done by anyone.