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The Breathing Factory
Mark Curran
The South of Ireland never experienced the Industrial Revolution but is
now defined as the ‘most globalised economy in the world’ (O’Brien, 1999
and IDA Ireland 2005). Global companies, primarily North American, have
outsourced operations to this country, now branded as a ‘trans-global
site of operation’, attracted by a highly skilled and flexible workforce
where direct cost of employment is among the lowest in Europe and, what
continues to be, the lowest rate of corporation tax in Europe (IDA
Ireland). The title, from a concept of management by Peter Hartz (former
CEO of Volkswagen), The Breathing Factory critically addresses the role
and representation of labour and global labour practices in this newly
industrialised landscape as manifest in manufacturing and technology.
Global industrial practices are characterised by ‘fleeting alliances’
(O’Riain 2000); transient spaces as capital moves when and as required.
In such an ephemeral and global context, the project focuses
specifically upon the Hewlett-Packard Manufacturing and Technology
Campus, part of a cluster formation of multinational technology
complexes, in Leixlip in the east of Ireland. Following nine months of
negotiation regarding access and completed over a 20 month period, the
work is the result of a practice-led postgraduate research project
incorporating ethnographic practices in its undertaking. The full
installation includes photographs, text-based work, digital video and
sound archival material in its presentation.
The Breathing Factory (2006) is published by Edition Braus, Heidelberg
with the support of Belfast Exposed Photography, the Arts Council of
Northern Ireland and the Gallery of Photography, Dublin.
'we are encouraged to believe that we live in a ‘post-industrial age,
when in fact the industrial function has just been globalised.'
(Allan Sekula)
Space to Breathe in the High Tech Workplace
Seán Ó Riain
What is the colour of high tech?
White. A kind of blue-grey. The colour of clean steel. The grey of the
carpark. The red and yellow of warning signs. The creamy sheen of
surgical gloves. The clear plastic of a cap keeping hair out of ink
cartridges.
What is the sound of high tech?
The sound of your own breathing. A low whirring - the breathing of
computers. The soft pad of shoes across office carpet or of non-marking
runners across factory floor. The odd curse under your breath. A laugh
from the next cubicle. The crunch of chippings underfoot in the car
park.
****
Roaring furnaces, clanking machinery, workers with earphones working in
a noise bubble alongside – but isolated from – their colleagues. It’s
difficult to hear yourself think, let alone speak. Sparks fly and oil
and grease drip off the assembly line – a symphony of black and orange,
of clanking and banging.
The Ford River Rouge plant is one of the last auto assembly plants left
in Detroit, employing 6,000 workers on a 600 acre site. Although now
working under a ‘modern operating agreement’ the plant remains an icon
of an industrial age. A system of mass industrial production had found
its most ambitious expression in the assembly of the automobile, moving
quickly from Henry Ford’s invention in a Michigan garage in 1896 to
plants such as the River Rouge, which employed over a 100,000 people in
the 1930s.
In a different garage around the same time Hewlett and Packard created
their first product – an audio oscillator. HP’s founding in 1938 in Palo
Alto, California (the heart of what was to become ‘Silicon Valley’) was
a step that couldn’t have been imagined at the time, a step towards a
world where HP, Microsoft, Intel, Cisco and others would replace Ford as
icons of a new ‘post-industrial’ age.
Ford had built a massive plant in Cork in 1919, totaling 330,000 square
feet. In 1928 the last Model T was built here but by 1984 the plant was
gone – testimony to Ireland’s failure to enter the industrial age.
However, Digital (now part of HP) had come to Galway in 1971. In the
mid-eighties, Microsoft, Lotus and others arrived – and Intel and HP
followed shortly after. The ‘post-industrial’ high tech industries
became a crucial element of the ‘Celtic Tiger’ boom of the 1990s. The
industrial parks dotted along the new M50 motorway around Dublin were
filled with companies producing and distributing the new high tech
products – chips, computers, shrink wrapped software CDs, parts and
components. Population and housing boomed in sleepy semi-urban towns
such as Leixlip, where HP located.
****
In these testimonies and photographs of Hewlett Packard in Leixlip we
are given an unusual insight into the inner workings of high tech
Ireland. The high tech workplace gleams and whirrs, there is quiet and
control, there is the permanence of a state of the art factory and the
instability of changing jobs, global ties and ever shifting products.
There is an ever present shadow of competition from similar gleaming
locations situated around the world and shrouded in equally controlled
images. Mark Curran’s photographs give us a visual insight into what are
surprisingly obscure workplaces – the modern manufacturing plants that
circle Dublin city, the icons within the new cathedrals of high tech
industrial parks.
One worker sees in HP the promise of permanence and stability. But
underneath this stability there is turbulence (Benner, 2002). New lines
of business and new products constantly emerge - managers don’t need to
camouflage the names of product lines as they will have disappeared by
the time the photographs are published. Low-end technology is shipped
out to contractors, in Ireland and elsewhere.
Jobs change too – while there are still operators at work in HP, we find
new species of workers too. Supervisors, logistics coordinators,
inspectors, traffic coordinators. Workers move between different roles
as the nature of the job itself changes. Work itself is hidden. HP (and
other high tech firms) are reluctant to reveal the details of the
organization of production, of the technologies that organize that
production, of the work process itself.
As the work of production is taken into the technologies themselves,
human endeavour in the factory is focused on monitoring the machines and
handling the distribution of their output. Hidden in other workplaces,
beyond the reach of the photographer, are the designers of the software
and hardware that drives the system.
The photographs reveal the place of the body in high tech manufacturing.
In Ford’s River Rouge, technology was a constant threat to bodies,
offering regular noisy reminders of the damage that pistons and presses
could do to fragile bodies. In HP, the body threatens the technology –
clean suits, hair caps and latex gloves all serve to protect the
production process from contamination by dust, skin and hair. But also
to protect bodies from a quieter threat, as a splatter of blue chemicals
on a clean suit hints at the potential toxic revenge of production on
the human body. The fragile, exhausted bodies of River Rouge are
replaced with the risky, sterile bodies of HP. Where the bodies of
workers become visible through the noise and the sweat of River Rouge,
in HP we catch glimpses of labouring bodies through shapeless clean
suits and transparent plastic caps.
****
HP in Leixlip could be anywhere – looking at the photographs of the
inside of these plants, it would be impossible to pinpoint its location.
Fixing the accents and weather in time through the photograph highlights
the standard designs of high tech factories around the world and the
feeling of placelessness that seeps through the images. Take away the
faces of the workers and this could be HP Singapore.
But place still matters, and we find clues in both images and
testimonies. HP Ireland is connected – to California, Singapore, Japan,
China. These are places that these workers cooperate with, but the
shadow of their competition hangs over the testimonies. These
connections to, and competition with, the outside world focus workers’
identities on HP Ireland. The corporate subsidiary may offer few
guarantees of loyalty to individuals, but we are all in it together,
competing against other locations. And this does not stop at the factory
walls – communities, universities and government become part of an
alliance to keep high tech investment in Ireland. In a factory that
appears placeless, place looms larger than ever (Ó Riain, 2000).
Identities peek through the grey sheen of high tech in these closely
observed photographs. Workers in cubicles create personal spaces – small
pictures of family on desks, photos of friends and rugby players on PC
screens, a cross on a necklace, and a picture of Didier Drogba from the
Ivory Coast celebrating a goal with his international Chelsea teammates.
Discreetly dotted around are flags, Brazilian, Swiss, German, Dutch.
Portugese and US testimonies, European and African faces mingle together
in the neutral surroundings. The factory is a ready made bland drop
cloth for Mark Curran’s portraits. But the standardization of the
physical plant only highlights the human and social diversity.
There are hints here too at a surrounding world - a world I live in
myself, in a housing estate not far from this site. HP Ireland is not
built in the ruins of industrial Ireland as no such Ireland was ever
created. Instead it sits in the middle of country fields, on the edge of
a historic town, within a short bus ride of a global city. It lies
amidst new industrial locations and new communities that sit halfway
between the rural and the urban, where people draw on elements of the
‘traditional’ and the ‘modern’ (Corcoran et al, 2003). Its car parks
call out to and echo the nearby motorways, by turn fluid and clogged
according to the time of the day (Slater, 2006).
****
HP, like other high tech companies, jealously guards its image of
dynamic high tech competitiveness in the face of global threats. What is
not revealed is the contribution of public actors to subsidizing and
developing these gleaming high tech cathedrals – through roads,
telecommunications, education, grants and more. Macro-economic
stabilization from the late 1980s was accompanied by changes in state
action in promoting industrial development – in addition to attracting
foreign investment state agencies now provided finance, promoted
improved research and management, and fostered the growth of a network
of centers, associations and other supporting institutions for business.
Taken together, there has been a widespread upgrading and deepening of
the organizational capacities of Irish society – supported in most cases
by state agencies and often by EU funding (Ó Riain, 2004).
The private world of careers and competitiveness depends heavily on the
public actions of communities and governments. The standardized
industrial workplaces spread across the globe draw deeply on the
resources of local places. Mark Curran’s images give us hints at how
these local and global relationships combine – gender, ethnicity,
family, sport, national loyalties, friendships, religion and even
personalities peek through the neutral expressions, plastic, and
grey-blue and white of his portraits. But these are only peeking through
– the space and ground for making claims on management and employers in
high tech is highly controlled. Mark, a clean room supervisor, suggests
that where workers have concerns they will ‘walk with their feet’,
rather than use their voices to complain internally. Unions are nowhere
to be seen, even though managers are quick to point that they are not
‘anti-union’.
The ‘breathing factory’ seeks to control the breathing bodies within it
and these images suggest that it succeeds in this. But the ideology of
the ‘breathing factory’ also argues that the rhythms of non-work life
should respond to the gusts and yawns of commerce, as family and leisure
schedules are re-shaped around fluctuations in production and changing
working hours. If we are to have social and economic development rather
than simply high tech growth, human and social needs and identities
cannot simply peek through plastic but must be asserted and negotiated
in these new workplaces.
References
Benner, Chris. 2002. Work in the New Economy Oxford: Blackwell
Corcoran, Mary, Jane Gray and Michel Peillon. 2003. ‘Local Sentiment and
Sense of Place in a New Suburban Community’ in M. Breen et al (eds.)
Technology and Transcendence Dublin: Columba Press
Ó Riain, Seán. 2000. ‘Net-working for a Living: Irish Software
Developers in the Global Workplace’ In M.Burawoy et al. Global
Ethnography Berkeley: University of California Press
Ó Riain, Seán. 2004. The Politics of High Tech Growth Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press
Slater, Eamonn. 2006. ‘ The M50: A ‘Lugly’ Construct’ In M.Corcoran and
M. Peillon (eds.) Uncertain Ireland Dublin: IPA
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