The garment factory supervisor

 I don't remember now what exactly caused me to think of this person. Maybe it was that I was working on a lecture on "sociology of work", accompanied by thoughts of the Marxist concept of "alienation", of meaninglessness, normlessness, etc.

I had worked two stints in two different garment factories. By coincidence, they were located in the same general location off Jalan Bukit Merah in Singapore.

The first time was straight after my 'O' levels and I needed to get out of school, to earn some money. My friends were vying to get into junior colleges (Sixth Form equivalent) based on their "mock" or preliminary results. I just wanted to try working.

I found myself, aged sixteen, a "finishing worker" in a small garment factory. My job consisted of cutting off lengths of thread that the sewists (not sure about calling them "sewers") had left in finished garments just so to increase their piece-rate. Sometimes I ironed out some creases.

Source 

Though my family had never been well-off, it was here that I first observed what it was really like to live from hand to mouth. 

My heart went out to the tea lady who waited for the boss to return on a Friday evening to collect her wages. The boss did not return and the tea lady was not able to give her children the school fees they needed that following Monday. 

(No such thing as a free lunch. Even though we had "free education", we had to pay "supplementary fees", and we saw money being exchanged for that privilege, every month. Even those who were deemed too poor had to pay a token sum, if only to give us all the sense that our parents had invested in our education.)

While working on my Master's degree years later, I needed to conduct some fieldwork amongst "working class" people. My sister looked after accounts in another small-scale garment factory and got me in.

This time I was packing. Because I could read the labels quickly, I became a very efficient packer. It mostly involved using a labelling gun to shoot a tag with a plastic tie into a garment and then packing them into full dress-length plastic bags. 

This was tiring work because I had to keep raising my arm well above my head to put the dresses into the bags. I did this standing up, for hours on end. After a few days I started feeling a "shooting pain" in my feet that left me devoid of energy to do any cerebral work.

As a participant observer I tried taking in all that was happening around me. There were some really fascinating characters.

There was a "gopher" who ran all the little fetch-and-carry errands around the factory. Most of the workers were piece-rated. So there was a lot of fetching and carrying between stations. Everyone was shouting at her, giving her instructions to do these mindless tasks.

When a mother presented with her daughter whom we would now describe as having special education needs, the daughter was taken on. All of a sudden the gopher was no more the bottom of the food chain. Powerlessness was finally turned on its head. We soon got used to hearing gopher shouting instructions at the newest recruit. 

There was the chief sewist. She was a wiz at sewing garments quickly and accurately and worked on the prototypes. She had no idea what secondary school meant, let alone university, and asked me if "university" (in Chinese "big school") was the same as "secondary four" (when students sat their 'O' levels).

There was the "ironist", one of two women who focused on steam-ironing clothes. She was a smoker and turned the air blue with the most filthy language I had been exposed to. Yet her life was built around giving her children the best in life.

She asked me to tutor her son. She did not have a clue whether I was any good, but simply because I had graduated university she was willing to pay me to help her son.

On the factory floor, made up mainly of women, the most well-paid and respected were the pattern-makers. They translated the designs into shapes on fabric after the prototypes were approved. All this was necessary to cost the production. 

The men on the factory floor did the heavy lifting, and helped to roll out the bales of fabric several layers thick, on the long, long cutting tables. The patterns were marked on the fabric and the chief cutter used various mechanised tools to cut out the fabric. You don't want to make a mistake in this process. These are skilled workers.

The 'parts' were then sorted and distributed to the sewists who were given instructions and samples on how to sew the various parts: overlocking, buttons, zippers, etc, all repetitive, brainless tasks, all piece-rated. These were then given to the more capable senior sewists to assemble the whole garment.

Supervising these little operations was [drum roll] the factory supervisor. I don't know what her training and experience was, but she had the most amazing ability in estimating what hours, and by whom, were needed to finish certain "jobs" (consignments). Her little notebook (no computers) was all she needed. I don't think she even used a calculator. 

I might have an Honours degree in Sociology (then), but I could not have done what she was able to do: manage all the chattering women, all trying to gain some advantage over another, at least reputationally, estimate the labour costs, estimate the time required, and cajoling staff to work overtime.

I had every admiration for her because she always managed to get the job done, as we finally seal the boxes and see these being loaded onto trucks to be exported to whatever country they needed to be in. On time, and on budget.

I didn't last long in my first factory stint. I begged my former school principal to take me back as a student to do some 'A' level study, any study, before the official results were released.

The second time around, I lasted only as long as I could officially be away from my teaching duties at the university. What this second stint had taught me was: I had to get out of the very cloistered academic environment. If I really wanted to be a good university teacher, I had to get out of the university.

[I'm an academic. Get me out of here!]

As soon as I was able to, I left academia to work in industry. This was despite an offer of a job to lead the social scientific aspects of some research (at Architecture!!) and support to go on to do a PhD. It was at least another ten years before I returned to academic work. 

Still, I can hear the voice of the factory supervisor, giving clear and precise instructions to her staff as to what needed to be done. What a superwoman. 

I learned not to look down at people who work in factories.