mentalbunny
14th January 2003, 11:07
Let them pack cake
When Polly Toynbee took a job in a bakery she faced some tricky challenges - how to wrap a custard tart without squashing it. How to tell an apple Danish from an apricot one. But such problems, she writes in the second exclusive extract from her new book, paled next to the discovery she made when her wages arrived: she had earned more in real terms doing the same job in 1970
Tuesday January 14, 2003
The Guardian
"Would you know an Eccles cake?"
"Yes."
"Well, what is it then?"
"Round, made of pastry, with currants inside."
"When can you start?"
It was a hard place to find. Hidden away in a network of streets in a dismal part of Bermondsey, the bakery was set in the service area at the back of a big council industrial block but it didn't seem to have a door or any sign. Only a tall brick chimney suggested baking might be going on inside, and the lorries crammed together outside loading crates. By squeezing between the trucks I found a narrow open doorway. It was difficult to push my way in with so many crates stacked at the entrance, and I wondered if this was the main door, but it was. Inside, it was dark and cavernous with frosted high windows offering only a dim light. People were scurrying about and it was hard to attract anyone's attention. Eventually, a man in a grubby apron and old T-shirt stopped close by, and I asked for the boss. "Up there!" he said and hurried away.
"I'm Manuel. Go and leave your stuff upstairs and get right down here," he said. Upstairs, sitting on packing cases, was a group of women, smoking and chatting while several young children were fidgeting about. The women looked blankly at me but didn't say anything. "Where do I leave my stuff?" I asked. "Oh, just dump it anywhere," a thin young woman said. I added my rucksack and coat to a heap on top of some cardboard boxes and went downstairs. I had on a white polo shirt and my black work trousers, and at the bottom of the stairs a large woman gave me an apron.
These were not the kinds of cakes to be seen in any ordinary supermarket, let alone an upmarket coffee bar or restaurant. They were enormous, heavy, doughy things - a full crate felt like a load of lead. They were the biggest cakes I have ever seen: gigantic doughnut rings with thick icing on top, vast cream puffs stuffed with artificial cream and a lurid squiggle of jam ... biggest of all was something called a king - a loaf-sized, oblong éclair, with inch-thick, fake chocolate icing on top. It was impossible to imagine a person eating the whole thing. These were the kind of cakes you sometimes see in old-fashioned works canteens, the kind of cakes only very hungry men would eat after doing hard physical labour, the worst of old English baking I had thought driven to extinction by the superiority of Mr Kipling and other branded varieties.
I had to keep asking what things were; it wasn't easy as the 20 or so other workers hurried about fulfilling their own orders. Ten custard tarts: easy, except they were large and wobbly so that carrying a whole bundle was precarious. Most of the cakes we carried in handfuls or armfuls to and fro between crates, so I would fetch eight vanilla Devon slices in my hands, trying not to squash them and trying not to be jostled by other people. Sometimes there were not enough of a particular item to be found anywhere, creating an incomplete order. Forty-five custard doughnuts? Only 33 to be found. Ten cream slices? Only eight. And when all the Danishes look the same, how do you know apple from apricot or from one called just "fruit" on the printout?
But what really made the place impossible was the children. I wasn't sure whose they were, but there were now three or four of them aged between five and seven. They tore up and down between the racks, whizzing about on a broken office chair they had found. They prodded the cakes and tumbled about fighting in the middle of the narrow aisles. Sometimes someone shouted at them but not with much force, which suggested they might belong to someone in authority because the impulse to bellow at them was strong in the rush, yet people resisted it. At one point, the children were perched on top of the doughnuts shredding a telephone book all over the place.
The last orders were for "wrapped" cakes. I was put next to Maria to operate one hot-wrapping machine while she used the other. She went at about three times my speed, whizzing each cake under the cellophane, pulling the cake and wrapper over the metal plate, slamming down the hot lid that melted and sealed the paper's edges. At first, when we were wrapping round flat cherry Bakewells, it seemed quite easy. Apart from often losing the cherry and having to fish it off the floor, there were few difficulties as the tarts fitted the paper. It was the big tall cakes and the large buns that were difficult to seal. Any cake wrappers left even a little open were spotted at once by Manuel and he slung them back at us. Worst of all was the wrapping of custard tarts and the long open cream-filled doughnuts. They were almost impossible to wrap without squashing the custard and the cream, but they had to look good. I don't know if some shops and canteens wanted wrapped cakes because they thought them more hygienic: if so, they were in a fool's paradise - wrapping just meant yet another pair of hands had touched them.
If I tried to keep up with Maria I got into trouble, twisting the cellophane roll, crushing the cakes or squashing the cream. She seemed so professional I thought she must have been there a long time. "No," she said, "only three weeks." She was in her mid-20s and came from Madeira. She had recently been chambermaiding in hotels in Bournemouth. "But then I come to London, what a crazy thing to do! Bournemouth is a nice place; London is terrible!" She rolled her eyes and looked around the room, the detritus on the floor, the darkness and the stacks of cakes still to wrap.
I asked her about pay. Since she was clearly such a fast and diligent worker, I wondered if they paid her a bit more, since she had proved her worth. "I get £3.95 an hour," she said. I thought I had misheard with all the clattering around us, but she repeated it. She was getting even less than me - and I was on the minimum wage. "But how can you be getting less than the minimum wage? It's against the law."
Manuel was suddenly standing behind us again, watching, so we speeded up. When he had gone, I asked her if she knew there was a minimum wage, and she said, "Yes, but what difference does it make?" She looked guarded, and I was in danger of getting too nosy so we worked on in silence: wrap, slam, wrap, slam, the rhythm of picking up a cake, pushing it under the paper and slamming down the hot welder.
The cake-wrapping was not finished until 8.30 that evening. Most of the other workers had already left. They all departed with big bags of broken cakes. "It's a perk!" said Tom, an amiable old man, urging me to remember to take a good-sized bag when I left. I didn't fancy the look of them, though. Maria and I were both exhausted by the end of the shift, and struggled up the stairs to collect our stuff and wash off the sugar, cream, custard, jam and general gloop at a small sink in the toilet which Maria showed me. There was still sugar in my hair and under my fingernails as we left the building. It was silent outside in the cold, dark cul-de-sac now that the lorries had left with all their deliveries. With a brief wave, Maria hurried off into the night in one direction, I in another, as Manuel locked up the doors after us.
When I called back at the bakery to collect my wages a couple of days later, I was turned away by the owner's daughter with some excuse that her mother had the money and she wasn't there. I was persistent and turned up again, but again I was sent off with nothing. On the third visit, with marked reluctance, the daughter sent me up to her mother upstairs who slowly reached for her handbag and counted out my money from her purse - no paperwork, no receipt.
When I looked at what she had given me it came to only £4 an hour. I thought I should complain but from the forbidding look in her eye, I feared she might say I had been worth no more than that, useless at the job, lucky to get anything at all. I hadn't the stomach for a fight so I took the money and gave her back her apron, nicely washed.
When I worked in the Lyons cake factory in West Kensington researching A Working Life, the book I wrote 30 years ago, I was paid £14.25 for a 40-hour week. It wasn't much; the other women on the production line were poor. I asked the Institute for Fiscal Studies to compare my pay then and now: they said £1 in 1970 should pay £16.80 today. My weekly wage in the cake factory now was at a rate of £164, but to keep pace with my pay back then, it should be £239.45. To be sure, a large, brand-name factory would tend to pay more than a hole-in-the-wall bakery. Even so, as I found time and again in the jobs I returned to for this book, in real terms I was being paid considerably less than I had been 30 years ago. That - the real meaning of growing inequality - was my most shocking discovery.
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More at http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,3604,...,874342,00.html (http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,3604,874342,00.html)
When Polly Toynbee took a job in a bakery she faced some tricky challenges - how to wrap a custard tart without squashing it. How to tell an apple Danish from an apricot one. But such problems, she writes in the second exclusive extract from her new book, paled next to the discovery she made when her wages arrived: she had earned more in real terms doing the same job in 1970
Tuesday January 14, 2003
The Guardian
"Would you know an Eccles cake?"
"Yes."
"Well, what is it then?"
"Round, made of pastry, with currants inside."
"When can you start?"
It was a hard place to find. Hidden away in a network of streets in a dismal part of Bermondsey, the bakery was set in the service area at the back of a big council industrial block but it didn't seem to have a door or any sign. Only a tall brick chimney suggested baking might be going on inside, and the lorries crammed together outside loading crates. By squeezing between the trucks I found a narrow open doorway. It was difficult to push my way in with so many crates stacked at the entrance, and I wondered if this was the main door, but it was. Inside, it was dark and cavernous with frosted high windows offering only a dim light. People were scurrying about and it was hard to attract anyone's attention. Eventually, a man in a grubby apron and old T-shirt stopped close by, and I asked for the boss. "Up there!" he said and hurried away.
"I'm Manuel. Go and leave your stuff upstairs and get right down here," he said. Upstairs, sitting on packing cases, was a group of women, smoking and chatting while several young children were fidgeting about. The women looked blankly at me but didn't say anything. "Where do I leave my stuff?" I asked. "Oh, just dump it anywhere," a thin young woman said. I added my rucksack and coat to a heap on top of some cardboard boxes and went downstairs. I had on a white polo shirt and my black work trousers, and at the bottom of the stairs a large woman gave me an apron.
These were not the kinds of cakes to be seen in any ordinary supermarket, let alone an upmarket coffee bar or restaurant. They were enormous, heavy, doughy things - a full crate felt like a load of lead. They were the biggest cakes I have ever seen: gigantic doughnut rings with thick icing on top, vast cream puffs stuffed with artificial cream and a lurid squiggle of jam ... biggest of all was something called a king - a loaf-sized, oblong éclair, with inch-thick, fake chocolate icing on top. It was impossible to imagine a person eating the whole thing. These were the kind of cakes you sometimes see in old-fashioned works canteens, the kind of cakes only very hungry men would eat after doing hard physical labour, the worst of old English baking I had thought driven to extinction by the superiority of Mr Kipling and other branded varieties.
I had to keep asking what things were; it wasn't easy as the 20 or so other workers hurried about fulfilling their own orders. Ten custard tarts: easy, except they were large and wobbly so that carrying a whole bundle was precarious. Most of the cakes we carried in handfuls or armfuls to and fro between crates, so I would fetch eight vanilla Devon slices in my hands, trying not to squash them and trying not to be jostled by other people. Sometimes there were not enough of a particular item to be found anywhere, creating an incomplete order. Forty-five custard doughnuts? Only 33 to be found. Ten cream slices? Only eight. And when all the Danishes look the same, how do you know apple from apricot or from one called just "fruit" on the printout?
But what really made the place impossible was the children. I wasn't sure whose they were, but there were now three or four of them aged between five and seven. They tore up and down between the racks, whizzing about on a broken office chair they had found. They prodded the cakes and tumbled about fighting in the middle of the narrow aisles. Sometimes someone shouted at them but not with much force, which suggested they might belong to someone in authority because the impulse to bellow at them was strong in the rush, yet people resisted it. At one point, the children were perched on top of the doughnuts shredding a telephone book all over the place.
The last orders were for "wrapped" cakes. I was put next to Maria to operate one hot-wrapping machine while she used the other. She went at about three times my speed, whizzing each cake under the cellophane, pulling the cake and wrapper over the metal plate, slamming down the hot lid that melted and sealed the paper's edges. At first, when we were wrapping round flat cherry Bakewells, it seemed quite easy. Apart from often losing the cherry and having to fish it off the floor, there were few difficulties as the tarts fitted the paper. It was the big tall cakes and the large buns that were difficult to seal. Any cake wrappers left even a little open were spotted at once by Manuel and he slung them back at us. Worst of all was the wrapping of custard tarts and the long open cream-filled doughnuts. They were almost impossible to wrap without squashing the custard and the cream, but they had to look good. I don't know if some shops and canteens wanted wrapped cakes because they thought them more hygienic: if so, they were in a fool's paradise - wrapping just meant yet another pair of hands had touched them.
If I tried to keep up with Maria I got into trouble, twisting the cellophane roll, crushing the cakes or squashing the cream. She seemed so professional I thought she must have been there a long time. "No," she said, "only three weeks." She was in her mid-20s and came from Madeira. She had recently been chambermaiding in hotels in Bournemouth. "But then I come to London, what a crazy thing to do! Bournemouth is a nice place; London is terrible!" She rolled her eyes and looked around the room, the detritus on the floor, the darkness and the stacks of cakes still to wrap.
I asked her about pay. Since she was clearly such a fast and diligent worker, I wondered if they paid her a bit more, since she had proved her worth. "I get £3.95 an hour," she said. I thought I had misheard with all the clattering around us, but she repeated it. She was getting even less than me - and I was on the minimum wage. "But how can you be getting less than the minimum wage? It's against the law."
Manuel was suddenly standing behind us again, watching, so we speeded up. When he had gone, I asked her if she knew there was a minimum wage, and she said, "Yes, but what difference does it make?" She looked guarded, and I was in danger of getting too nosy so we worked on in silence: wrap, slam, wrap, slam, the rhythm of picking up a cake, pushing it under the paper and slamming down the hot welder.
The cake-wrapping was not finished until 8.30 that evening. Most of the other workers had already left. They all departed with big bags of broken cakes. "It's a perk!" said Tom, an amiable old man, urging me to remember to take a good-sized bag when I left. I didn't fancy the look of them, though. Maria and I were both exhausted by the end of the shift, and struggled up the stairs to collect our stuff and wash off the sugar, cream, custard, jam and general gloop at a small sink in the toilet which Maria showed me. There was still sugar in my hair and under my fingernails as we left the building. It was silent outside in the cold, dark cul-de-sac now that the lorries had left with all their deliveries. With a brief wave, Maria hurried off into the night in one direction, I in another, as Manuel locked up the doors after us.
When I called back at the bakery to collect my wages a couple of days later, I was turned away by the owner's daughter with some excuse that her mother had the money and she wasn't there. I was persistent and turned up again, but again I was sent off with nothing. On the third visit, with marked reluctance, the daughter sent me up to her mother upstairs who slowly reached for her handbag and counted out my money from her purse - no paperwork, no receipt.
When I looked at what she had given me it came to only £4 an hour. I thought I should complain but from the forbidding look in her eye, I feared she might say I had been worth no more than that, useless at the job, lucky to get anything at all. I hadn't the stomach for a fight so I took the money and gave her back her apron, nicely washed.
When I worked in the Lyons cake factory in West Kensington researching A Working Life, the book I wrote 30 years ago, I was paid £14.25 for a 40-hour week. It wasn't much; the other women on the production line were poor. I asked the Institute for Fiscal Studies to compare my pay then and now: they said £1 in 1970 should pay £16.80 today. My weekly wage in the cake factory now was at a rate of £164, but to keep pace with my pay back then, it should be £239.45. To be sure, a large, brand-name factory would tend to pay more than a hole-in-the-wall bakery. Even so, as I found time and again in the jobs I returned to for this book, in real terms I was being paid considerably less than I had been 30 years ago. That - the real meaning of growing inequality - was my most shocking discovery.
---------------------------------------------------
More at http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,3604,...,874342,00.html (http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,3604,874342,00.html)