Maintenance and repair beyond the perimeter of the plant: linking industrial labour and the home

Abstract

Dominant political economic accounts of manufacturing labour draw on an intellectual heritage that has tended to over‐emphasise production culture within the industrial workplace, at the expense of other work cultures such as maintenance and repair. When the latter are foregrounded, new links emerge between work undertaken within the paid workplace, and that undertaken in the home and community. Work that occurs outside the bounds of an industrial site is co‐constituted by materials and skills engendered within, raising timely political and geographical questions around the visibility and mobility of these prosaic restorative cultures. Empirically, the paper brings together two perspectives to illustrate: first, an auto‐ethnographic account of the author's experience as an apprentice industrial electrician in an Australian steel mill in the early 1990s. Emboldened by the work of feminist geographers, I reflect on the spaces occupied by maintenance and repair workers, with an interest in how they cultivate socio‐material cultures that transpire across the bounds of paid and unpaid work. Second, qualitative interviews conducted two decades later, in the homes of retired maintenance trades workers from the same plant. Throughout long careers, these workers have embraced – in both attitude and praxis – the labour of maintenance and repair both at work and at home. Their case demonstrates modes of living thoughtfully with materials that have the potential to reanimate the industrial city as a site of geographical enquiry. The paper urges labour researchers to return to the industrial city and to look beyond the production paradigm, to explore more deeply the heterogeneity of shop‐floor cultures, in order to account for the full value, and thus the potential, of industrial life.

The Devotions of Restoration: Materiality, Enthusiasm, and Making Three “Indian Motocycles” Like New

“…Skilled restorers recognize those parts rare and those common, those parts original and those reproduced, and those parts authentic to a given year and type of bike and those that belong elsewhere. What we here offer is a deep material analysis (see also Paton 2013;Carr 2017).…”

“…Anderson 2012;Bond, DeSilvey, and Ryan 2013;Causey 2013;Ingold 2013;Luckman 2013Luckman , 2015Gibson 2016;Carr 2017)-but this is not wrong. Making is romantic: As we have shown, making practices like motorcycle restoration reveal labors of love.…”

“…The scholarship on making portrays it as positively counterculturalbecause it is blossoming in the Global North often in the self-same cities that have endured manufacturing decline, because it consciously celebrates skill and craft traditions perceived otherwise as eclipsed, because it is regularly practiced for pleasure rather than profit, and because it is so network and community based (Crawford 2009;Dawkins 2010;Gauntlett 2011;Miller 2011;Warren and Gibson 2011;Carr and Gibson 2016;Gibson 2016;Carr 2017). Making, to some commentators, serves as an empowering response to our throwaway society and distance from production-it is a way of "defying conventions, enjoying life or solving its problems" (Charney 2011b, 7).…”

“…This scholarship seeks to return the embodied tasks of handwork and manual labor to focus in a way distinctly different from examinations of production-line manufacturing-these are efforts that seek to validate the embodied practices and material knowledge such labor exacts (Carr and Gibson [2016] offered a rich review; see also Crawford 2009;Charney 2011a;Gauntlett 2011;Miller 2011;C. Anderson 2012;Ingold 2013;Paton 2013;Thomas, Harvey, and Hawkins 2013;Warren and Gibson 2014;Luckman 2015;Patchett 2015;Gibson 2016;Carr 2017).…”

“…Skill matters because making of all kinds requires significant practiced and knowledgeable handcraft labor, the kinds of effort frequently mourned as lost or forgotten in twenty-first-century postindustrial affluent countries (Crawford 2009;Luckman 2013Luckman , 2015Thomas, Harvey, and Hawkins 2013;Warren and Gibson 2014;Carr and Gibson 2016;Gibson 2016;Carr 2017). The scholarship on making portrays it as positively counterculturalbecause it is blossoming in the Global North often in the self-same cities that have endured manufacturing decline, because it consciously celebrates skill and craft traditions perceived otherwise as eclipsed, because it is regularly practiced for pleasure rather than profit, and because it is so network and community based (Crawford 2009;Dawkins 2010;Gauntlett 2011;Miller 2011;Warren and Gibson 2011;Carr and Gibson 2016;Gibson 2016;Carr 2017).…”