You could call the men and women at Viome factory
workers, but that wouldn’t be the half of it. Try instead: some of
the bravest people I’ve ever met. Or: organisers of one of the most
startling social experiments in contemporary Europe. And: a daily
lesson from Greece to Brexit Britain, both in how we work and how we
do politics.
At the height of the Greek crash in 2011, staff at Viome
clocked in to confront an existential quandary. The owners of their
parent company had gone bust and abandoned the site, in the second
city of Thessaloniki. From here, the script practically wrote itself:
their plant, which manufactured chemicals for the construction
industry, would be shut. There would be immediate layoffs, and dozens
of families would be plunged into poverty. And seeing as Greece was
in the midst of the greatest economic depression ever seen in the EU,
the workers’ chances of getting another job were close to nil.
So they decided to occupy their own plant. Not only
that, they turned it upside down. I spent a couple of days there a
few weeks back, while reporting for Vice News Tonight on HBO, and it
now looks like just an ordinary factory. Behind the facade, it has
become the political equivalent of a Tardis: the more you look
inside, the bigger the implications get.
For a start, no one is boss. There is no hierarchy, and
everyone is on the same wage. Factories traditionally work according
to a production-line model, where each person does one- or two-minute
tasks all day, every day: you fit the screen, I fix the protector,
she boxes up the iPhone. Here, everyone gathers at 7am for a
mud-black Greek coffee and a chat about what needs to be done. Only
then are the day’s tasks divvied up. And, yes, they each take turns
to clean the toilets.
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