There's no mistaking how touched protesting workers are at the generosity of strangers, writes Ruadhan MacCormaic
“WE WON’T turn the lights off on this place,” says Noel Atkins defiantly, and the men across the wooden table nod their approval.
It is nearly 30 years since he first passed through the gates of “the Glass” as a 15-year-old and took his place at the shoulder of a blower on the factory floor, picking up the master’s deft touches with the molten red liquid and the iron pipes of the craft.
The furnace room was one great cacophonous roar back then, with so many cutters, blowers, designers, sculptors, finishers and acid-men that the union membership list ran to over 3,500 people.
But Atkins has had a close up view of the decline since then. No apprentice has been taken on in over 20 years, making him one of the youngest glass-makers here. Like hundreds of his colleagues he finds himself sitting in the visitors’ canteen on a midweek afternoon, torn between his sense of determination and despair. “We’ll stay here as long as it takes,” he says. “As long as it takes.”
When Atkins and some colleagues met with Fás officials last year, they were told there would be no realistic job opportunities for the next two years, and if they were to lose their jobs the best advice would be to study or retrain. “I’m married with four children. How am I going to pay bills?” he asks.
“Recently, a supermarket not far from here advertised two jobs packing shelves on the minimum wage during the night. About 1,500 people applied for the two jobs, and I’m led to believe that one third of those had third level qualifications. Now I’m 44 years of age, and I’m the youngest blower left here. So the age profile in the cutting and the blowing is 50-58. Go back to school?”
Last Friday, the receiver from Deloitte Touche sent letters to almost 500 Waterford Crystal workers to inform them that they were being made redundant. To their anger, most learned of it over the radio or by text from friends, and within a few hours local businesses were sending food supplies for hundreds of workers who had begun a sit-in at the visitors’ centre at the company headquarters at Kilbarry.
With the protest almost a week old, something of a routine has been asserting itself. All week, workers have signed onto roster sheets at the reception desk and whiled away the hours talking to friends, drinking tea or reading messages of support posted on the noticeboard. “To all the Mammys and Daddys,” said a card from a creche in town.
Half a dozen workers manned the food counter (“Womaned, not manned! We don’t see any men back here,” said one with a laugh), topping up the hot water, ladling out soup and handling the constant flow of deliveries from local well-wishers.
Few of the protesters claim to be surprised by people’s decency, but there’s no mistaking how touched they are at the generosity of strangers.
The taxis that pulled up outside left their metres off. The big-screen television and the pile of mattresses were unsolicited gifts, and a few people returned to the story of the elderly couple who came to the door one cold evening asking could they hand over €50 each.
“It gave me a lump in my throat to see it,” said one worker who watched from the window as 6,000 people backed their cause in the flood-lit car park on Wednesday afternoon. “Waterford Crystal is the city,” says Ken McEvoy, a master sculptor who joined when he was 14, and it is necessary to grasp this to understand this outpouring of support. “It’s like the grandfather of industry, and if your grandfather dies, it goes through the whole family.”
The richly entwined ties between the iconic factory and its people come across in every conversation – most often it’s simply “our factory” – but while the workers concede they had expected job losses since last year, for many the protest was most important for restoring to them the dignity they were denied when the doors were closed last week with so little explanation or compassion.
On Wednesday the shifts change over at midnight, when a new group of workers arrives and settles in for the night with some tea and their decks of cards. The mood changes, too. Gone are the visitors, the television cameras and all the women, save for Tracy Chapman singing on the radio in the background. There is a new introspection, more silence between sentences, and unanswerable questions are the currency of the night. What’s the latest from Dublin? Would they send in the heavies at night?
There is barbed talk of bailed-out bankers and politicians’ pay, and – for all the banter and good humour – a hardened determination to hold out for as long as it takes.
Shortly after 2am, a group of five friends, each with between 38 and 40 years’ service to the company behind them, cross the windy car park and make their way quietly into the factory where they grew up together and know like their own homes. “We all started at 15 or 16,” said one. “Tough times. But it was a great place to work.”
A dozen of their colleagues have been working shifts all week to keep the tank furnace alight – if it cools, the immense unit will collapse. The factory floor in the dead of night is a stirring sight, with machinery built up to the roof and the furnace purring softly as it sucks in the cocktail of sand, potash and red lead that gives the crystal its silvery sparkle, then churns it out in lava-lamps that burn at 1,200 degrees.
These men are intimates, finishing each other’s sentences and talking passionately about their craft and what it’s still teaching them after all these years. With a few hours till morning, one of the blowers decides to turn one more tumbler glass and goes to fetch a hollow iron. The men stand silently as he raises the rod, twists it in the furnace and blows carefully at the bubble of bright red crystal.
Then he holds it aloft and the men watch as it slowly takes on the clarity of glass.