Bakery tales - part 2

4. "Best work I have ever seen"
This bakery had a second retail shop in the centre of the city, as well as wholesale customers, and one day Jimmy had asked if anyone could do Harvest Festival bread (wheatsheaves) - it was during a handover so the day shift were there as well - and foolishly I said I had done them in the past. Jimmy said he would like one for each shop display, so I explained that usually a large one (30" x 18" baking tray) took around 90 minutes to produce, so I wasn't sure how we could fit that in alongside the normal production. He said he would see if they could do them during the day shift.
That night we arrived and on top of the bread production sheet was a note "Please make 2 large wheatsheaves, and five small ones (for customers) ... for tomorrow!" Chris, my assistant baker, and I looked at each other with horror - done properly that would take most of my shift to produce - if I did nothing else! There was no way he could do all the bread production alone, and neither Mark nor our oven man could make bread!
The only way I could do this was by cutting corners on the wheatsheaves - going against all my principles and making an inferior product - but there was no other way I could do that many in one night. First thing I did was make a really slow dough - very cold water and tiny quantity of yeast - as I didn't want it to ferment too fast, as I was going to have to work on these between my other work.
So every time I had a few minutes between doughs - when the next one was mixing, or when I should have been helping Chris with roll production - I cracked on with the wheatsheaves. The wheat stems are all rolled by hand, like thin strips of spaghetti, and the ears are cut with scissors to resemble corn - all the time the work has to be egg-washed to stop it drying and forming a skin. I made the stems much thicker than usual to reduce the number I had to make, and made the ears of corn much larger - I had to cut back the amount of work I had to do to complete them.
Eventually they were all finished and baked off, and though the other guys working with me were impressed I knew that by my standards they were very substandard! The day shift arrived before we left - yes, we were late finishing as usual - and they all commented on how good they were, and a couple of experienced bakers even asked how the heck we managed to do that many in one night (then Chris explained it was all down to me, and they were even more amazed!). I was still not that happy with the quality, but at least they were completed in time.
That evening when I arrived (always the first as I used to start by checking the production list and then working out a schedule) Jimmy was there. He came over, shook my hand, and told me how impressed he, the shop staff, and the clients the 5 small ones were sold to, were - "Best wheatsheaves I have ever seen!", he said.

What a wheatsheaf should look like!

5. Formal written warning
Bakery night shifts in 24-hour production bakeries are never easy - we are the people who have to finish off the production and pack the orders, so any problems on the day shift (including machinery breakdowns) that slow production have to be resolved by us! We used to arrive and find a production list and had no choice - we had to finish the list off the best way we could, and before 6.00 am when the deliveries went out! Our "shift" was supposed to be 20.00 - 04.00, 6 nights a week, but it rarely worked out that way! There was only ever one night that we used to get away on time, or on a couple of occasions early, and that was Sunday night, the rest of the week we generally had to work 1-2 hours extra (of course, unpaid!) to complete the work, and Friday, despite starting 2 hours earlier, we regularly worked 11-12 hours - so instead of the "contracted" 48 hours were working closer to 60!
One Sunday night/Monday morning we managed to finish early, and by "early" I mean everything was completed by 02.30 - all bread baked, all orders packed, bakery cleaned, so we left early. As we were going one of the delivery drivers, who was a close friend of the owners, arrived - said he had forgotten something. 
When we arrived for our shift Monday evening Karl was waiting for us - he said he heard we "had been finishing early" so now we had to bake off the confectionery at the end of the shift as well as slicing all the bread (something done later as you cannot slice hot bread). I explained that we had finished "early" once, which was that morning, but that generally we never got away on time, but he was adamant we had extra work to do!
This additional work put another hour on our schedule, which I was not happy with, so I spoke with the day foreman, who occasionally came in before we left, and he appeared sympathetic, and I told him that the following day we would be finishing at our scheduled time (after 8 hours) no matter what remained to be done. As it turned out there were only a few, maybe 20, loaves to be sliced, so we left "on time". 
When we arrived back that night there were letters for us all - formal written warnings, for not completing our work! The first and only time I have ever been disciplined at work - for leaving on time! The following morning I tried calling the bakery to speak to them about this, and neither owner was "available" - I went in early in the day and neither was there, but I did manage to get hold of Karl (who had written the letters) on the phone and told him I wished to speak to him, but he said he didn't have time for a few days!
That night I sent the other bakers home at 6.00 (2 hours "late") and continued on my own slicing bread. Karl came in shortly after that and asked where everyone was - and I told him I sent them home as we had already done too many hours. He had the nerve to say that "maybe you all don't work hard enough?" I flipped, I looked him in the eye and asked him if I had "idiot" tattooed on my forehead? "What do you mean?" he asked. "Do we get paid overtime?" I replied, "Of course not!", "So why the hell do you think we stay here working extra hours we don't get paid for? Don't you think that if we could finish in 6 or 8 hours we would do that? But we have to work 10-12 hours because there is that much work to be done! And when we do manage to get away early one night, we get extra work, and then written warnings! You have got to be kidding me!"
He tried to placate me and even offered me a cigarette - "You are joking, right? We are in a bakery and you expect me to accept a cigarette? There are only two people who smoke inside the premises, you and Jimmy (the owners), so if any contamination occurs you know who is responsible!" He then told me he would finish the slicing, and I could go home, but I said I would finish the work required for my shift, but that he would lose all the good people he had working if they continued to treat us the way they were doing. The next night when we arrived slicing was no longer our responsibility, but we still were working over 60 hours a week.
Ironically two nights later we arrived to find a "special" order for an additional 2500 bread rolls (it was Bonfire Night the following day and a local radio station were having a stand at the city celebrations). Normally rolls are pretty simple to produce - we had a roll-moulding machine which cut production time, though fitting that much extra production would be tricky ... and we arrived to find that the roll machine was broken! There was no way that we (well, Chris, as he processed almost all our rolls), could make that many additional rolls by hand overnight, so I had to call Karl to see what we should do. No-one had told him the roll machine was broken - it had happened during the day shift, which is why they left the extra roll order for us - but he and Jimmy came in, to their credit, bringing an old roll divider with them, which cuts a lump of dough into 36 pieces which are then rolled up by hand. Jimmy didn't stay long but Karl remained with us all night until we finished the rolls - which was 4 hours unpaid "overtime" for us all, and he never said a word about the fact that we did that without hesitation, even after receiving written warnings earlier that week for finishing "on time"!


6. "If you don't like it there is the door."
As I mentioned in my last post Jimmy and Karl never gave any of us employment contracts, which contravened labour laws. So although when hired we were told it was a 6 night a week, 48 hour a week job, none if us had any formal contract stating this is writing or laying out the terms and conditions. This was actually quite common in small bakeries, only one out of 4 I worked for ever gave me a formal contract, but the others never appeared to get caught.
The bakery was a 24 hour a day operation, though the day shift concentrated mainly on cake and pastry lines, and a solitary bakery continued when the day shift left until we arrived to relieve him, and finish the production. He suffered from Psoriasis (brought on by contact with flour!) and used to have to wear latex gloves to work, though on occasions it was so bad he had to take a few days off to let it recover. When this happened the daytime foreman, who was a nice guy, covered for him, starting a little later, and we got to meet him (I suppose I was the "night foreman" as I was responsible for the night work, though this wasn't a formal title), and talk over any problems we had during handover.
One major problem was that part of our job was to bake off some confectionery lines at the end of our shift, and often, especially by the end of the weekend, there weren't enough to meet the orders that were going out shortly. I asked him how the production worked, and he said that he was the main baker preparing the confectionery lines (which were then frozen unbaked), but only until Thursday when he had to help with bread as orders were higher for the weekend, so no-one made pastry lines on Friday and Saturday. I suggested we needed to move the day staff around a little to ensure we had enough to carry over the weekend, and he realised that it would be quite easy if he and another day baker changed their production roles - the other baker wasn't involved in bread production so could concentrate solely on pastries. As the foreman implementing this should be a simple process, and he planned to start that the following Monday when he returned to normal hours.
Monday we arrived to start our shift to find every member of staff in for a meeting - including the shop staff from their three outlets. Jimmy and Karl are there, but no foreman (I cannot recall his name!) - and Jimmy starts by telling us that he sacked the foreman this morning (during his first shift back on days) for trying to change the working system! "I am the boss and you will do what I tell you to do. This is my business!" 
"If I tell you to make a batch of bread and throw it in the rubbish, you do it, because it is my business and you do what I tell you to do. No-one changes things here without my permission. If I tell you to work a 12 hour shift, you do it, because I am the boss." I looked around at the rest of the staff and the horrified looks on their faces, including the wife of the man they had bought the business from. I had to say something: "Excuse me, Jimmy, we were all taken on to work 48 hours a week, over 6 days, and now you are changing this?" He looked at me, pointed at the door, and said "You heard me, if you don't like it, there is the door. If you think I cannot find easy replacements you can go the same way as the foreman!"
The following day I was looking for a new job.