This chapter explores the reasons why workers would stay in or run from a factory, as well as the traps and perceived appeal of temporary employment and day labor jobs. It discusses the role of employment service agencies and their networks of job intermediaries in sustaining factories’ power and control over workers and in making workers more vulnerable and more susceptible to informal and temporary employment.

Chapter 5 is a study of within-firm mobilization during collective action and explains why those with the resources for mobilization have weaker preferences for collective action. Due to high levels of labor turnover, the majority of the workforce lacks strong social ties in the workplace, and those who do have mobilizational resources perceive collective action to be highly costly. Collective action occurs when the workers with mobilizational resources expect a high chance of success.

Cadbury’s represents the heyday of British industrialism and remains a familiar global brand. Guided by Quaker Capitalism, employees at Cadbury’s Bournville factory took part in recreational and educational activities. In the first decades of the twentieth century sports, leisure, and entertainment were part of day-to-day Cadbury’s life. Creativity flourished. Amidst this culture of Work and Play, an astonishing amount of factory theatre was staged involving tens of thousands of Cadbury’s employees. Home-grown Bournville casts and audiences were supplemented by performers, civic leaders, playwrights, academics, town planners, and celebrities, interweaving Birmingham’s famous Quaker industrialists with the city’s theatre culture, visual artists, wider, national entertainment cultures, and ground-breaking approaches to mental and physical health and education. Theatre in the Chocolate Factory uncovers stories of Bournville’s theatre and the employees who made it, exploring industrial performance and positioning theatre and creativity at the heart of Cadbury’s operation.

Fresh air and green spaces were key to the development of Cadbury’s company image, and to the marketing of their cocoa and chocolate products. The creation of Bournville’s industrial pastoral landscape – widely marketed as the Factory in the Garden – was grounded in the firm’s recreational activities and theatrical performances. Outdoor performance was a key ingredient in this imagery, and a significant amount of theatrical activity was staged on the factory’s recreation grounds, including masques, Shakespeare and Robin Hood plays and Ancient Greek tragedies. Focusing on Cadbury’s summer works party performances, Chapter 3 considers performances that attracted audiences of between 5000 and 6000, who were offered rich, lengthy entertainment programmes that lasted up to eight hours, and brought together fairground side-shows, burlesques, sports, tableaux vivants, dances, song, brass bands, appearances from well-known professional performers, plays, maypole dancing, and aquatic spectacles.

This chapter examines the multiple ways in which obtaining food was tied to labor in the ghetto. This includes trading labor for resources to purchase food as well as supplemental food which was provided for certain occupations. It explores different types of work in the ghetto including forced labor, work for the Judenrat, factory work, home-based piece work, as well as employment in the ghetto’s private sector. The chapter looks at ways in which people utilized their social networks to obtain better work as well as how hunger impacted productivity. This chapter also explores the tension between obtaining work that provided enough funds to meet one’s food needs versus positions which protected one against deportation and the strategies employed by individuals and households to meet their needs of adequate food and protection. This chapter also discusses the struggles of the Jewish communal leadership in providing labor to the Germans while feeding working and nonworking ghetto inhabitants. This chapter examines how the Germans took control of food distribution out of the hands of the communal leadership in order to prioritize labor.

Having grown up in an industrial township, the author reflects upon housing that was conditional and retractable, being linked to the job, as well as a means through which one’s socio-economic location was visibly reinforced. This chapter focuses on a cement factory, and the way businesses control a particular landscape, the mineral wealth and other natural resources, without having either historical or cultural roots in the land, and the relative powerlessness of indigenous communities that were the original inhabitants.