Artifacts of workers' knowledge: Finding worker skill in the closing and restructuring of a furniture manufacturer

Abstract

The closing of and restart of a furniture factory provided a unique opportunity to interrogate worker skills. As part of the bankruptcy sale, workers and managers ‘discovered’ a large number of worker-made jigs that had been integral to production. I argue that these are artifacts of workers’ implicit knowledge over generations of workers, troubling the notion of skill as only the explicit static attributes of individuals. Despite being seen as deskilled workers, the creation and use of these jigs are sites of worker agency suggesting that workers were more integrally engaged in production and not simple appendages to machinery. After the firm was bought, start-up proved difficult without either experienced workers or the physical artifacts of knowledge in the jigs. As several workers from the shuttered facility came to train new workers, they brought not only an implicit knowledge but a habitus that had gone unrecognized in the old facility.