We Like Luycks

Any moment has the potential for the unexpected. You wouldn�t expect that a group of bad smelling, free spirited youngsters hanging out on Dam Square would be inclined to accept the offer of a job, but they�ll sometimes surprise you. Exactly that happened one late summer day, when a personnel agency arrived and began passing out multi-lingual flyers advertising a chance to make some money for a week�s work. Quite a few of the free spirited youngsters showed up at the agency for a job assignment.

A little background about this work force is in order. Some few days prior to the unexpected event of the free spirits choosing to go to work, there had been riots in Amsterdam for about four or five nights in a row. It seems some disturbance took place on Dam Square, police were summoned, and a police officer had drawn his pistol from its holster. The pistol had accidentally fired and wounded someone in the foot. Now, for the Americans reading this, a little explanation is required. You see, unlike in America, in the Netherlands the police are not to draw their weapon unless it is the most dire of circumstances. The Dutch don�t define dire circumstance as a routine disturbance either. So, this incident provoked outrage in Amsterdam, whereupon riots ensued. Word of street battles with police flashed around the youth subculture of Europe attracting radical �student� activists. The result was that a small but powerful core of the individuals hired to work at Luycks were Communists and Anarchists. They were veterans of the Barricades in Paris of �68, and they were primed for action.

Several of them had the good fortune (if you can call it that) to receive Luycks as their assignment. Luycks was a venerable Dutch company that produced foodstuffs like mustard, ketchup, and peanut butter. Now, if you had held the position of director at the Luycks factory, you would not assign a bunch of irresponsible, unmotivated, unhygienic individuals to any work that could really affect your product. Likewise, you wouldn�t let them anywhere near the peanut butter. They would steal and/or eat more peanut butter than they would produce. So, those responsible for the operation of the plant put this motley crew (no, not the band) to work in the pickle packing part of the plant. Most people probably don�t give much thought to how pickles come to be pickles. Well, let me tell you, it�s not pleasant! If you find the smell of hot vinegar pleasant, you might enjoy this kind of work, but these �workers� were like most other people, they didn�t.

The plant had a conveyor belt that moved the jars of wanna be pickles through the plant. After the gherkins, vinegar, and water were inserted in jars they passed through a large pasteurizer. They emerged from the pasteurizer quite warm and passed along single file, so someone could look at them for quality. After passing the inspector the went on to two stations at the end of the line. The people working there would stack the jars into boxes on a pallet. When the pallet reached about ten layers of jars, a forklift would come and take the soon to be pickles to a storage area where they could complete the process of becoming pickles. Now, these radicalized �students� were among the workers at the end of the line. The Communists and Anarchists all knew each other, so when the week began they all worked at the same station together. The other workers who didn�t know each other wound up working the other station. Naturally the pickles came to the end of the line faster than the workers put them into boxes. So, periodically the management would have to stop the line. Management did not at all like to stop the line, so one of the foremen would come over to instruct and exhort the workers to work faster. After a while, the workers figured out that if every once in a while a row of pickle jars (about 12 or 13 jars) didn�t quit make it from the conveyor to the box, but instead fell to the concrete floor below and broke, they stood a better chance of keeping up.

It became obvious to the management that they needed to break up the Communists and Anarchists, so they moved some of the workers to other places. Now, these workers came from many countries. For example, there was an American, an Egyptian, an Israeli (yes, this was just shortly after the famous six day war), some Italians, and some French. Communication was pretty limited among these workers, so hand signals became the preferred means of interacting. One of the Communist/Anarchists joined the American, the Egyptian, and the Israeli. He would pick up a jar of newly minted pickles, hold it out for the other three to see, and then smash it to the floor to break. He would do this with regularity. Every once in a while, he would unscrew one of the jars and spit into it, and seal the lid back. He probably fancied himself to be striking a blow for the downtrodden proletariat, but all he was really doing was clogging the drain in the floor. So, periodically the group would sacrifice 12 to 13 jars of pickles to keep up with the conveyor, and one of them would hurl a jar to the floor. You can imagine that soon, the workers were standing ankle deep in warm vinegar. They stood in the vinegar for most of the 8.5 hours they would work each day.

After a couple of days they began to fantasize about leaving the job early with a little less money than they had planned on. Many of them were just about to take that route when one of them came back from the office with the sad story that if you didn�t work your full week, you wouldn�t get any pay. By the time the learned this sad fact, they had all put in too much time to make it worthwhile to quit. You see they had all signed contracts (written in Dutch which none of them could read) which stated they had to work the entire week. Oh, the plight of an undocumented worker!

At the end of the week, each worker got a piece of paper which he carried back to the personnel agency, and exchanged for cash. The pay was 100 guilders, about 38 or 39 dollars. No wonder none of them signed up for a second week.