I am a labourer in an international construction company that focuses on building ships. Huge contracts that span 4 different trades and industries. I am but a lowly insulator, I know my place and I am happy to be paid a reasonable wage to leave my work at work. It’s a simple life and one I chose.
My company decided to roll out a new safety program, complete with a slogan and logo, to put the focus on working together to improve safety conditions within the company. On the first morning of the announcement, they decided to have a meeting at each job site where they passed out chocolate bars and stickers to everybody.
When I read the slogan and saw the accompanying symbol, I nearly fell off my chair. “Home Safe” was the name of the program, and the symbol is a valknut – which has been adopted by white nationalists as a symbol of hate and xenophobia. Was this a mistake? The symbol paired with “Home Safe” must be some kind of joke. I brought it to the attention of my manager and he excused himself quickly to ‘make a phone call’
Apparently my company paid tens of thousands of dollars to a marketing firm to come up with this. They already had hats and lunch bags ordered with a bunch of other offensive swag on the way to hand out to everybody. Apparently I saved them many tens of thousands of dollars in wasted merchandise and a pile of bad press and public reputation. There was talk on my site of rewarding me for catching such a huge fuck up before it went public. How some low level labourer caught this at the last minute, and not somebody in one of the many offices in the months leading up to the launch, I’ll never know. There was talks of lawsuits against the marketing firm as they try to claw back their investments in this program.
So today I get to work, feeling proud over the weekend for single handedly saving the company from a disaster, to be called into the office. I didn’t get a thank you, no letter from head office, no appreciation at all. They simply handed me a company hat and lunch bag (just without the symbol) and a nod with a ‘good job’.
Maybe I was expecting more, and maybe that’s wrong of me, but if I didn’t notice or decided not to bring it up, the company would be in a total shit storm right now. We would have been walking around each work site with racist iconography posted on our hard hats. We would have been under fire in the press and by the public for displaying hate symbols. I figured that should at least get me a personalized thank you from one of the idiots that let this slip past them. But who am I, but a lowly labourer. I guess my contribution is only worth a shitty hat and lunch bag after all.