The memory of the era of a printing house: the state-owned enterprises that once envied, now only have less than ten employees

A small number of workshops still in operation

 

 

 

Whenever government documents are printed, people in the printing house must sign a confidentiality agreement. The police stationed on the guard patrols all over the factory. Workers who want to go to the toilet go in and out of the workshop, and small cards are used as signs on their necks. After the printing is finished, the printing plates are directly destroyed, and the printed papers are all processed, and one cannot be left.

 

 

 

 

 

a good job

Zhou Xinqin still clearly remembers the scene when he came to the factory thirty-two years ago. Two or three forklifts were loaded with bundles of book paper in a large workshop. The sound of the paper smashing the chopping board was one after another. The smell of the ink was mixed in the air, and the new Zhou Xinqin took a breath.

At that time, Zhou Xinqin had just finished junior high school and was catching up with the large-scale recruitment of the printing house. She also wanted to try. Zhou Xinqin’s mother worked in the printing house, and even she said that this is a rare opportunity. "For so many years, such collective recruitment is still the first time."

That year, the printing house was the only state-owned enterprise in the local printing industry, and the benefits brought by the steady flow of orders made every workshop hot. Even ordinary workers have a monthly salary of 42 yuan, which is similar to other state-owned factories in the city. Because there are many orders, many people go out early and return late, and there are a lot of overtime pay. Sometimes, a person can get up to 60 yuan.

Many people are therefore jealous of this job. "At that time, our military division unit had a division commander and chief of staff. The official is a big local? The wife still works in the printing house." Zhou Xinqin’s mother said, "But the printing factory at that time generally did not recruit people, not Open the back door and find a relationship that really can't come."

However, the mother who was already the workshop director had some contradictions. She did not want her daughter to continue to work in her own job, even if the internal employees could give priority to the factory. "The benefits are good, but they are really hard."

At that time, the wave of reform and opening up was stirring the land of the South. The whole land was a myth of overnight riches. The trains in the south were always crowded with people. Zhou Xinqin’s younger brother also set foot on the green leather car that went to Guangzhou and went to “where the place is golden” to find opportunities.

Zhou Xinqin, who stayed at home, finally decided to seize the opportunity and go to the printing factory to go to work. At that time, my father was sick in bed. Although the mother was the director of the workshop, her salary was reduced to twenty or thirty yuan because she was no longer involved in production. She wanted to share some pressure for her family.

Factory hidden in the grass

 

 

 

 

In the workshop

Growing up in the printing yard compound from an early age, Zhou Xinqin began to sit in front of the chopping board and try the things that were heard.

She is no stranger to the ink, but after the first completion, she slammed her mouth to the faucet and tried to pick up the dark things on her hands. The workers on the side told her that they should be washed with gasoline or diesel. The residue in the nail crease could not be washed, and she took the loofah in the pot and repeatedly rubbed it, looking for sand and sawdust to grind back and forth.

The ink is cleaned, but the taste on the body is hard to remove. A female worker learned from her boyfriend's complaint: "What the hell are you doing? The nose is full of gasoline." The workers at the side made a joke: "He knows your nose." What is it?"

There is no need to complain about this between the husband and wife of the same factory. Jiao Hui and Zhou Xinqin entered the factory at the same time, which was one of the early marriages among the women workers. The former "one flower" in the factory also insisted on making heavy makeup every day, tying up high scorpio, carrying thick powder, and the eyes were painted like "like a panda."

These seemingly exaggerated makeups today attracted the attention of a handsome male worker. "It didn't take long for us to enter the factory. The man ran around and chatted with her every day, sometimes helping her." Zhou Xinqin recalled. Some workers saw it and knew it: "Hey, Lao Yin (the male worker) is coming again, who are you looking for?"

Although many people at the time thought that this dark, big, awkward man and Jiao Hui did not match well, the two still talked about love in the factory. Later, they got married early.

"Which of the two of you, don't dislike the smell of gasoline on your body," the workers said.

Similar jokes are just a matter of heavy production tasks. A wide variety of orders come and go, single invoices, car tickets, food stamps, government documents, envelopes, books... In the words of Zhou Xinqin, except for banknotes, they print everything. Sometimes the order backlog is encountered, the worker changes the shift eight hours, but the machine has to keep turning.

When printing government documents, especially important documents, the “political” attributes of the printing house in that era emerged. The factory must unify the general meeting to convey the instructions of the superior, followed by the signing of the confidentiality agreement. The police stationed on the guard patrols all over the factory. Workers who want to go to the toilet go in and out of the workshop, and small cards are used as signs on their necks. After the printing is completed, the printing plates are directly destroyed, and the printed papers are all processed, and one cannot be left. "So the printing workers at that time, the mouth was very strict, knowing what secrets never go out, including their own family."

Every time you work overtime, time is the most precious thing in the factory. There is no canteen in the factory. Most of the workers choose not to go home at noon. They sit in front of the chopping board and make the lunch. The entrance to a nearby elementary school is crowded with small carts selling pancakes and cool skin. Workers often go there before school. Later, the induction cooker rose, and someone added a piece to the workshop. Everyone started bringing instant noodles and noodles from home.

A union chairman who usually loves to play with flowers and plants planted amaranth and schisandra in the factory, which became a free dish for workers. Every time Zhou Xinqin and his fellow workers are in the workshop, they will choose one.

But after a short break, the machine started again and the pungent smell re-wrapped everyone. Sometimes when you encounter a different color paper order, you need to remove the original plate and replace it with a new one. Workers used gasoline to wash off the black ink on the machine, and then painted red or blue ink. After some tossing, the hand became colored.

It is the intrusion of harmful substances that is less noticeable than color and taste. Zhou Xinqin suffers from insomnia and headache all year round. Heavy metals such as lead and chromium contained in printing inks are among the main culprits. In addition, organic solvents such as isopropyl alcohol, butyl acetate and xylene will also be used on the human body. Causes certain damage.

In the list of carcinogens published by the World Health Organization's International Agency for Research on Cancer, “Printing processes” and “Printing inks” were included in Category 2B under the Category 2 carcinogen subclass in 1996. Class 3 carcinogens.

Printing recipe on the wall

 

 

 

 

Watershed

The sorrows and sorrows of the workers are always closely linked with the factory. In the 30-year printing career of Zhou Xinqin, there is a watershed standing in the middle. The first fifteen years were fires, and the last fifteen years slowly turned into ice. Between ice and fire, it is almost exactly the century.

In 1998, the local mainstream newspapers that had been renting office in the factory for six years were evacuated from the factory. Three years later, the newspaper's printing business was transferred to its own printing center, which was firmly in the hands of the printing house for 13 years in the mainstream newspaper printing business, and suddenly pulled away from the daily plan of the unshakable.

Zhou Xinqin looked at the empty second floor, and the scene repeated over the years suddenly disappeared. Initially, the factory still used the more primitive printing technology. The freshly baked manuscript was sent from the newspaper on the second floor. The master responsible for the typesetting contrasted the manuscript and quickly found the corresponding block from the dense dictionary on the wall, and stuffed it into the woodblock one by one.

The work of Zhou Xinqin is to send the white paper of Chengyu to the machine one by one. The printing speed of four or fifty sheets in one minute is really not as fast as it is today, but it is good to print a small amount. In four or five hours, the plans of the city and the eight subordinate counties can be completed. At dawn, the vehicles that sent newspapers to the counties have already set off, and the city's delivery staff also lined up at the factory gate.

Although the newspapers have to go through the newspaper's "three schools" (three proofreading) before the official batch printing, the typo is sometimes happening. "They (the newspaper) only have a signature to confirm, we will directly print it, no one will look at the contents inside, so it is difficult to find out." The careful reader sent a correction on the next day, the typesetting master You need to put in a few small "corrections" in the middle of the day's newspaper.

The scene of type printing did not last long in Zhou Xinqin's career. Later, the printing factory completed the technical innovation of laser phototypesetting, and the printing speed was raised at once. In the mid-1990s, the national key book printing and printing factories all adopted the domestic laser photo-distribution technology, and the printing memory of “lead and fire” basically ended.

The newspaper printing center after independent operation has developed faster. In 2002, the newspaper purchased a set of Sino-foreign joint venture color printing equipment. This mainstream newspaper achieved a leap from black to color shortly after leaving the printing house. In the following three years, the newspapers successively added two more advanced prepress equipments, and became the printing center with the strongest printing power in the surrounding cities. After 2006, the two central-level newspapers successively established print points in the newspapers. This young printing center expanded the printing range of newspapers to other provinces.

Workers who were extremely sensitive to changes in efficiency quickly discovered that there were fewer and fewer orders in the factory. Food stamps and bus tickets were first withdrawn from the factory, and the envelopes were getting smaller. "Slowly people don't use envelopes, change the courier, you see that the post office business is not good. Some personalized envelopes with decoration are sold very well, but our factory can not print." Zhou Xinqin said.

Including those government documents that once made the factory "premeditated", the government agencies first set up their own printing office, and then the printer entered an office. For the printing house, this means bidding farewell to a stable source of benefits.

Some things are still recognized in the change. The kraft paper produced in the factory is still the first choice for Zhou Xinqin to give his son a cover book. Four large sheets of paper wrapped in textbooks, strong and durable. When the son went to the classroom and published a book, he always attracted the envious eyes of the students around the colored plastic book cover.

In any case, the quality of the kraft paper can not bring a few orders, printing companies of various names appear in the streets of the city. In the past, as long as a state-owned factory can cover all the printing, it is now more and more refined. In the print shop's many products, the eye-catching flyers, and now there are special poster studios responsible for design and printing.

 

 

 

 

Broken factory

The production scenes that were once brightly lit and raging were gone, and many workers had flexible working hours for the first time. For the longest time, Zhou Xinqin has less than half of his time in the year.

She has more time to spend with her family. In the past, the son of elementary school always liked to put his head on his mother's lap and smell the smell of ink for a nap. Zhou Xinqin had only one and a half hours of rest at noon, and every time his son woke up, he found himself lying in an empty bed.

Can be idle, once the order is rare, the workshop leader is like a chicken blood, the workers who are staying at home are urgently recalled. The intensity of work suddenly increased. Originally, two people were responsible for the paper feed port and paper exit of one machine, but in order to improve efficiency, the factory distributed the manpower to one person.

Old machines are always out of order, and the situation of paper jams often appears at both ends. Zhou Xinqin is a little busy. Once, she went from 8:00 in the morning to 9:00 in the evening. The retired mother looked at her watch from time to time. The 28-year-old employee of Daxie Printing Factory was “nobody”.

Such intensity arrangements are purely a last resort. After the old workers retire one after another, there are not enough young people to make up the gap. Most of the girls who came out to find work after graduating from high school went to restaurants and shops. The workers in the factory began to lose their jobs. The former 500 people gradually shrunk to the left. tens of.

Zhou Xinqin's generation of workers also thought about leaving the factory in advance. Most of these thoughts appeared in the years of retirement. In addition to being too tired, there is a more practical reason: the factory is not good, the wages are pitiful, and once Retirement, the monthly pension can be doubled.

In the last few years of work, Zhou Xinqin’s monthly salary was only about 780 yuan, and occasionally caught up with the increase in orders to barely reach four digits. At that time, the average wage in the province was close to 3,000 yuan.

Because of this, many workers at the time played a slippery head and wanted to mix the last few years. The workshop director called to get people to work, and some people shirked for various reasons.

Some people are still on call, Zhou Xinqin is one of them. The mother who has worked in the printing house for 28 years is always angry and shouted: "You are a stupid child, and you are still dying. You still manage it?"

Old factory

 

 

 

 

Old factory at dusk

Although the time flowed slowly in the factory, the city in front of it had already pressed the accelerator. At the end of the last century, the roads at the entrance of the printing factory were widened, and the houses on the street were all demolished. Some of the family buildings including Zhou Xinqin were also relocated. In recent years, close to the highest two-story factory, the home appliance city, building materials city, and department store center have been built densely. This state-owned factory, which has made countless people jealous, was forced to hide in the cracks of the city.

At the end of 2015, Zhou Xinqin had a retirement procedure. She washed the blue overalls and put them in the innermost part of the wardrobe. Even if she went to the factory through the street, she only glanced at it gently. "If I knew that it would be broken into this, I might not go to the printing house at the beginning." She thought about it and added another sentence, "But where can I go without going to the printing house?"

Most of her female workers are working at a young age. The best time in the first half of the life is catching up with the peak of the factory's efficiency. From then on, there are few holidays and entertainment. They usually wear a necklace, because the sweat from work will stick to the neck and feel uncomfortable. In the past three decades, Zhou Xinqin was wearing work clothes for almost a week, and only bought a few decent skirts after retirement.

Zhou Xinqin went to a kindergarten to find a job. After 30 years in the factory, she didn't like to deal with people. She was unable to start with a group of embarrassing children.

She lost the smell of ink in two years, but the insomnia and headaches are still serious. The toxins in the workshop have accumulated in the body for 30 years. After retirement, she needs to digest slowly throughout the second half.

Zhou Xinqin also saw the printing factory in other places on TV. There was almost no ink and paper scrap in the spacious and bright workshop. Workers wore gloves without worrying about the lack of touch. Advanced equipment has already replaced their hands. And more efficient.

Looking at the workers who are "leisure" walking, Zhou Xinqin is somewhat envious, but at the same time she also understands that the junior high school students can't manipulate the complicated equipment full of buttons. In the most difficult time of the printing house, the factory had received the work of giving CDs to computer teaching materials. When doing this job, Zhou Xinqin did not expect that the technology in the textbook was slowly incorporating her career.

The short board of education has stabbed Zhou Xinqin and the printers around her. They have pinned their hopes on their children and turned to mentioning themselves as "negative materials." They slandered their children, at the very least.