Rapport de stage ouvrier

Acknowledgement page

        First, I would like to give a special thanks to Maria Swierzy for taking care of me so well, organizing meetings with many employees of Plastic Omnium and for making sure that I always had everything I needed.

        I would also like to thank every worker who accepted to answer my questions and in particular Martin and Ron whom I spent almost all of my breaks with. For the same reason, I express my gratitude to the French engineers who gave me information about what I could do at the end of my studies and advised me for my report.

        I’d like to show appreciation to Richard Weasley, the Manufacturing Project Manager, for spending a long time with me because he knew I was particularly interested in his profession. He also helped me to choose to join the sport section.

I’d like to give a special thanks to Ian Gutteridge because he took me to the Jaguar and Land Rover factory every Tuesday and Wednesday and ensured that I could visit the assembly plants and test the cars.

        Finally, I thank Daniel Portinha, my former chemistry teacher and internship advisor for making sure that  I was fine during the whole work placement and for always being available when I had questions.

Executive Summary

My four weeks of internship lasted from the 18th of June to the 14th of July in the United Kingdom. It took place in a Plastic Omnium factory located in Measham. The aims of this work placement were to understand how a company and a plant work and at the same time to improve my English and discover a new country with its own culture. I was also eager to discover the interactions between the employees and therefore, I focused my observations on the relations between the employees of the site and on the way they communicate.

What attracted me most about Plastic Omnium was its innovative side because I have heard a lot about the recent improvements they have made concerning the robots and presses. The customer’s demand is getting higher and higher therefore the firm must adapt its plants to be able to produce more and faster. I also liked the fact that the company is very concerned about Health and Safety and reduces every year the number of accidents occurring. Moreover, the Measham factory was all the more interesting for me that there is an engineering center next to it. It is also located in England so I could make the most of my weekends to visit.

Focusing on Plastic Omnium, the company was founded in 1947. It is a family business hold by the Burelle family and actually run by Laurent Burelle. The family is the major shareholder of Plastic Omnium, with fifty-seven percent of the shares. We can divide its business into three branches, and Plastic Omnium is number one in every one of them: The Auto Exterior Division and Auto Energy Division which make body components and fuel systems, and the Environment Division which produces wasted bins and containers. These three areas made a total turnover of seven and a half billion euros in 2016. The Plastic Omnium factory I worked in is part of the Auto Exterior Division and produces bumpers, tailgates and spoilers for Jaguar, Land Rover and Nissan. The plant is divided into different sectors: injection, paint and offload. There is also a bonding area for Nissan parts.

During four weeks, I mainly worked on the line at injection and paint, but I also had the chance to talk to employees working in various areas who showed me what they do. Therefore, I met workers, engineers, managers, Human Resources employees and auditors and was able to get an overall idea of how every sector works and how everything is connected together. I also went to the Jaguar and Land Rover assembly plant where I did quality checks on the paint of the cars and seized the opportunity to visit the assembly line.

During my internship at Measham, I was able to observe many things concerning the general functioning of the factory. First, there is a huge number of foreigners which makes the relations between the workers difficult because of the language barrier.  I also *noticed that even if the plant has many different ways of communicating like a software or numerous meetings or radios, communication is still an issue in the company. This is a real predicament since it postpones a lot Plastic Omnium in the production, because people don’t share enough information. Moreover, I remarked a strong competition between the Plastic Omnium plants which is surprising since they are all part of the same company. They often question the other factory when there is an issue instead of working together to solve it. In the past, Plastic Omnium has also had many problems with its customers concerning the transportation of the parts. In fact, many of them were damaged because the rules were not followed concerning the storage. The customers used this fact to send many parts back saying that they arrived broken but after an investigation, Plastic Omnium realized that some of the bumpers were broken on the assembly line. To solve this issue the company hired people to check that while the customer was assembling the parts, nothing was being damaged.

Concerning the relations between the employees according to their status, I observed that they vary a lot with the profession. While the workers don’t get much along with each other because of the diversity in the cultures and the competition between them to obtain a contract, the relations between the office support employees are impressive as they do many activities together outside of work like playing football. I could say that the relations between the employees in Measham are all informal however this doesn’t mean that everything is going on well in their interactions. Indeed, the workers complain a lot about their status in the factory, saying that they don’t have any freedom and that they are followed in their every move. The team leaders usually don’t care about what they think or don’t want to hear their ideas. However, the managers say that it occurs quite often that the workers cause problems in their behavior and that it is very difficult to handle because when one starts to disobey then many other workers want to do the same and it becomes quickly a real disorder.

My internship raised many questions, especially concerning the competition between the factories of Plastic Omnium, but also between the employees working in the same plant. To me, this is something abnormal since these people are supposed to work together for the common good of the company. I was surprised to see that the mood in the office is much better than the one in the plant whereas their job requires more concentration. In fact, the workers during their breaks never talk to each other and are only looking at their phone. This is very strange since some people have been there for more than thirty years. Moreover, even if there is a huge diversity in the plant, people stay in small groups with the employees having the same culture. This is true no matter the profession since the Polish workers stay together as well as the French engineers. I finally realized that the engineers are not comfortable during the meetings with their supervisors because they fear telling them the issues they encounter. This shows that the hierarchy is still very important in Plastic Omnium, even though the relations between a supervisor and the engineers working for him are informal.

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