Inside the electronics factory where staff have gone back to work – 2 metres apart
Welcome to the factory floor of electronics repair firm Northern Industrial, where there are hand-sanitisers everywhere and colleagues spend their days at least two metres apart.
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As Britain’s economy slowly cranks back into gear, this is the new normal for thousands of people up and down the land.
The Blackburn-based family firm, with 93 employees, has kept going throughout the pandemic, including fixing equipment for hospitals.
Managing director David Lenehan, whose father John started the business in 1978, told The Sun: “I support going back to work.
“We have to get the economy going.
“We put in these social distancing rules a while ago.
“Our workers have embraced them and are not being stupid.
“They know what two metres is.
"They don’t want to be bumping into people.
“No one wants to get the virus.”
David’s company provides electronics spare parts, repairs and onsite support to clients around the globe.
The 39-year-old boss added: “We’ve split our workforce in two — a late shift and a morning shift, with an hour in between.
“They can clock in on mobile phones rather than using the machine.
“We’ve put restrictions on where people can sit in the canteen and a lot now eat their sandwiches in their cars.
“We have 30 guys in the workshop area on benches in long rows repairing units that then get packaged and sent off.
“We space them out so they are always at least two metres away from each other.
“We also put hand sanitisers on all the doors.
“We’ve tried to make it as safe as we can, with the fewest people in the building possible.”
Around 20 staff have been furloughed, chiefly those dealing with orders from Italy.
Sales staff now work from home, in a move that is likely to become permanent.
Plans for a new staff car park have been mothballed and workers come in for seven-hour shifts across different times of the day between 6am and 10pm.
Electrical engineer Mark Baldwin, 54, has worked at the firm for 20 years.
He said: “It feels safer here than going to the supermarket.
“My wife is a teaching assistant with Year Six, so she is due to go back to school.
“We’re more worried about her going back than me.
“I feel good with these measures.
“It needed to be done and the country needs to get back to work.”
The company has helped fix lifts at a Blackpool NHS hospital and sorted out obsolete waste-disposal units at a California hospital.
David Melia, a team leader, was off for two weeks after falling ill.
The ex-Army engineer and father of two, 39, said: “We had been on holiday to Alicante in early March then started to feel unwell.
“I couldn’t get up the stairs and was struggling to breathe.
“It was pretty scary, as I’m quite fit.
“I had coughing fits but I didn’t go to hospital, because I didn’t become really ill.
“I didn’t have a test but I’m convinced I had coronavirus.
“My boss told me to stay away.
“A few colleagues joked about staying away from them but we all feel pretty secure.
“We don’t do a lot of face-to-face stuff.
“We do things on the phone or email.”
Ben Fordham, 35, has been fixing machines at food packaging factories, for Amazon and at a plant making aprons for the NHS.
The site engineer and dad of two said: “Each place has different rules but they all felt safe.
“Some can’t really social-distance so workers wore masks or gloves.”
Risk assessor Adam Smith, 37, with the company for 16 years, said: “My wife is starting a job as a carer, so that is a lot riskier.
"She was worried [for me] at first, as we had parts coming in from China and Italy.
“But everyone is a lot happier now.
“We had most things in place already.
“It’s about split shifts, social distancing and washing your hands a lot.
"Two people here seemed to have the virus but we’ve kept everyone else healthy.”
The picture elsewhere is mixed, however.
The Federation of Small Businesses this week warned that with thousands of firms forced to close, more than a third might not reopen.
FSB chairman Mike Cherry said: “It is vital that small businesses, which make up 60 per cent of all private sector employment, are supported to provide jobs and growth in the future.”
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