Documenting a Way of Life and Resisting

If you actually look at a map of the planned Remploy Factory closures it looks pretty grim.





The politicians, managers and disability charities who insisted upon the Remploy factory closures can explain away their actions in fancy words but once you see the nationwide closures visaully mapped out , you really grasp the sheer scale of the problem and the impact the closures are most likely to have upon the workers and their families.

Many of the names on the map mean nothing to me but they'll mean an awful lot to the Remploy workers who have worked in these places for years and their families, friends and people living in their communities.

A few posts back, Gillian shared her memories of working at the Remploy print works in Sharston for 17 years in the comments section which got me to thinking that as well as disrupting and potentially ending many disabled peoples working lives, these proposed closures do something else, they threaten to brush away a whole supportive working culture and history just like that.

From personal experience I know that when something socially established is broken , particularly in a top down way, the first thing to go is the supportive links between people.

One of the ways of resisting closures and making sure that this does not happen here is for people to use free resources like the photographic site Flickr ,personal video sites like Youtube and Social Network applications like Facebook and Ning to sustain the links people have at Remploy and document and create a living and lasting record of their Remploy workplaces , their work, the friendships they have developed there and the whole way of life the top down decision making of the Government and six disability charities on the Remploy Taskforce now threaten to wipe off the map.

Dont let them do that.

The 'Remploy Factory Closures' map is a public map. The map placements can be populated with text,images, video, weblinks, etc. and the map itself was created with Google My Maps and embedded with My Maps Plus