More than a Workplace

The workshop at which I spent my social internship during Advent 2022 is called Schacht 3 and is located in Bergkamen in the Ruhr region. The name alludes to its former use by miners. I chose the social internship in the workshop primarily because I wanted to experience something completely new. This internship offered me the opportunity to make new encounters with the fate of others.

My tasks consisted of helping out where needed. This included rearranging cardboard boxes in the warehouse or disinfecting the tables in the cafeteria. If a worker was missing, I sometimes helped out with a work step. Overall, I was relatively free to choose where I wanted to help out, so I was able to organize my day flexibly. Because the social aspect of the internship was important to me, I spent a lot of time talking to people.

When I started my internship, the workshop was having a «good» week. The atmosphere was calm, people were working continuously and productively. Most of the work there is done together. So someone starts with the first two steps, passes the product on, the next person does the next two steps, passes it on again and so on. Once the product has been fully assembled, it is approved by the inspector, also a person with a disability, and released for packaging. On «good» days, this works quite well, but it can also happen that someone in production loses interest or starts daydreaming. Then the entire production stops. But the others didn't seem to mind. It also happened that no work was done for half an hour. However, as long as product manufacturing is still running within a certain time frame, this is not a problem. During my internship, the workshop worked on two different types of garden sockets from BEGA. This company is known for its high quality and its Made-in-Germany image. The specifications for the production of the sockets were quite meticulous, for example the sticker with the QR code on the packaging had to be placed exactly one centimeter from the edge. However, the people in the workshop are now very familiar with the products, which is why you can expect very good quality. Occasionally there were mistakes, but that's human nature. I did a lot of the work steps myself and some of them really drove me to despair! Where I managed to fiddly wire one socket in ten minutes, Markus managed three sockets in the same time.

Markus was the most talkative person in the workshop and the first person I really made contact with. Talking to the workers often felt like I was talking to children. This happened, for example, when Markus started to explain that Bergkamen is located in a low-pressure area and why it snows here, or when he told me that he actually wanted to study medicine. Markus has been working in this workshop for over 26 years. However, he hasn't yet topped Reiner's 45 years in packaging. Markus never gets bored, he says.

At the end of the internship, I had at least one conversation with everyone. One unexpectedly nice moment was when Sascha, a person with Down's syndrome, asked me to write in his friends' book. Sascha is known for listening to pop songs on his headphones and dancing in the corridor during the break. The group leader Daniel is one of the young group leaders and has only been working in the workshop for six months. During the conversations, you could tell how much passion he has for the workshop. He told me that the workshop is not the end of the line for people, but rather that everyone has the chance to find their way back into normal working life from the workshop, even if this can prove difficult. In fact, around three percent of workers manage to find their way back into normal working life every year.

For many people from the workshop, there is not much they can do outside of work, apart from watching TV in the residential home or with their parents and occasionally going to the Christmas market with their caregivers, for example. That's why it's important not to always just focus on work, but also to do things outside of work. During my internship, for example, we finished early twice to watch a Christmas movie on a big screen, and on St. Nicholas Day we had a big St. Nicholas dinner with christmas cookies. So the workshop is more than just a workplace. Nevertheless, the pay is too low, as the workers are not legally entitled to the minimum wage. According to the Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs, a person with a disability in a workshop for the disabled earns around 220 euros a month. I think the fact that they don't receive a minimum wage excludes them as people in our society. I have rarely encountered so much humanity as during my internship. Nevertheless, it should be noted that they are roughly covered by the EU pension.

I think it's important that workshops like Schacht 3 exist. They give people who don't have it as easy as the rest of society a job and therefore a sense of purpose. They show people with disabilities that they are not indifferent and take them in. I recommend everyone to spend some time doing an internship in a workshop for people with disabilities, because it gives you the opportunity to get a new impression of our society, especially of those who often don't get as much attention as they deserve.