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I. PASTURE BEHIND THE GROVE: HOW CHEŁMEK WAS BOUGHT

The factory chronicle describes the transaction without sentiment. In 1931, emissaries of the "shoe king," as the world called Tomáš Baťa, or "the shoemaker" as he preferred, arrived at the palace of Prince Adam Zygmunt Sapieha in Bobrek. They were interested in a vast pasture near the Kraków-Dziedzice railway line. The problem: the pasture did not belong to the prince, but to the municipality, and cattle grazed there.

The municipal council, led by mayor Marcin Krzyworzycki, found a solution: they ceded the pasture in exchange for a young grove called "Gruszka," owned by the prince. Bata acquired the pasture and forest lands covering over 1000 hectares – the Chełmek cultural center calendar states 986 – and the prince's account grew by 1,200,000 PLN. The reason for choosing Poland was explicitly stated in the chronicle: unemployment was rampant in the Chrzanów district, so there was no need to worry about cheap labor.

The decision was made earlier and dispassionately. The Polish Shoe Company "Bata" SA was registered in Kraków in December 1929, with a capital of PLN 3 million divided into 12,000 shares at PLN 250 each. Art historian Andrzej Szczerski lists four reasons for choosing this village on the Przemsza: the railway line, a navigable river, proximity to industrial agglomerations, and cheap labor. A fifth reason, not recorded in the prospectus, emerged: in the Kraków Industrial Region, mines, steelworks, and power plants did not employ women, and shoemaking relied on female labor. Bata entered a labor market where no one competed with him.

On December 6, 1931, twenty women and sixteen men were sent for training to Zlín – they were to return as instructors. In the same year, the first two halls, a boiler house, and an outbuilding were erected; in December, the rubber factory was under roof. Production began in spring 1932: first leather sandals, then sneakers. Tomáš Baťa died on July 12, 1932, in a Junkers F 13 plane crash near Otrokovice, a few months after the Chełmek factory started operating. The company was taken over by his half-brother, Jan Antonín Baťa.

II. BATISM: A FACTORY COMPOSED OF SMALL COMPANIES

Chełmek cannot be understood without the system developed in Zlín. In 1924, Tomáš Baťa introduced two things simultaneously: workshop self-governance and employee participation in profit and loss. Three years later, his own design of conveyor belts was added. Organization and machinery – in this form, the system arrived on the Przemsza.

The principle was brutally simple: each department bought a semi-finished product from the previous one, processed it, and sold it to the next. If it bought cheaper, sold more expensively, and reduced waste – it profited. The concern collected a commission at every stage, so its profit was secured regardless of how the workshops competed with each other. A side effect, intended, was quality control without inspectors: no one wanted to buy a faulty component from a neighbor, because they wouldn't be able to sell it further themselves. The company motto was: "do not accept bad work from your predecessor."

The factory structure, reconstructed by Łukasz Płatek from company documents, looks like a list of small enterprises: nine separate purchasing and warehouse units, its own printing house, carpentry shop, dyeing plant and last factory, a rubber plant under number 300 with departments for mixing, calendering, and vulcanizing presses, seven sewing rooms with assembly under numbers 421–434, and a sewing room for the school department under 487. In the "non-industrial activities" section, a canteen, forests, apartments with tennis courts and a bowling alley, a kindergarten, and the "Jazdówka" farm were listed.

Planning extended to the individual: seasons were divided into weeks, weeks into days, and each employee received a preliminary schedule for the next day – how many pairs to make, how much material to process, in what time – and their wages depended on their performance. Raised boards with results hung in the halls; no one was to learn about their efficiency from an envelope. The profit share in a worker's earnings at the turn of the 1920s and 30s, calculated from Zlín data, can be estimated at around 15 percent. The rest of the system no longer concerned production, but the individual:

• Everyone started on the assembly line. No exceptions. Advancement was based on efficiency, quality, and rationalization proposals, and character – responsibility, honesty – was checked with psychotechnical tests.
• The best were sent to Zlín. Three years in the international School of Work: shoe technology, German, English, good manners. By 1938, 180 graduates of this school worked in Poland.
• There were no "workers," there were "associates." Even the director had to personally make a pair of shoes from time to time. Slogans urging economy, cleanliness, and diligence hung on the walls.
• Five days a week, from 7 AM to 5 PM. The concern had a 45-hour week from 1930, and a 40-hour week from 1934. The pace was higher than in American shoe factories.
• The newspaper took care of the rest. "Echo Chełmka," published from May 14, 1934, wrote about production results, distinguished employees and their weddings – especially when the young couple met "at Bata's."

III. CONVEYOR BELT: A RHYTHM INTERRUPTED LIKE A HEARTBEAT

Chełmek was the first factory for industrial shoe production in Poland. It started with a rubber plant, because vulcanization allowed for permanently joining a rubber sole to an upper under pressure and at high temperature – without glue, which gives way at the first wetting. The most expensive machines were located there: the rubber plant had 76 of the 1214 machines installed by 1937, but it accounted for one third of the value of the entire machine park.

The assembly line was arranged in an elongated loop connecting dozens of machines and dozens of people. It moved in an intermittent rhythm, compared to a heartbeat, and its speed was set by the foreman. It dictated the pace – a worker who would normally work slower and with breaks had to adapt. The division of labor went so far that one person performed one task on a shoe and became a master at it. Transport between workstations disappeared, because the conveyor itself was the transport; shoes were dried on its lower part.

The cost of this solution was also quantifiable. The assembly line was only as efficient as the weakest worker and the least efficient machine allowed. A team that failed to meet the quota incurred financial penalties; one that exceeded it received a bonus, after which the quota was recalculated upwards. If one workstation fell behind, the entire line jammed, and a red light illuminated above it – repeated illumination meant dismissal. Mechanics had a strict rule: a repair longer than fifteen minutes meant replacing the machine with a spare. The forced body position, noise, and lack of natural breaks affected health, including neurological diseases.

The path from raw leather to a finished pair passed through five gates, and at each, someone stood who had a vested interest in not letting a defect pass further:

• Purchase and tannery. The leather was inspected by the purchasing office, then thoroughly by the tannery, where the raw material arrived.
• Manipulation and cutting. Separate departments for cutting and processing sole elements, cutting soft leathers, and cutting fabrics. More elements can be cut from good leather, so the department fought for raw material for its own results.
• Sewing room. Controlled the cut parts before sewing the upper – a poorly cut set would not be sold to assembly.
• Assembly. Joining the upper to the sole and finishing the shoe. Chełmek had the most sole machines: 419 out of 1214.
• Inspection and store. An independent inspector, a shoemaker "with a good eye," checked about 2000 pairs daily. Before shipping, the management randomly selected one crate – a defect in one shoe meant examining the entire shipment. Once a week, two or three cartons went to Zlín, where they were evaluated as the basis for classifying the concern's factories.

Tomáš Baťa repeated that machines should do the work, and people should be left to think. By 1937, the factory had bought 1214 machines for over PLN 2 million and 1243 engines – mainly Bata, Skoda, and Maniura. The cleanliness of the machine was included in the employee's evaluation: a commission reviewed workstations weekly, and the owner of the best-maintained one received a bonus of PLN 10, later reduced to PLN 5, a commendation in their record, and a mention in the newspaper. Inspections were repeated the next day to catch those who cleaned their machines just for show. Such individuals were stigmatized in "Echo Chełmka."

IV. 6.15 METER MODULE: A CITY FROM A GRID

Chełmek did not grow chaotically, because in Bata's system, a building was as much a mass-produced item as a shoe. The urban plan was developed at the Zlín headquarters by František Lydie Gahura – the same person who designed Zlín – and Miroslav Drofa, based on a modular grid of 6.15 × 6.15 meters. The concept of an ideal industrial city assumed a wide avenue with a park leading to the main factory gate, a center with department stores and public buildings, and a strict separation of the residential district from the production area.

In the factory itself, the Zlín rule was bent. As Płatek established, citing Anna Syska's research, the halls in Chełmek were low and heavily glazed, with reinforced concrete or steel structures, but single-story and laid out in a barracks system, not multi-story like in Zlín. The proportions of the plans were maintained, but the height was sacrificed – there was plenty of land, and capital was invested only as needed. The construction sequence illustrates the pace: halls 12 and 22 and the old boiler house in 1931, hall 21 and the foundry in 1932, hall 13 in 1933, halls 14 and 23 in 1934, the garage in 1935, halls 11, 24 and 25 with the pumping station in 1937, the gatehouse in 1938.

The residential colony operated on the same principle. The Old Colony consisted of nineteen typical multi-family brick houses, with kitchens and bathrooms, flat roofs and stone foundations, arranged in regular rows and surrounded by greenery – an avant-garde idea of minimum living combined with the garden city concept. The estate covered twelve hectares, of which seven and a half were designated for recreation. Bata consciously excluded large blocks: collectivism was to apply to the workplace, and outside of it, the worker was to live with their family, separately. In 1937, the complex consisted of eight halls, fourteen family houses with 54 apartments, and four houses for bachelors; the apartments ranged from about 50 to 75 m².

Infrastructure grew around it that no one in the Chrzanów district had: a school, a swimming pool, tennis courts, a ski jump, a football pitch, and a bowling alley. The courts were considered the most important investment – tennis became a common pastime in Chełmek. In 1936, the Mother and Child Care Station was opened, providing medical care and supplementary feeding for children from poor families, and at the end of that year, the church, co-financed by the factory and built in a year on the initiative of Father Eugeniusz Wcisła, was consecrated. In 1938, a kindergarten was opened and a vocational school was established to prepare students for work in the factory, and employees together with residents funded an RWD-13 airplane and several machine guns for the Polish Army. The population of Chełmek doubled in five years.

The scale of the plan and the scale of its execution dramatically diverged. The chronicle speaks of a town of 15,000 inhabitants, about 1,500 houses, and 40 public utility buildings; the Lesser Poland Cultural Heritage Days study cites 10–12 thousand inhabitants, including 3–5 thousand employed. They agree on the outcome: of the fifty planned factory buildings, ten were built by 1939, and about one percent of the entire complex. "Little Zlín" remained an unfinished town.

V. QUOTA, SMUGGLING, STRIKE

The image of a concern entering Poland and doing as it pleases is false. From 1933, Chełmek operated under an annually renewed agreement with the government – an "economic program" – which specified what and how much it was allowed to produce. The annual quota for leather footwear was 600,000 pairs, including 50,000 exclusively for the Free City of Gdańsk; additionally, 250,000 pairs were allowed to be imported from Czechoslovakia, making a total of 850,000. Exports were not included in the quota but were sparingly rewarded: above a threshold of 50,000 pairs, only 10 percent of the surplus could be added to domestic production. Rubber and textile footwear were not limited.

The strictest provision concerned raw materials: the company was prohibited from setting up its own tannery. This was a nod by the government to the domestic tanning industry. In return, customs relief for machinery from Czechoslovakia was promised, and the plant's importance for the defense industry was emphasized. Chełmek thus got the assembly line, but was cut off from control over leather – exactly the opposite of how the parent concern operated. Tanneries would enter this history only after the war, and not as Bata's property, but as plants incorporated into a state-owned combine.

Customs relief turned out to be a mere declaration. Authorities blocked the import of machinery, which undermined the point of the entire investment. After information about the ban coming into force, the company organized a railway transport from Zlín within twenty-four hours, consisting of several wagons of equipment. Machinery was bought domestically, including from the liquidated footwear factory in Bydgoszcz, and directly from manufacturers – this is how Singer sewing machines arrived in Chełmek. When this was not enough, the company's president and factory director ordered employees to make continuous business trips to Zlín and carry disassembled machines, spare parts, and materials in their personal luggage. This practice lasted from 1933 to 1935.

It ended with a tip-off from a dismissed employee. The factory inspection lasted ten days and covered ledgers, correspondence, and witness interrogations. Smuggling worth over 45,000 zlotys and almost 11,000 zlotys in omitted customs duties were uncovered – according to investigators, this was a minimal amount, covering only what could be proven. The protocol lists, among other things, 14,000 sandal buckles, 78,000 leather trimmings, 24,000 shoe buttons, and 129.5 kilograms of dyes and chemicals. President Alojzy Gabesam, interrogated twice, requested to voluntarily submit to punishment.

There was also tension within the plant. Both Tomáš and Jan Baťa fought against trade unions – in Zlín in 1930, the concern bought and demolished a tenement house housing the local branch of the communist party, leaving in its place a passage named "We demolish the evil of the past." In June 1936, the Chełmek workforce went on strike: it was about wage disputes and the ban on workers' self-government activities. The strike ended only after Jan Baťa's personal intervention. Financial matters were settled, and instead of a trade union, an organization called "Shoemakers' Family" was established to mediate between employees and management – and financed by the factory, including its periodical.

The internal cost was real, and the chronicle does not hide it. The halls were low and lacked ventilation, unbearable in summer. Fines were imposed for tardiness, incorrect workers were dismissed, and smoking cigarettes on the premises was grounds for dismissal. The daily plan had to be met, so machines often worked even after the factory whistle. Alongside this: exemplary cleanliness, order, and better wages than in the surrounding area. Both of these statements are true at once.

VI. NUMBERS: HOW MANY PAIRS, HOW MANY PEOPLE, FOR HOW MUCH

The numbers from the 25th-anniversary chronicle are as follows: 1933 – 1,057,400 pairs, 1934 – 1,516,800, 1935 – 1,536,400, 1936 – 1,684,500, 1937 – 2,140,800, 1938 – 2,260,000, 1939 – 1,987,200. Semi-annual summaries that Płatek extracted from the company's records in the Katowice archive yield the same annual totals but also show what the chronicle does not mention: the preliminary estimate was systematically higher than the actual output. In 1935, 2,063,800 pairs were planned, but 1,536,400 were made. Chełmek operated below its own plan for most of the decade and only caught up in 1937.

Employment in the same records increased smoothly: 323 people in the first half of 1932, 348 in the second, 670 by the end of 1933, 890 by the end of 1934, 1150 by the end of 1935, 1220 in 1936, 1340 in 1937, and 1410 in the first half of 1938. The chronicle reports 1669 people for the entire year 1938, and 1656 for 1939. Between 1932 and 1938, the workforce grew more than fourfold. This was not "thousands of workers" on the scale of Łódź – this was a medium-sized factory with very high productivity per capita.

This magnitude is worth assessing honestly. With national leather footwear production estimated at over 15 million pairs, Chełmek did not reach ten percent of the market. Its visibility was determined not by scale, but by its network: according to Szczerski, shoes were sold mainly in their own stores in over one hundred and sixty locations, and data from the Bata heritage foundation indicate 340 stores in 235 locations in 1938. However, the fears of the shoemaking lobby that the Polish company would flood the country with Czechoslovak footwear did not materialize: Bata's imports dropped from 125,000 pairs in 1932 to less than 12,000 in 1934 and merely 1,500 in 1937. Exports in the opposite direction were equally modest – exceeding 100,000 pairs only in 1937.

Economic calculation did its job. According to pre-war statistical yearbooks, a pair of men's low shoes cost 24.66 PLN, a ready-made shirt 9.50 PLN, and an average worker earned 102.77 PLN per month in 1935. A shoe was an expense of about one-quarter of a salary – which is why lowering the price through assembly-line production changed the market faster than any advertisement. The extent of the backlog is shown by one number: in 1933, about half a pair of shoes per person was sold in Poland annually, while in Great Britain – three pairs.

VII. OCCUPATION: A RECORD ON WOODEN SOLES

Chełmek fell into German hands in the first days of September 1939. The factory was undamaged, and the equipment, which was intended to be evacuated deeper into the country and had already been loaded onto wagons, could not be moved – the German administration ordered the machines to be unloaded and reinstalled. The company's losses included raw materials worth 1.2 million PLN and finished goods worth nearly 800,000 PLN. The company was placed under commissarial administration, its headquarters were moved to Katowice and registered there under the name Bata Schuh und Lederwerke Aktiengesellschaft in Chelmek. On February 20, 1940, Karol Woźnica, Alojzy Gabesam, Wiktor Kucharski, and Rudolf Sikora were removed from the commercial register, and Heinz Mahnkopf, the former director of the Otmęt plants, was appointed commissarial administrator. In June 1943, the commissarial administration was suspended, Bata regained its assets, the headquarters were moved from Katowice to Chełmek, and the share capital was revalued to 6 million marks.

Production was shifted to wartime footing. The same number of assembly teams worked, but the workday was extended to twelve hours, and the organizational system was maintained entirely – the new director knew it, as he had used it before in Otmęt. The result was a record: efficiency periodically exceeded 50,000 pairs of leather and textile footwear per week. Annual totals in this category were 1,545,900 pairs in 1940, 2,095,700 in 1941, 2,566,700 in 1942, 1,961,400 in 1943, and 1,439,600 in 1944. Some men were moved to heavier work in mines and factories in Silesia, their places taken by women. Footwear for the German army and civilian shoes for rationing were produced, but a significant portion of these were clogs – shoes with wooden soles for prisoners of war and inmates.

In October 1942, Aussenkommando Chełmek, a sub-camp of KL Auschwitz, was established in nearby Paprotnik. By December 9, 1942, 47 people had died there; in 1969, a monument was erected at this site. However, the prisoners did not work in the factory: they deepened ponds north of the plant, from which water was drawn for production and sanitary purposes, and built a narrow-gauge railway connecting the factory with the quarry on "Jazdówka" in Libiąż. The plant's work was disrupted by acts of sabotage – high-voltage poles were toppled, machines were destroyed, and leather and explosives were stolen. On December 10, 1944, a unit of the People's Army named after Jarosław Dąbrowski destroyed machines, set fire to a waste warehouse, smashed two telephones, and demolished ten distribution boards.

The occupier exploited the factory, but also equipped it: 454 machines and 433 engines, mainly Siemens, AEG, and Skoda, were purchased. And, uniquely for Polish Bata plants – during the evacuation before the advancing Red Army, not a single machine was transported from Chełmek to Germany. For comparison: Radom searched for machines for incomplete sets after the front passed, and Otmęt was completely looted. In the first week of January 1945, 2505 people worked in the factory – 128 fewer than a year earlier. This complete machinery park determined what happened next.

VIII. PRL: EXPERIMENT, COMBINE, FALL

The Red Army entered Chełmek on January 25, 1945. Windows were broken, wires were frozen, the electrical installation had been dismantled by the occupier for copper – but the machines remained. In the first half of February, the boiler house started, and in the second, the first batch of 50,000 pairs was sewn in cooperation with the Soviet army, using supplied materials and with payment per pair. The crew was brought in using a stick-and-carrot method: the reluctant were threatened with forced labor, the willing were tempted with provisions, and the appeal was also announced from the pulpit. The scale of scarcity is shown by the allocation from the eighteenth week of 1946: a decagram of tea, 0.3 kg of salt, 0.6 kg of herring, 0.25 kg of sugar, and for each child three cans of condensed milk and a chocolate bar. In July 1946, 2227 people worked here.

On July 4, 1947, the entire Bata company was nationalized, and on July 31, 1948, the Southern Footwear Works in Chełmek were established. Nationalization showed how the state operates without consultation: forests purchased with the land automatically passed to the State Forests, and with them the factory kindergarten, wells with drinking water for the colony, and ponds, pump stations, and pipelines supplying industrial water to the plant. Of over a thousand pre-war hectares, the factory and colony were left with 31.16 ha – less than three percent – of which production occupied about seven.

Production grew despite this: the annual average in the pre-war period was 2,300,000 pairs, in the three-year plan – 2,900,000, in the six-year plan – 6,250,000. The workshop remained essentially the same. Bata worked on eight automatic machines; in 1950, production ran on an assembly line system with eight automatic machines for leather footwear and two for rubber footwear. The growth came from shift work and rubber, not new machines.

The most interesting episode falls between 1957 and 1958. By decision of the Ministry of Light Industry, Chełmek became an experimental enterprise for two years – this was an attempt to return to the Bata management system under conditions of a centrally planned economy. Not by chance: the factory director from 1953 was an old Bata man, Tadeusz Jelonek. The experiment increased efficiency, production, quality, regularity, and work discipline, and wages also rose. An extension was denied. Officially, this was explained by the economic situation; in fact, the authorities could not accept a plant operating as a "state within a state."

However, a combine emerged from the experiment. On January 1, 1959, the Southern Leather Works in Chełmek were established – a multi-plant enterprise with a vertical structure, combining tanning with footwear production. The reason was the same that blocked the government before the war: without its own tanneries, it was impossible to control the regularity and quality of leather supplies. The effect is visible in the numbers: between 1960 and 1970, the production of hard leather fell from 2936.8 tons to 77.6 tons, while soft leather – which the factory genuinely needed – increased from 930.6 thousand to 2772.5 thousand square meters. In 1965, the combine was the largest enterprise in the industry in Poland: 9464 employees, over 15 percent of the national footwear potential, 27 percent in men's footwear, and almost 20 percent in women's. Peak employment was in 1972 – 10,691 people.

The export of Polish footwear began in 1959, with Chełmek playing a leading role – the first shipments to the West included women's leather low shoes with monolithic soles and rubber Canadian boots. In 1961, the plant exported 851.8 thousand pairs, about half of all Polish footwear exports: to the USSR, but also to the USA, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Ghana. It had no direct contact with customers – everything went through the "Skórimpex" Import-Export Center in Łódź. Director Jan Pactwa traveled to Moscow as an industry advisor; in 1960, a delegation brought back an order for 1.7 million pairs, of which Chełmek accounted for 734 thousand. Separate departments with the best people and machines were designated for export; footwear for the West was 100% controlled, for socialist countries – selectively. In April 1971, the Minister of Light Industry recognized the combine as an enterprise specializing in export.

Then the decline began. After the years 1966–1973, employment steadily dropped – shoemaking paid poorly, and nearby were mines and chemical plants that paid better. In 1977, Chełmek had 24 out of 97 national vulcanizing presses, but not a single polyurethane injection molding machine out of the four operating in Poland: it stuck with rubber when the world was switching to lightweight plastics. The largest investment of the 1980s – the construction of a new artificial leather factory started in 1987 – remained ninety percent unfinished. In 1981, the factory's crew went on strike.

The plant, oriented towards exports to the East, lost its markets in the early 1990s, and the Polish market was flooded with cheap footwear from the East. Restructuring involved the creation of four spin-off companies, which was supposed to protect employees – but it didn't: when two of them failed, 387 people lost their jobs without their final wages, and arrears only began to be settled on October 21, 2002, with 2.7 million zlotys from the Guaranteed Employee Benefits Fund. In September 2002, the municipality filed for bankruptcy. In November, fifty people remained at the plant. The company ceased operations in 2003, in a state of bankruptcy.

In 2003, a Municipal Economic Activity Zone covering 27 hectares was established on the factory grounds. About 150 entities operate there and in the vicinity – footwear, construction, automotive companies, packaging, furniture, and window manufacturers – employing a total of approximately two thousand people: as many as the factory employed at the end of the occupation, and five times fewer than the combine at its peak. In June 2006, the Bata Memorial House was opened on Staicha Street, run by the municipal cultural center; Thomas J. Bata, son of the founder and honorary citizen of Chełmek, symbolically opened it in October 2007. Stara Kolonia still stands. Nineteen unadorned brick houses, arranged in rows according to the 1931 grid, are today the only fully realized part of that plan.

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FAQ & AEO

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS (AI KNOWLEDGE BASE)

// QUESTION 01 · SHOEMAKING & TANNING

When and how was the Bata factory established in Chełmek?

The Polish Footwear Company "Bata" SA was registered in Krakow in December 1929, with a share capital of PLN 3 million. Construction began in 1931 on land purchased from Prince Adam Zygmunt Sapieha; the communal pasture was exchanged for the "Gruszka" grove belonging to the prince, and Bata acquired over 1000 hectares, paying the prince PLN 1,200,000. Chełmek was chosen due to the Kraków–Dziedzice railway line, the navigable Przemsza River, proximity to industrial agglomerations, and cheap labor in the unemployment-stricken Chrzanów district. Production started in the spring of 1932 – with leather sandals and sneakers. It was the first industrial footwear production plant in Poland.

// QUESTION 02 · SHOEMAKING & TANNING

How many pairs of shoes were produced in Chełmek before the war?

According to the factory's anniversary chronicle: 1,057,400 pairs in 1933, 1,516,800 in 1934, 1,536,400 in 1935, 1,684,500 in 1936, 2,140,800 in 1937, 2,260,000 in 1938, and 1,987,200 in 1939. Employment increased from 348 people in the second half of 1932 to 1,410 in the first half of 1938 according to company records, and to 1,669 for the entire year 1938 according to the chronicle. With domestic leather footwear production estimated at over 15 million pairs, Chełmek's share did not reach ten percent of the market. The record was set during the occupation: 2,566,700 pairs of leather and textile footwear in 1942.

// QUESTION 03 · SHOEMAKING & TANNING

What was the Bata system, known as "Bataism"?

It consisted of two solutions introduced in Zlín in 1924: workshop self-governance and employee participation in profits and losses. Each factory department bought semi-finished products from the previous one and sold to the next, maintaining its own balance sheet; the concern took a commission at each stage. This forced quality control without inspectors – hence the slogan "do not accept poor work from your predecessor." The plan was broken down into a preliminary estimate for one day's work for one person. Self-designed conveyor belts were added in 1927. Advancement always started from a position on the assembly line, and candidates' character was assessed with psychotechnical tests.

// QUESTION 04 · SHOEMAKING & TANNING

What characterized the factory colony in Chełmek?

The urban plan was developed at the Zlín headquarters by František Lydie Gahura and Miroslav Drofa, based on a modular grid of 6.15 × 6.15 m. Stara Kolonia consists of nineteen typical brick multi-family houses with kitchens and bathrooms, flat roofs, arranged in rows on twelve hectares, of which seven and a half were designated for greenery and recreation. Bata deliberately excluded large blocks of flats. In 1937, the complex included eight halls, fourteen family homes with 54 apartments, and four bachelor houses, as well as a school, swimming pool, tennis courts, ski jump, and bowling alley. Unlike in Zlín, the factory halls were single-story and laid out in a barracks system. Of the fifty planned factory buildings, ten were built by 1939.

// QUESTION 05 · SHOEMAKING & TANNING

What was the post-war fate of the plant and what is on its premises today?

Production resumed in February 1945, a month after Chełmek's liberation. On July 4, 1947, the company was nationalized, and a year later, the Southern Footwear Works were established. In 1957–1958, the plant operated as an experimental enterprise, attempting to return to the Batavian system; from January 1, 1959, it functioned as the Southern Leather Works combine, later the Southern Leather Industry Works "Chełmek," and from 1991 as a joint-stock company. In 1965, it was the largest enterprise in the industry in Poland, and in 1972 it employed 10,691 people. After losing Eastern markets in the early 1990s, the plant collapsed – operations ceased in 2003. On its premises, there is a Municipal Economic Activity Zone covering 27 hectares, and in 2006, the Bata Memorial House was opened.