The centre of Cities production lies in eastern Forgar, concentrated in two rows of workshops either side of the Brulos. The Forgar workshops account for around a third of all manufacturing in the Cities, and employ about a fifth of its workforce. The site started as a production centre with the building of Forgar, with two smiths and a brewers located there; however most of the buildings date form the early 1100's or 1200's. The area is a separate ward, a slightly unusual state considering very few people actually reside there but created thus to allow certain laws, mainly to do with taxation and labour relations, to apply there and nowhere else. Named after Osters Bridge, which links the area to the north, Osters is commonly used for the workshop area generally. Though there are a wide variety of industries there are a number of similarities between most. Physically the workshops are similar, alike in their lack of imagination and pretension. Most are just great rectangular barns, solid brick or stone constructions fifty to two hundred feet tall with few adornments beyond hundreds of windows and, in some cases, huge chimney stacks. This lack of imagination makes the buildings to an extent multi-functional. With a few exceptions (Sardacs, Ocheverry) few are run by the companies they were originally built to house. Every now and again one company goes bankrupt and their premises are swiftly taken over by a younger, thriving concern who merely have to tinker with the fittings and bring in new machinery. The majority of businesses are independent companies, solely concerned with production (i.e. buying raw materials & selling finished goods to separate bodies). Most incorporate machinery somewhere in the productive process, usually the most sophisticated yet devised, but they still remain heavily labour-intensive. The rationale behind the building of the workshops was to try and bring productive processes under a single roof, as opposed to the more scattered system of domestic production. This allows a tight supervision of workers and a rigid control over quality and volume of goods; regular hours have to be worked and foremen are extensively used to check behaviour The reverse of this is the growth of worker solidarity, augmented in a naturally class-conscience like the Cities. The workshops have generally been a success story but marred throughout their history by a series of strikes and riots, with workers and owners of many in semi-permanent positions of hostility. Workers come from all across the Cities, and those living close to the workshops are in fact less likely to be employed by them. Men and women of all ages are employed, though different groups are often concentrated into certain segments - young men in the smithies, for example, and older women in the hatters. This has helped to split the workers of different workshops into cliques, and they often feel loyalty to their company even whilst despising their bosses. For all the divisions between the many groups relying on the workshops for their income a certain ethos exists at Osters. Sporting contests are often held between the different factories and there are several taverns where they congregate after work. The majority of goods produced are low-quality and cheap, intended primarily for local consumption; indeed the workshops are the most commonly cited instance of the Cities 'circular economy' (people employed by one local industry, using their wage to consume the products of other local industries). The narrow strip of land is probably the foulest area of the Cities. Narrow lanes run between its ugly, monolithic buildings, the sky is full of belching smoke, the clatter of machines is deafening and the air is filled with a range of smells, dung and sulphur usually dominating. Hundreds of delivery carts make the streets perpetually unsafe and filthy and the river is clogged up with waste products dumped in it. The Brulos is dirty before it reaches the workshops. The right word doesn't exist to describe its condition when it leaves. A few half-hearted attempts are sometimes made to clean up Osters but most tolerate it, not having to live there and for the high, regular wage most workshops pay.
Brayhatch & Sons One of the largest bakeries in the world. The chief purchaser of the huge yield from the Dorlafan Central Plains (mainly in flour form from the New Dories and other mills) which its legions of workers prepare, bake in their immense ovens and sell as cheap, low-quality bread and cakes.
Chalac Carriage Makers, The Wayfarer's
Coach Works
Two near-identical institutions glaring at each other across the river, both building coaches, particularly the one and two horse gigs used locally. Chalac have more models at the top price range and Wayfarers do slightly more long-distance mercantile coaches, but the difference is small. Chalac's is the elder company, the workshop completed in 1189 and controlled by the Chalac family, long associated with carriage making. For a time the business was a success and the family a strong force in local society until 1237 when a major row blew up between Helden & Anarto, the two brothers then running the company. Anarto was ousted from power and responded by taking over the building directly across the river (formally one of the original smithies, then standing empty), converting it into a rival carriage works and poaching half his brother's staff. A number of years of open hostility followed, in which the brothers tried to undercut one another's prices, sent in gangs to wreck the other's machinery and encouraged gang fights between their workers. Matters seemed to reach a head in 1249 when Helden was jailed for several years after a particularly blatant raid. However, after his release in 1257 he was seriously assaulted and left a permanent invalid, allegedly by his brother. Anarto fled the region and vanished, rumoured to have taken his own life several years later. Those who picked up the pieces in the respective workshops made some attempt at burying the hatchet, but the companies remain rivals today.
Christotan Candles
Something of a junior - it was only set up in 1326 - and on the edges of the workshop area, but is currently one of the most profitable businesses in the Cities. Like many of the workshops it arose from the ashes of a bankrupt company, kept on most of the workers, updated the machinery and made the order book go forth and multiply. Christotan Candles has benefited from sticking doggedly to its sole product - it makes candles, nothing more, nothing less. It does, however, sell a wide range, from the dirt-cheap greasy ones to high quality products which have the distinctive CC emblem stamped on them. It also doesn't see the world ending at the Cities' boundaries, embarking on a risky but hugely rewarding export program and has began selling across the Confederacy. The co-owner and chief driving force is Marie Balden, a highly experienced businesswoman who previously helped to build up the Zierlona Works before being forced out.
Corilaen Glassblowers
One of the most advanced workshops in technical terms, with several multi-level furnaces, special fans and gizmos to assist cooling. Controlled by a consortium headed by the Desonté family. Chiefly domestic production, glasses, bottles etc. Revamped in 1315.
The Dando Smithies
Domestic and commercial smiths who nowadays chiefly sell to the construction industry (hinges, door knockers etc.) and manufacture riding goods. The Dando were a small family-run business in Forgar for many years. However, like many Cities smithies they benefited hugely from the Ten Years War, both from the upsurge in demand for weapons and armour and particularly from the hurried relocation of production when the Chorley foundries were threatened by the Labbish. The Dando cleverly capitalised on the boom and moved into the premises, empty after a tanners went bankrupt several years previously, in 1296. Also like many Cities smithies, after the war they subsisted for a few years on contracts from Tannerz' Fortification Programme and ran into troubles when that was scrapped and Chorley's works picked up. The Dando was quicker on the turn than the equally upstart New Forgar Foundry, which went bankrupt in 1317, and eventually found its reasonably profitable niche. However the turmoil saw off the last of the founding family, whose influence had anyway been declining during the expansion years. It is now joint-owned, with the majority of shares in the hands of Stayson Dorlac, a typically thin-spread and colourless modern businessman.
Forgar Timber Mill
Buys logs which have already been cut up and treated. The Timber Mill turns them into their various products and sells them on. Chiefly a paper producer, with the central works given over to this process - they include vast pulping presses and bleaching vats, the latter one of the main polluters of the Brulos. A surrounding annexe is given over to carpenter's bays. The Mill has some presence to be a 'master carpenter' but mainly just builds cheap, poor quality domestic furniture. Recent embarrassment came when its manager, Kael Otranto, was convicted of a host of business legislation violations and publicly punished; she has since been replaced by a scion of the Fortraine family, who own the mill.
The Hatters
Not surprisingly, they mainly manufacture hats. Fairly long established, moved into Osters in 1317 to take over the premises of the newly bankrupt New Forgar Foundry.
The Ocheverry Printing Works
Sardacs Textile Works
The chief of all the workshops and the
biggest private employer in the Cities.
Sardacs perhaps got an unfair head start, being established with
government help in 1108 as a flagship company which would help revitalise
Dorlaf's then moribund economy. Its
first owner, though, was entirely typical of Christoté's capitalists. Mesman Sardacs was an aristocrat who already
controlled a fair amount of textile production on the Central Plains, but he
found local laws and customs preventing expansion. The domestic homeworking he relied on was also increasingly
viewed as too inefficient. Moving to
the Cities and a professional, tightly controlled workforce was deemed to be
worth the higher costs and wages this would bring. Sardacs presided over thirty years of gradual expansion, the
company gradually modernising its equipment and building reliable client
bases. The Civil Wars and the less
competent stewardships of Mesman's son and grandson saw the works hit trouble,
badly damaged by fire in 1145 and forced to temporarily close its doors
1162-3. Again, though, the government
bailed it out and in the 1170's it passed into the hands of Endez Sardacs, a
legendarily cunning and brutal businessman.
His various measures, legal and otherwise, brought Sardacs into a
pre-eminent position and it has never really relinquished it. The sudden collapse in 1279 of the Star
Company, its only real rival, consolidated Sardacs' position; as too has the
gradual decline of domestic textile production, largely blamed on Sardacs' but
caused by overall economic factors. A
slump in profits in the 1310's finally saw the ousting of the last of the
Sardacs family from its control, though one retains an honorific position on
the board. It is now run by the usual
consortium of businessmen headed by a salaried manager. However, it has developed a strong internal
culture which all its governors are inducted into, and which has remained
intact for all the modernising of its productive methods. Its workers, the vast majority Jalkinites,
have also developed their own culture, enhanced by their numbers and the blue
and brown striped uniforms they are obliged to work. They claim to be the most obstreperous workforce in the world,
not necessarily true but they are highly unionised and strikes are scarcely
unknown. Sardacs is a prominent Forgar
landmark whose three citadel-like main buildings tower even over its immediate
neighbours, built in 1244 to replace a considerably smaller workshop. Surrounding it are a sprawl of yards,
outhouses, storage barns and stables which were tacked on during later
expansions. The bulk of production is
regulated by (extremely noisy) clockwork-powered conveyor belts which divide
the work into small, repetitive tasks and allows a low-paid, unskilled
workforce to be used. More skilled
workers are used for delicate stitching and finishing off tasks; these,
however, are at a minimum given Sardacs' emphasis on quantity over
quality. It has never become a brand
name for polite society but concentrates on hammering out vast numbers of
everyday garments for the general market in the Cities and beyond. You can get two garments for the price of
one, it is said, and you'd better as well, given how long the buggers
last. Sardacs doesn't sell directly,
except to its workers who get garments at a discount rate. The majority of its customers are market
traders, who call every Saturday and Wednesday to buy; it also imports to shops
in other Dorlafan towns.
The Scrace Building
Saddlers
Tarragons
Domestic smithies, traditionally concentrating on cutlery though diversifying of late. Tarragons have long been established but an influx of capital and an ambitious new ruling consortium recently has seen the works and workforce much expanded. Tarragons' aim is nothing less than to break the monopoly of the Chorley smithies. (The Cities has witnessed many companies with such aims, and they generally last under ten years). To this end they have also modernised their machinery considerably and head-hunted Kellin Mechlic, former manager of one of Chorley's main smiths.
The Zierlona Works
Carpenters, long-established but steadily declining.