Can new workers’ co-operatives bridge old ideological divides?

JOE Caygill and Dave Kerin are the most unlikely of collaborators: one is a conservative-voting small businessman; the other, a Marx-quoting trade unionist.

Caygill has been in the manufacturing industry for 30 years. He’s the owner and CEO of Everlast, a hot water tank manufacturer based in Dandenong. But before long, he won’t be the boss anymore – just a worker-owner like everybody else.

He’s teamed up with Kerin and a group of volunteers, many of whom are environmental activists, to convert his business into “Eureka’s Future”, a not-for-profit workers’ co-operative factory.

“I used to negotiate hard against a lot of union initiatives in the earlier days, but as you get older you get wiser,” Caygill says. “And I realised that it doesn’t matter whether you’re way left, way right or somewhere in between, people can come together for a just cause.”

Their cause is the Earthworker Co-operative. The Dandenong factory, and a new facility at Morwell in the Latrobe Valley, will be part of a network of co-operatives aiming provide local jobs and stimulate a “just transition” from fossil fuels to renewable energy.

Caygill did not expect it to turn out this way, but he is adamant that his workers should own his business. Indeed, he believes it’s the only option. Imported tanks are sold in Australia for what it costs Everlast merely to make them. Unless something changes, the business won’t last much longer.

“With not-for-profit co-operatives, all of a sudden we can be competitive,” he says. “As long as we can comfortably cover our costs, we don’t need to make a profit.”

In a worker co-operative, all employees have a stake in the business and an equal vote in the way it runs. Typically, pay is much more even. Caygill anticipates that as a manager at Eureka’s Future he’ll earn no more than double the lowest paid worker. The co-operative’s other advantage is an innovative sales plan: it is using workplace agreements to offer solar hot water systems to workers in lieu of wage rises.

“To my mind, the country needs to be underpinned by a strong manufacturing base,” he says. “I think it’s critical. At the moment it’s underpinned by resources, but the resource boom isn’t going to last forever. And it isn’t only manufacturing we need to address, but also climate change, because our country is going to be one of the most vulnerable.”

Kerin is a life-long union and social justice activist. Currently a member of the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union, he’s been an organiser for several different unions. For the last 16 years, he has been toiling on the Earthworker plan as a volunteer, seeking the right time and place to begin. “It’s been a real learning experience for all of us. Now I know what they mean by the word ‘co-operation’. It’s hard work,” he says.

As a teenager in the late 1960s, Kerin joined the Builders’ Labourers Federation. He participated in the “green bans” of the early 1970s, when the builders labourers refused to work on projects they considered environmentally or socially damaging.

For him, the idea of the co-operatives grew from the roots of the green ban movement: he believes the responsibility to provide meaningful work is inseparable from the need to tackle climate change. Now, he says reaching beyond the ideological divide has become non-negotiable too, because governments are backing away from climate action.

“To me, apart from the climate emergency, the big story in all of this is that small Australian companies have been hit by neoliberalism just as hard as working people. The old Marxian expression for what has happened to small business is they’ve been ‘proletarianised’. They’ve been pushed into the working class. Everything they make, they’re pumping back into their business.

“The good ones, like Joe, feel great responsibility for the people they’ve employed over the years and they don’t know what to do about it. That’s the seedbed for a new approach for the common good.”

While Kerin spent his formative years organising with the Builders Labourers Federation, Caygill rose through the management ranks at the industrial multinational BTR Nylex. In the late 1980s, he started his own plastics manufacturing business.

“I’ve always believed that if somebody gets off their arse and achieves things, what they reap is their reward,” Caygill says. “Dave and I are really on opposite political sides: he’s fairly left wing and I’m fairly right wing. We’ve probably fought each other over picket lines.”

But what unites them has now become more important, he says: a belief in manufacturing, social justice and doing something about climate change.

Workers’ co-operatives are few in Australia. Historically, Australian workers chose to unionise to bargain wages up, rather than organise to own production themselves. Other kinds of collectivism prospered, however, especially agricultural co-operatives, such as Dairy Farmers, as well as small-town co-operative stores and credit unions.

“Not many people in Australia are very familiar with the idea of a worker-owner co-operative,” says Professor Katherine Gibson, an economic geographer from the University of Western Sydney. “Traditionally there has always been an antagonism between the union movement and the idea of worker co-ops.”

In recent months, however, this has changed: new worker co-operatives include a civil engineering services co-operative in Melbourne (which is affiliated with Earthworker), a café in Adelaide, a date farm near Alice Springs, and an aged care business in Sydney [see box].

Gibson’s most recent co-authored book is called ‘Take Back the Economy’. She sees the co-operatives as part of a broader social context in which old political categories and alliances are vanishing. Independents and minor parties are rising, and farmers and environmentalists campaign together against mining.

“The divisions of the past are breaking down given the challenges we’re facing today,” Gibson says. Earthworker shouldn’t be understood as a union or green scheme, but rather, “an initiative of a community saying we need a different way of organising our economy”.

“In co-ops and other experiments like social enterprises, we’re seeing that people crave a more ethical relationship with the economy, rather than the belief that we’re all looking out for ourselves,” she says. “As a society we need to care for each other, and there’s a thirst for asking how we might do that within an enterprise model.”

Melina Morrison, CEO of the newly formed Business Council of Co-operatives and Mutuals, says it is “to be expected” that people will turn to the worker co-operative model in response to the decline in manufacturing.

“Co-operatives thrive in times of economic downturn because they are a self-help solution. In a worker co-operative, labour hires capital, not the other way around. The reason for the enterprise is job creation: the profit is the job,” she says.

But people’s ambitions, however worthy, don’t always match reality: starting a business is hard going, and even harder if you’re doing something unusual, for which advice and finance are thin on the ground.

In mid-2012, when Heinz shut its tomato sauce factory at Girgarre, in the Goulburn Valley, the workers and the local community rallied. They formed the Goulburn Valley Food Co-operative and, initially, offers of funding rolled in. But Heinz refused to sell the factory to its old employees. Before long, the money dried up.

Les Cameron, the co-operative’s public officer, regrets not being able to capitalise on their time in the national spotlight. “If Heinz had been willing to sell to us, that would have given us breathing space. But even so, we would have been trying to compete with global capital in a shrinking market.”

Later that year, the group was considering an alternative plan – taking a lease on a smaller facility in Kyabram – when the Banksia Securities financial group collapsed. A lot of people in the region lost money, including ex-Heinz workers who had invested their redundancy payouts with Banksia.

So the food co-operative changed tactics again. “We felt putting money into a risky, undercapitalised venture would be like rubbing salt in the wound,” Cameron explains. It now uses its funds – raised from one-off contributions by more than 1000 members – to finance local growers and food businesses to increase production and sell into a wider network of stores and restaurants. These include makers of pasta and sauce, pear cider, strawberry jam and liqueur, with more on the way.

The Girgarre site remains all but idle. A small section of the plant is being used by a business that converts out-of-date food into animal feed, Cameron says. “There’s probably a metaphor in there for what happened. And all that infrastructure, a lot of which was paid for out of the public purse, is effectively rotting.”

Only a few ex-Heinz workers are still involved in the co-operative. It is volunteer-run, not worker-owned. No one is getting paid. Its gains, compared with its initial dreams, have been modest. But they are gains all the same. “In some ways we feel stronger than we ever have been – it feels like we’re doing something at the human scale that could be repeated,” Cameron says.

“It’s our attempt to replace the current distribution system, which is dominated by the supermarket oligopoly. Like a lot of big ideas, it isn’t going to deliver in five minutes.”

Both the Goulburn Valley Food Co-operative and the Earthworker Co-operative were inspired by the Mondragon co-operatives from the Basque country, in Spain.

Beginning with two-dozen workers making paraffin stoves in 1956, the Mondragon Co-operative Corporation now comprises a web of 289 businesses including a university and a bank, 110 of which are owned by their workers. The group employs over 80,000 people, and it has proved comparably resilient throughout the deep recession in Spain.

“It’s been a successful model of regional development and it has inspired a lot of people more recently, especially in areas where companies have moved on and left whole workforces abandoned,” Professor Gibson says.

For instance, the Evergreen Co-operatives in Cleveland, Ohio, which formed a cluster of laundry, urban farming and solar panel installation co-operatives beginning in 2009. So far, their growth has been far slower than anticipated, and few jobs have been created.

The journey for Earthworker has been protracted. But it has now negotiated clauses in a range of Enterprise Bargaining Agreements, including a university, a council, and a community sector agency, which allow employees to salary sacrifice for its hot water systems.

“We use the agreement as the means to distribute the goods – that’s never been done before,” Kerin explains. “It’s a world-first. We build the demand side and manufacture into it.”

As with the Mondragon model, Earthworker will be a central co-operative that provides finance, training and support for subsidiaries, such as Eureka’s Future and the engineering services co-operative.

Recently, the group raised nearly $80,000 in a fortnight-long crowdfunding campaign for Eureka’s Future. “That just shows that people aren’t waiting for governments because, crikey, we can’t wait any longer!” he says.

His ultimate vision is to offer childcare and housing, via co-operatives, as a part of their job. They’d be part of a growing “social sector” in the economy: “We would be manufacturing the things the country needs in terms of jobs and climate: the new green electricity, water and mass-transit grid. Three decades of that work will see this country prosper.”

As a businessman, Caygill is rather more circumspect. “We’ve got this transition period now where it can all fall down, or it can get stronger and bigger,” he says.

Until three years ago, Everlast was in operation 24 hours a day, 6 days a week. It employed 45 people. But that ended overnight when the then federal Labor government cut rebates for solar hot water units. “It’s been a real struggle ever since,” Caygill says. Now he employs only ten, but believes Eureka’s Future can re-create the old jobs within 12 months.

He says that while his views on politics haven’t changed, he’s been troubled by the decline of manufacturing, the growing influence of large, footloose corporations, and the casualisation of the workforce.

“One of the only ways people can make money [in manufacturing] now is to exploit the workers and drag down the costs. That’s the reality of it,” he says.

“I think everybody deserves to make a decent living. That should be a God-given right in this country, and it isn’t. We need to try to change that. And when you address both manufacturing and climate change, the beauty of it is that there can’t be any opposition. It’s unique because it brings everybody together.”

Caring for the carers

WHEN Robyn Kaczmarek began working on a casual contract for a community care agency, visiting elderly people in their homes, she didn’t like the way she was treated. “It’s a poor quality, low-paying job. It’s really, really hard work and you’re usually alone,” she says. “The people at the bottom don’t have any say and that was really disheartening.”

She also observed that it was bad for the clients too – high staff turnover and poor communication undermined the continuity and quality of care.

Home support workers are “already economically marginalised”, says Melina Morrison, from the Business Council of Co-operatives and Mutuals. They’re often women from non-English speaking backgrounds, or older women returning to work part-time.

“Aged care workers are a forgotten bunch,” Kaczmarek says. “Nobody is looking after them.”

Rather than put up with it, she founded a worker-owned business. Co-operative Home Care is based on successful models in the USA and UK. After two years planning, it began operating last October. The workers are based in Sydney’s inner-west and south-west, employing 20 people and growing quickly, with plans to expand into a network of linked home-care and day-care centres.

For now, management, administrative staff and carers all receive the same rate of pay. Each worker gets one vote and the books are open so everyone knows how the money comes and goes.

Kaczmarek says the upside is clear for co-op workers: comparatively higher wages, more training, and the opportunity to take on different roles in the business. “The other benefit is that they’re supported,” she says. “They’re not alone in the job, which otherwise doesn’t happen in this industry.”

Read this article at The Age online.

Read ‘The Co-operation’, a related article about the Goulburn Valley Food Cooperative.

After more than 20 years and countless campaigns, the Save Albert Park group is still trying to save Albert Park.

IT’S a Monday evening at the 3CR studios in Collingwood, and Save Albert Park’s radio show has just begun.

When the rousing theme song – “Do you hear the people sing?” from Les Misérables – ends, host Barbara Clinton introduces the guests. Owing to circumstances, there’s been a sudden change in programming: she had to bump a public parks expert from New York.

“Tonight we’re devoting our programme to the state government re-signing the Formula 1 Grand Prix in Albert Park for a further 5 years,” Clinton says.

“Firstly, I’d like to ask Peter Goad, was this a surprise to us at Save Albert Park? What was your immediate reaction?”

“Well, Barbara, we’ve been protesting against this event now for 20 years,” Goad, the group’s president, replies. “I’m not really surprised to hear they’ve re-signed, but of course it’s still a blow. We are perennial optimists. We think that eventually something has got to go right.”

The group has hosted a half-hour weekly radio spot since the mid-1990s. Today is a particularly dark day: Premier Denis Napthine graced the pages of the Herald-Sun waving a chequered flag. The event will continue in the park until 2020, at least. The Premier described the race as a “key pillar of Victoria’s major sporting events strategy” and congratulated Grand Prix Corporation chairman Ron Walker for “getting the best deal for Victoria”. As usual, the government would not reveal how much it paid for the contract.

On the radio show, Peter Logan – a former Port Phillip councillor and the group’s media spokesperson – ridicules the idea that the race offers value for money. “To use Joe Hockey’s phrase, the Grand Prix is a leaner, not a lifter,” he says. “It’s getting a multi-million dollar subsidy every year.”

Save Albert Park is a story of extraordinary community activism and persistence against overwhelming opposition.

The group held its first official meeting in February 1994, in the Albert Park library. Peter Logan was among the 50-odd people there, outraged both at the impending loss of their park to commerce, and that the deal had been done in secret, without any consultation. They hoped to stop it before it began. “We were a bit shell-shocked. We weren’t sure how to go about it,” he says.

Before long, they figured it out. A newspaper article the following year referred to the group as “one of the strongest campaign organisations ever built up in Australia”. Its organisational chart contained 18 specialist subgroups, including a legal group boasting about 40 lawyers, two QCs and a former County Court judge.

Goad now says that at its peak, the group’s membership was about 3000, but plunged when the Labor Party embraced the race. Now, they have about 300-400 households, or 1000 people. Two-thirds are from further afield than the neighbouring suburbs, he’s quick to affirm. Since 1996, every Port Phillip council has opposed the race, but it has never just been a case of the NIMBYs.

Although its numbers are diminished, Save Albert Park endures. As well as its radio show, the group runs weekly working bees at the park and produces a monthly newsletter. Volunteers staff the South Melbourne office each weekday morning.

The state member for Albert Park, Labor’s Martin Foley, meets with them 3 or 4 times a year. Despite his party’s support for the race, Foley admires the activists.

“This community is all the better for Save Albert Park,” he says. “They’re locals giving up so much of their time and energy for a very noble pursuit: protecting open space for parks.

“Because their activism comes from the very best of intentions and is not party-political, the community can trust them. That means a great deal – it’s one of the reasons they’ve been able to sustain their efforts for so long.”

Peter and Rosemary Goad meet me at their office the morning after the radio show. It’s a modest nook in South Melbourne Town Hall, adjacent to the quarters occupied by fellow travellers, the Friends of the ABC.

High on a bookcase, entirely forgotten, sits a delightfully provocative sculpture: a golden fist in middle-finger salute. “I can’t remember where it came from – we’ve had it so long,” explains Rosemary.

The couple, who live in Middle Park, were recruited to the cause by Logan in early 1994. They met him at a Save Albert Park stall at the South Melbourne market.

Goad pulls a wealth of documents from his shoulder bag. Both sides of politics have endeavoured to keep their dealings with the Australian Grand Prix Corporation secret. Save Albert Park has done its best to draw out the evidence.

He produces a well-thumbed copy of the 2007 report by the Victorian Auditor-General, which questioned the “brand value” benefits for the city and found the Grand Prix amounted to a net cost to the state of $6.7 million. An updated analysis using the same methodology – this time commissioned by Save Albert Park – estimated a net cost of over $60 million in 2012, accounting for traffic congestion, noise and loss of access to the park.

The corporation’s annual report for 2013 showed the government gave it a $58 million subsidy. It also reveals that it spends nearly $30 million to install and remove the race’s infrastructure every year. “Ridiculous!” Rosemary exclaims. “It’s just busywork.”

The group’s objective remains the same as ever: to remove the race from the park. Instead, it could be held at Avalon, Goad says, where a purpose-built track could be a year-round boost for the Geelong economy, rather than months of traffic snarls and inaccessible parkland for Melbourne.

He closes his eyes in concentration when he makes an important point, which is often. He has been president for over a decade. He formulates his arguments – clear, rational, well-founded – again and again but nothing gives. Still the cars go round.

What’s it like defending reason in the face of two-decades of unreason?

“We are acting for a large number of people who are sympathetic but can’t do anything – they haven’t got the time. It’s just like the people who are protesting against the East-West link, which has no business case and nothing to justify it. They’re doing the [protest] work for me – I’ve got enough to do already,” he says.

“To a degree, we’re the conscience of Victoria. Somebody’s got to do it, because the whole thing is so basically dishonest. You’ve got to be philosophical and not get too emotionally involved. It’s depressing, but what does keep you going is the fact that you’re battling against something you know is wrong.

“And Ron Walker keeps us entertained.”

On the wall is a magnificent green tapestry commemorating the early years of the struggle. It marks key moments in the fight: the 10,000-strong rally in May 1994; “Chainsaw Tuesday”, in December that year, when over 100 trees were cut down around the lake and beyond; and “Flag day” the following year, when the group’s giant 40m by 20m flag was unveiled.

As Goad says, they were “heady days”. Nearly 700 people were arrested for various acts of civil disobedience, from sitting in proscribed zones to locking themselves onto trees marked for felling.

One year, several dozen protestors blocked access to the Grand Prix’s depot during track building. “The Grand Prix Corporation is denying us access to the park, so we are trying to deny them access to their stored equipment,” spokesperson Diana Burleigh said at the time. During the race that year, 60 protesters blocked the VIP entrance gate. Two were dressed as ducks. Four were arrested.

Among the civilly disobedient were many prominent citizens. Carrillo Gantner AO, actor, director and theatre founder, and subsequently, city councillor and Victorian of the Year, was one of them.

“I’m not against the Grand Prix. I am against it being located in Albert Park,” says Gantner, currently the chairperson of the Sidney Myer Fund.

He decided to take a stand when Premier Jeff Kennett introduced the Grand Prix Act, which exempted the event from various other pieces of legislation and removed the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court. People whose houses were damaged by track compaction works could no longer sue for compensation.

“That seemed to be a bridge too far, because people have been fighting and dying since the Magna Carta – and probably well before – for the right of appeal to an independent judiciary against a wilful executive,” Gantner says. “So along with a few friends we resolved that it was time to be visible in our protest.”

It was a “fairly unusual group” he says, including as it did, the daughter of a Liberal Premier, Julia Hamer; the son of a state governor, James McCaughey, and a prominent artist, Mirka Mora. They sat where they weren’t supposed to – in the place designated for the pit building – and refused to budge.

“The police were very polite and asked us sweetly to move to the other side of the tape on the ground. To move our arses three feet to the left, basically,” Gantner says. “And we said ‘No thank you, we came down to be arrested’.”

They were never charged. For all the arrests, not a single conviction was recorded.

Gantner was a dues-paying member of Save Albert Park for “some years”, and remains sympathetic. The campaign has endured, he believes, in part because the governments have been “so dishonest and opaque” about costs and crowd numbers.

The initial, prolonged militancy had its place in the broader tumult that finally undermined Jeff Kennett’s premiership. But when even a change of government yielded no progress, their mobilising moment had passed.

“That was our heroic age. We’re now in the stoic phase,” Goad says. “It was so intense it burnt a whole lot of people out. The only way to continue to fight the Grand Prix was to concentrate on the facts and the economics, rather than the demos.”

The group’s other tactical shift has been to volunteer in the park itself. The Goads take me on a tour of their works. Peter navigates their Subaru through the park with a proprietary air, shifting bollards where necessary for ease of vehicular access.

Out of the Grand Prix’s reach, they’ve planted hundreds of trees and installed nearly two-dozen Cyprus pine bench seats. They revegetate and guard over a small patch of bushland, adjacent to the Junction Oval, which contains the Corroboree Tree, a lone River Red gum estimated to be up to 500 years old. The tree bears wounds on its trunk where it was clipped by passing trucks. Save Albert Park successfully campaigned for VicRoads to install a barrier.

It’s one of many small wins around the park. When Lakeside Drive opened as a four-lane, 60 kilometre-per-hour thoroughfare, Save Albert Park documented every accident. The speed limit was reduced and the road narrowed.

“All the things we’ve done!” Rosemary chuckles.

Most famously, the group held a vigil at the park just off Albert Road. It lasted from 1994 until 2005.

In early 2000, Peter Goad was interviewed for an Age article, uncharitably titled “Why on earth do they bother?” By then, the vigil had notched up 1672 days. The journalist concluded her article by asking: when, if ever, will you give up?

Goad answered that he would campaign for “as long as it takes”, and certainly wouldn’t quit within 20 years.

Another long time volunteer, Reg Boyd, answered that he’d give up “when they put me in a box”.

Boyd is seriously ill with cancer, but remains the group’s treasurer. “Reg is indomitable,” Goad says. “His quote was correct.”

This latest extension has deflated Rosemary, however. Her spirits are “dampened, totally dampened”, she concedes. She’s not sure if their fight will continue beyond the terms of this contract: “Age will not allow.”

But Peter literally scoffs at the idea of giving up. “They’re such bastards, you can’t let them get away with it,” he says. “You have to fight it, even if you fail.”

 

Read this article at The Age online

It’s over at Alcoa.  The last shipment of alumina unloaded from the pier, the fires extinguished in the furnace, and smelting pots shut down. No more jobs for life.

STEVE Beasley stands on the long factory line, with the crane controls at his waist. Hanging before him is the crucible, which looks like a huge steel teapot, with a long, downward spout for siphoning the molten metal.

He manoeuvres the crucible forward so its spout extends into the smelting cell, where – with the help of extraordinary amounts of electricity – alumina is turned into aluminium, at 950˚C.

He’s been doing this for years, but something is different this time. The smelting cell – known as a “pot” – has already been switched off. There are 368 pots at Alcoa’s Point Henry smelter; this month, the operators have gradually shut them down.

At lunchtime, Beasley sits with his shift partner Wayne Palmer in the canteen. On one wall is a pinboard decorated with photos from the site’s 51 years. On the other, is a jobs board.

“There’s life after Alcoa,” Beasley says, over a plate of chips and gravy.

“It’s time to get it over with,” Palmer says.

Tomorrow, it’s over – nearly six months after the plant’s closure was announced in February. Today, the workers flick the switch on the last functioning pots, and siphon whatever metal they can get. The aluminium rolling mill, adjacent to the smelter, will close by the end of the year. Altogether, 800 people will lose well-paid jobs.

It is the latest of the mass-manufacturing job losses to hit the town, but Point Henry’s demise resonates beyond its economic impact. The Alcoa plant, with its iconic water tower, has been a constant presence in Geelong, visible to the east across a narrow stretch of Corio Bay. From father afield, too, it was a symbol of Australia’s post-war industrial optimism.

Warren Sharp has worked for Alcoa for 24 years. For the last three “eventful” years, he’s been the smelter manager at Point Henry. He is in charge until 7 pm tonight, after which the years-long decommissioning process will begin.

The closure announcement in February was no surprise, Sharp says, but it was still a shock – in the same way as the death of someone with a terminal illness can be. The years since the global financial crisis have been trying: the combination of a low aluminium price, a high Australian dollar, and old technology has proven lethal.

Alcoa’s newest smelter, in Saudi Arabia, is four times larger than Point Henry and much more automated. The company’s Portland smelter, opened in 1986, will continue to operate.

“We’ve pushed our technology as hard as we can,” says Darrel Linke, the manager of the electrode division. Linke started at Point Henry in January 1979 as a graduate electronic engineer. “We’ve always had good people here. We find a way of doing things.”

They know how to run the plant. But shutting it down safely, while continuing production, has been another challenge altogether. “It’s been a good distraction for us, that’s the truth of it,” Sharp admits.

For the last couple of months, each week has marked another melancholy milestone: the last shipment of alumina unloaded from the pier, the last anode made, the fires extinguished in the furnace, and ever more smelting pots shut down.

Both Sharp and Linke have observed the bittersweet truth that as the end nears, their admiration for their colleagues continues to rise. The challenge of working together has grown, as has their sense of mutual satisfaction from a job well done.

“The teamwork is tremendous,” Linke says. “I reflect on that. It’s going to be the hardest thing for me to say goodbye.” He has no job to go to next.

This week, as each crew has finished their final shift, they’ve gathered in the canteen to mark the moment and receive a commemorative booklet tracing through the site’s half-century history.

Alcoa of Australia was founded by mining engineer and businessman Lindesay Clark. He convinced the American parent company to invest; and, crucially, persuaded the Australian government to protect the industry with import restrictions. The new venture would mine and refine bauxite in Western Australia, and smelt, roll and fabricate aluminium in Victoria.

The smelter at Point Henry poured its first hot metal in April 1963. In ‘White Gold’, a company history published in 1997, Geoffrey Blainey wrote that the Americans cancelled a gala opening ceremony, which was to be conducted by Prime Minister Robert Menzies, for fear of industrial espionage by Japanese experts who’d been invited. They instructed that no official guests – not even Menzies – were to set foot inside the buildings.

The modernist photographer Wolfgang Sievers photographed the Point Henry site in its first year of operations. He returned several times in the next two decades, and as always, sought to portray the dignity of work and his faith in a notion of progress that united men and machines.

Linke recalls that when he started, 35 years ago, he was proud to join an industry that extended beyond primary production, and brought jobs and money into the country. “To me it felt good to do that, as opposed to being a miner. Having that whole supply chain, right to the end,” he says.

“It feels a little bit like we’re regressing. It’s sad – paring back the vision that the founders of Alcoa of Australia had.”

His pride in the company is not unusual. It is common to the managers, workers, receptionists and even unionists. Ben Davis, the Victorian secretary of the Australian Workers Union, says the smelter has a good relationship with its employees and the whole region. “Alcoa has been so much a part of the social and economic fabric of Geelong since it opened,” he says.

(The shop floor has been tense at times, however. In 1973, the workers staged the ultimate provocation: a strike on VFL grand final day.)

The average length of employment as an “Alcoan” at Point Henry is 18 years. But now, those jobs are gone. In retrospect, Wolfgang Sievers’ photos evoke a belief in progress that has long since eroded. As photographic historian Helen Ennis has written, his images “express no doubts about the future”.

“Their vision thus seems worlds away from contemporary concerns about the negative impacts of technology, pollution, environmental degradation and climate change,” she writes.

Her observation is especially apt in the case of aluminium, often described as “congealed electricity”. At Point Henry, Alcoa consumed over 7 per cent of the state’s electricity load, or about three times that of Geelong’s households.

In his review on climate policy, Ross Garnaut noted that Australia was among the world’s least efficient aluminium producers, and his modelling suggested that smelting would gradually move offshore.

The company’s brown coal power station at Anglesea is up for sale. It was built especially for the smelter and provided 40 per cent of its electricity.

Now, the power station has become the source of controversy for its 80 workers and for Surf Coast Air Action, a local campaign calling for its closure. The group is concerned about the plant’s sulphur dioxide and other emissions and its bushfire vulnerability. On August 10, it is staging a rally and march to the mine.

Without the carbon price, Anglesea power station has become a viable economic proposition, says Professor Mike Sandiford, director of the Melbourne Energy Institute at University of Melbourne. But if it continues to supply the grid, despite plummeting demand, it will be a significant contributor to what he describes as “a dire emissions outlook”. Our electricity supply is set to become more carbon intensive for the first time in half a decade.

*

Every Friday, Rebecca Casson writes an upbeat column in the Geelong Advertiser. Casson is the CEO of the Committee for Geelong, whose members comprise large and small businesses in the town.

“Geelong’s economy is changing, but is manufacturing really dead?” she wrote recently. “According to recent feedback, definitely not! Evolving and innovative? Yes. Exciting? It sure is.”

Casson points to smaller manufacturers, such as Boundary Bend Olives, the Little Creatures Brewery, or high-tech wheel maker Carbon Revolution, and to other growing industries, such as insurance. The National Disability Insurance Scheme and the Transport Accident Commission are both headquartered in the city.

“It is the job of the committee to be positive, but not to put spin on it,” Casson says. “We are realistic, we do know that the city is going through this huge change and we would be foolish to say everything is fine. Everything is not fine.”

“These new jobs might not come immediately, and they might not be in familiar industries. But if people are willing to retrain there are a lot of opportunities.”

On Monday morning, the city’s “job shop” will open its doors for the first time. Located at the Gordon TAFE, in a heritage building near Geelong railway station, the walk-in centre will offer careers counselling and advice on work available in the area.

It is part of Skilling the Bay, an $11 million state-government program managed by Greg Leahy, from the Gordon. He’s tasked with lifting education levels and workforce participation across the region. Geelong’s high school completion rate is well below the state average. Youth unemployment is particularly high.

Young men can no longer follow their fathers to Ford or Alcoa, Leahy says. “Instead they’ll be coming out of school or university and getting a job with a small to medium-sized enterprise in West Geelong or Ocean Grove. The path to those jobs is nowhere near as clear.”

The path for retrenched workers is equally muddy. Leahy acknowledges there “isn’t a perfect fit” between their skills and the region’s growing industries – healthcare, community work and construction.

But the Gordon has been working with Alcoa employees for months. The company has paid for resume writing workshops and short courses, and offered extra funding for training in whatever field employees choose.

“The workers are at different points in the journey: some are resigned to their fate, some are thinking laterally, some are in denial,” Leahy says. “We’re trying to create a family-friendly environment. We don’t want people confronting these issues on their own.”

In the lounge room of their neat, brick home in Geelong’s eastern suburbs, Damian and Bethany Young are explaining their revised plans.

When Damian began at Point Henry in 2000, he thought he had a job for life. But earlier this morning, the couple signed a lease on a shop in East Geelong. They are converting Bethany’s part-time, online kids and homewares store, Ryder Loves Miller – named after their two young sons – into a bricks-and-mortar business.

The city’s main street is pockmarked with empty shops, but the couple believe they’ve identified a niche. “We’re positive,” Bethany says. “We don’t think Geelong is dead at all, otherwise we wouldn’t be doing this.”

For Damian, 39, it’s a wild career change. “I’ve gone from one extreme from another,” he says. “I never imagined myself in retail. I find it a bit daunting, but Bethany reassures me.”

“He is a little institutionalised,” she laughs.

It’s a word that comes up often in conversations with, or about, “Alcoans”. They’ll have to get used to “the real world”, Bethany says: lower wages, fewer sickies and less flexibility for time off with family.

Young, 39, took his redundancy a few weeks early so he could start work on the shop. Even so, he still speaks about Alcoa in the present tense. “I work in the potrooms,” he explains. “It’s hard work. If it wasn’t hot, they wouldn’t pay us the rate they do.”

His workmates are mates – they’ve attended each other’s weddings and kids’ birthdays – but he expects catch-ups will become rare as life moves on. As the former union delegate for his shift, he is worried about their welfare – especially those who’d committed to big mortgages. A few have jobs, but many have been forced to search farther and farther afield.

On his last day, in mid-July, Young was told he could leave early – but he wasn’t ready to go. “I got changed and it didn’t really hit until I was having that last shower. I was like: I don’t want to get out yet. But Bethany was coming to pick me up. “So I left. I shut the locker and walked out the gate.”

For better or worse, he stepped into a new Geelong.

Read this article at The Age online