The Unknown Industrial Prisoner (43 page)

He took rosters over a number of days to read his prepared lecture to captive audiences. He came in through a door to which the men had no access, stood waiting for silence, and when he got it began his spiel. He had never spoken to them before. He thought of them as animals: now he wanted their understanding.

‘We have sustained very heavy financial losses in recent years—yearly losses which have increased rather than decreased'—he tactfully omitted to mention that the cost of the cracker construction had been charged against Clearwater refinery and that was the reason for the loss figure—‘and it is therefore necessary that action be taken to rectify this if the future security of each one of us is to be assured. Unless we can prove that we can operate profitably then further developments will be in jeopardy and certain of our activities could possibly be transferred elsewhere. We are over-manned in various departments and some reductions seem inevitable. There has to be change if we are to progress, there surely cannot be any argument about this. Your basic interests after all are synonymous with our own, that is, that the future will provide us with the security so necessary to our individual welfare. What will be done therefore has to be done.'

 

AN INDUSTRIAL OMBUDSMAN He finished and asked for questions.

‘Is the place going to be shifted?' asked Oliver Twist. ‘We ought to be told now so we can get other jobs. We're not going to move to Port Stephens or wherever it is and find there's only company houses to buy. We ought to be told now; after all, we're the permanent employees, you're not.'

‘What does that mean?' asked the Manager with dignity.

‘Managers stay a few years, then go somewhere else. We stay till we retire.'

‘Does this mean we'll get no change in the sick-pay policy?' asked the Count. ‘In the old country we got six weeks on full pay and six weeks half pay after six months' service. Here we get five days a year in the award and there's no policy in writing. It seems to vary from man to man.'

‘I can't pronounce on staff policy,' said the Manager, smiling at their ignorance. Didn't they know it was uniform throughout the world?

‘How will they liberalize sick pay if they're economizing, you log?' said Oliver Twist to the Count.

‘What about safety?' asked the Two Pot Screamer.

‘Special attention will be paid to safety. I am taking a special interest in it. I hope you will send representatives to the next Safety Council and not boycott it. After all, they're your plants.' No one questioned the pronoun.

‘I hope when we ask for something we need in the way of safe working,' said Oliver Twist, ‘we won't be outvoted by office galahs that don't know what we're talking about.'

‘I think we'll see improvement all round. I'm personally very interested in the safety question.'

‘We've had things in the safety books for months. We have wooden ladders in places where you need proper steel ladders stayed to columns. There's all the safeties that won't reseat, the drains that are full every time it rains, fires every few weeks and a whole mess of things at the cracker. They've all been notified and nothing's done. They've got sixty kilo boiling water going through a rubber hose down there.'

‘I'll have all this investigated promptly. If you men will draw up lists, plant by plant, of all hazards, I personally will see it gets attention. The plant must be safe.'

‘If we can't get action from those directly above us, the foremen and section heads, can we come up to you, then?' persisted the Two Pot Screamer.

The Manager stopped. He hadn't meant this. He was so unused to talking to prisoners that he hadn't realized they would take this meaning from his words. Couldn't they see it was just the old line—not meant to be taken seriously?

‘Well, I'll be attending every third or fourth meeting of the monthly council, so eventually I'll see all the minutes. You can stop worrying.' He looked round for the next question. He knew the effect on most of them of his economy drive. It would soften them up ready to accept the company award instead of pushing their own claims.

‘Wait a minute,' said Two Pot. ‘When you said you were personally interested and you wanted to know, you seemed to be saying you were going to resume the old style manager-worker contact, like we had with Gentleman Joe, the one before Glorious Devon. But every three months! Christamighty, we could have blokes dead down there and you'd read the minutes three months later! What we need is a man to combine industrial and safety investigation. Not just the Brown Snake, he doesn't do anything till we make a complaint. Why can't we have a man coming round to nip these things in the bud? Why don't you streamline your industrial set-up by appointing an industrial Ombudsman? That way you'—he almost continued ‘could bypass the Union', but stopped in time—‘you'd have a man in charge of industrial relations that we could trust, too. One that couldn't be suspected of being on the Company's side. One that didn't owe loyalty to any particular department. The unions together could pay half his salary and the Company the other half.' But Two Pot had stopped on the way to work for a few pots. Everyone understood and took no notice. The Manager disregarded the question. Two Pot didn't realize how little power the Manager had; certainly he was not allowed to tamper with Procedure, which laid down that Puroil was to have a Brown Snake after the pattern of Puroil snakes all over the world. None of the prisoners said anything to show they thought they should have a say in Puroil's management. All their training, all their education from childhood up had ingrained in them the conviction that they should be ruled by others.

 

THE STRUGGLE FOR FREEDOM One Eye waited at the other end of the building; he knew where the back door led.

‘You know what you need?' said One Eye, jostling the Wandering Jew as he scurried out. The Manager recovered his balance and asked, ‘What do I need?' One Eye stood between him and the path to his office.

‘You need a few hard knocks outa life,' said One Eye loudly. ‘You haven't been around enough to be a boss to these men.' He had avoided witnesses: he liked to feel he could get his dismissal in a man-to-man session with the Manager.

He pushed the Wandering Jew, tipped his white safety helmet over his eyes, pulled the white handkerchief out of his pocket and blew his nose dirtily on it. The Wandering Jew hoped vainly that his spectacles would not be touched, but One Eye hooked his finger in them and whipped them off. The Manager's eyes looked oddly naked, they were surrounded by skin which had not weathered with the rest of his face and seemed defenceless.

 

HEEL! When the lectured workers got down to the cracker, the Sumpsucker was waiting for them, his little eyes screwed up in close examination of their faces. Softly he sang the first verse of ‘Rock of Ages' as he moved among them. He walked off a few paces and stood with his hands behind his back as if he were hiding a rolled-up newspaper.

‘Come here, all of you!' he experimented.

‘You go and have a tootie on a hot brick,' advised the Humdinger. ‘Some day someone'll hang one on this company. They can't do what they like to people.'

‘It won't be you mob. Or we'll wear your guts for garters.'

No one else looked up. They trooped into the locker-room, except for those like the Western Salesman and the Loch Ness Monster who hung about like dogs, looking for the Slug and sniffing for news and scraps of loose talk. But the Sump knew that though they were tall, bronzed, rugged Australian individualists, more or less, they would end up doing exactly as they were told. The new industrial agreement would tell them how high to jump. After years of taking it, the Sump was in a position to dish it out. Not one man had the heart to joke about the big black drums on the footpath outside the widow's house. The council had ordered her to move them. Sumpy had to pay for the job. She still demanded something each time he had her and catalyst drums were the only things he could get free.

 

VICTIMIZED The phone calls started that same day. All departments, even the day workers in the Termitary, heard the earnest voice asking them about the proposed transfer of the Puroil enterprise to Port Stephens. The voice would answer no questions, merely repeating the words Port Stephens, and ‘When are the company's activities here going to be abandoned?' People started to be agitated over nothing.

Next day One Eye was called up to the Brown Snake's office, told that Head Office had reduced the Clearwater establishment by one operator and he was it. Sacked. At fifty-one.

He swore, stamped, banged the desk, called the Brown Snake for everything under the sun, scattered all his papers, tipped up the desk and threw the Brown Snake's hat and coat out the window on to the garden beds, then did a wee on desk and carpet, with the Brown Snake coiled in a corner. As a last gesture, he ripped the phone from its mooring, spat on the Brown Snake's white shirt—a little went on his tie and on his Puroil long-service tie-chain—then pulled open the door and strode to the car park, jubilant.

He would get his proportion of long-service leave now; as for his tantrums, they would be overlooked. If they were made public, everyone might get in on the act. But he'd made sure they didn't change their minds on his dismissal.

How was it, then, that he felt enraged? Why had they chosen him for the chop? There were bludgers aplenty all over the plants. He'd got what he wanted, all right, but it was like their bloody hide to pick on him.

17
THROWOUTS

GOODNIGHT, GOD The Great White Father nearly didn't reach work, his battery had leaked acid for so long it fell through the floor of the car. He was lucky to be able to put it back in; a few old newspapers wedged it tight. That night the plant was down and the unlucky ones were in the cracker's regenerator, digging out soaked and rock-hard catalyst with picks. He listened briefly to what they told him of the latest disaster. Some fool foreman had insisted on belting steam into the system for too long, the steam condensed to water, and when white-hot catalyst was circulated the water became steam again. The resulting pressure nearly took the lid off the lot. More steam was injected to damp down the whole mess. The catalyst was poisoned with water. He clucked his tongue.

‘Saw Slackie in town the other day. Back from Australia's riches in the west. They get him out there, eight hundred miles from nowhere and tell him to work twelve hours next day. That's all right. He does his twelve. Then he finds it's twelve hours a day whenever they say and they say it thirteen days a fortnight. One day off in two weeks he got, and he made the mistake of querying it. Out the gate he went and had to find his way to Perth the best he could. You should hear him curse those foreign bastards.'

‘Who owns it?'

‘Yanks and British. They do what they like. You say one word and out you go. Not even the Unionists were game to fight when they brought in Japanese workers—they had to be stirred up by a man who'd never voted Labor in his life. But never mind all that, all I want you blokes to do tonight is tuck me in, then come round at six and beg me to get up. And don't forget, wear double underwear on Anzac Day, the forecast is for cold weather.' Anzac Day was months off.

‘Aren't you going to be careful now they're tightening up?'

‘This is the time to stand up for your rights. I'll sleep tonight. So goodnight God and stay tuned to the Great White Father: he'll dream about you.'

Not all the shifts picked at the work in their usual exhausted fashion. This night, on 2 shift, they worked like madmen. The catalyst was thick and wet and only thirty tons to go. By the sort of coincidence that Puroil usually managed to avoid, the men were paired off in exactly the right way. The standard method was never to match up two men who got on well together in case they sat and talked; no, put the enemies together so they work hard. They never did, but Puroil stuck to its method. It was laid down.

The Samurai was with the Humdinger, Disneyland with Gunga Din, the Western Salesman with the Loch Ness Monster, the Two Pot Screamer with Terrazzo, the Thieving Magpie with Knuckles. There was little talking and no grumbling. Because the catalyst was wet there was no dust. No silica to breathe.

No one knew why everyone wanted to work—perhaps because the Slug was off sick catching up on printing orders, perhaps because it was the last day of the shift—but that thirty tons was down the vacuum line in two hours and the first thirty tons took four days of three shifts each.

 

TRAINING FOR FREEDOM On the plants men were learning the details of the new plan. There would be a pool of workers, the throwouts, who would be given training of a sort then sacked if they failed an examination. A Navy man was brought in to take charge of training. Men who had been there thirty-five years were given induction courses. No man would have any one job but would regard himself as temporary, to be moved as often as necessary. This and a few discipline adjustments were a violent change in the established job indulgency pattern.

There was a doubling of all supervision. One of the catalyst lines had blown through erosion by fine particles over a long time and this had caused the latest plant crash; doubling the supervision would stop the catalyst from doing things like this again.

A dozen men whom the company thought had a lot of influence on the rest because they talked a lot, were called up for interviews to be foremen, competing for eight places. The winners were to be announced after the industrial agreement was signed.

One of the group told to report for training in a month's time—the inference was that this was a reward for inefficiency or incompetence—was the Glass Canoe. At first he argued. Surely they meant he was for a foreman interview. It was soon explained to him. He went home dazed, forgetting an appointment under the Stripper skirt with the Rustle of Spring. He also disappointed Far Away Places, who had taken to spying on them.