The Unknown Industrial Prisoner (54 page)

There was no such man.

Then from over the sea a decision came and the Australians were confronted with the future. This time there was no Wandering Jew to cry on their shoulders. Every prisoner got a circular letter about reorganization, changing conditions, Clearwater's future, surplus numbers, different standards of skill, and redundancy. Some got two letters: the second was an invitation to discuss with Personnel a suitable date for separation. There would be a cash settlement. Most were over forty. They had two weeks to decide whether to take a lump sum and go, or hang on and take a chance. All but one went. Those over fifty got an early pension, suitably reduced. The retiring age had dropped ten years.

At the same time, it was made known by word of mouth that anyone else who wished could march up to Personnel and ask what his price was. If there was a price on your head it meant you were next on the list to go. If there was no price, a note was made of the fact that you had inquired and were probably not anxious to stay. Labour was given fourteen days to take advantage of the golden handshake; after that it was the greasy boot.

The first week ninety-seven men were paid off, operators and fitters. Those active in the combined shop negotiations went, those active in the Union, those over forty, their names recorded on an unofficial honour roll in the reactor lift cage as Killed in Action. After the golden handshake, those left didn't work any harder: they simply weren't so open about bludging. Cunning was rewarded, and youth.

The Congo Kid was ropable. He went up to Personnel, asking how much they'd pay him to go. He wasn't on the list. He went higher, he went to his Section Head, he went to the Python. The answer was no.

Congo banged the table of his Section Head. ‘You are fools! This is a stupid decision! In my frame of mind I could easily put a tank over or blow up a pressure vessel!'

‘Now, now. Don't talk like that. The company wants you,' said the man gently. He had no discretion in the matter; the prisoners' reports had been sent to Melbourne for processing and lists of throwouts had come back.

‘Why should you want me? I've had 149 sickies this year!'

‘You're worth a lot to us. You're young.'

‘Worth a lot? I've been stuck on the gasoline treaters four years. How can I be worth anything?'

‘You have the potential the company wants.'

‘I tell you I don't even do the work I'm paid for! I do nothing all shift so I'll be able to do a double shift on overtime and even then I do it on my back!'

‘The company needs you.' Congo couldn't break down his defence. There was no golden handshake for the Congo Kid.

From the other side of the world came a solution to the maintenance problem. Ideally, Operations should have had its own maintenance staff, but there was a great gulf fixed between Operations and Engineering divisions, and Engineering had won all the battles they'd ever fought. The solution was staring them in the face all the time—make the operators do their own maintenance.

Management, master of the situation, announced this plan to the prisoners as part of the new industrial agreement. The operators were to get a substantial increase if they agreed to carry a kit of tools. A skeleton staff of qualified fitters would stay, more or less as instructors and to do the jobs their five-year apprenticeship qualified them for. The operating prisoners would do the day-to-day jobs, the foremen would decide what was too difficult or dangerous. The few remaining fitters would work alone, no longer would they have assistance to carry their tools. It was the Puroil European idea. In a few years only fitters and instrument mechanics would be taken on as operators.

The promised increase in wages was not specified. Instead, the planned amount was multiplied by four then put round as a rumour. This was, after all, the procedure used by the Union when they used to fight for an increase in the days before they got too weak, before their future was in hock to the hire-purchase companies. The days had come again when prisoners wanted to cower into corners at the approach of executives. As if the days of a thousand lashes had returned.

Half-heartedly they listened as their Union representatives reported their meetings with the company, nodded their heads in disgust as the delegates urged them to accept the company offer. When the State Secretary of the Union came out to address them, urging them to accept, one man asked, ‘Why should we?'

‘What else can we do?' he asked.

‘We thought you might tell us,' said the man.

‘I'm here to take instructions from you.' He knew they didn't know what to do, he wanted them weak.

‘What about Arbitration?' asked a voice.

‘No. The company states frankly it doesn't want to damage the cordial relations it has built up over the years, but it won't budge an inch. Take the money and the retrospective payments. Arbitration could leave you worse off and it might take a year to get a hearing.'

His eyes were sharp, he wanted to squash this talk. The predatory Union was still waiting to catch him in court, to claim half his members. He had to look after himself first.

They had come from the country and all over the suburbs to huddle together in the warmth of industry, and now their security was gone. Five years before, any of them could look forward to retiring at sixty: now they would be lucky to last till forty-five.

To encourage the rest, the company called up two dozen men this time for interviews for an unspecified number of foremen's jobs. The Western Salesman was jubilant. ‘I'm one!' he shouted joyfully.

‘Thought you were,' said Humdinger sourly. ‘He looks like one, doesn't he?' No one answered. Instead several rushed off to make tea for the Salesman.

The operating manning figures settled out at fifty-five fewer than before. It was no use ringing newspapers now. Another war had started, no one wanted to know about semi-skilled labour. Dozens of young prisoners, usually straight out of the Navy, newly married and up to their necks in hire-purchase, were being taken on before the oldies left. Hire-purchase prisoners will do work a free man won't touch. Besides they had no tradition of operators never doing tradesmen's work, they were used to working with tools and used to obeying orders without thought or question. As long as there was more money to be had they were with the new proposals. The older men sounded like old women, and they told them so. It was a time of change, wasn't it? What was so good about preserving the same old conditions?

The training officer, brought in from the Navy, was outed. Puroil had no further plans for training prisoners. The company no longer wanted to pay them to keep off the streets. Let someone else bother.

In the meantime they had two weeks' grace to go up to Personnel to see if they were useless enough to get a redundancy payment or valuable enough to get nothing. After the deadline they were on their own. In various notices, signed and unsigned, the company warned them against going to Arbitration. The only reason the company didn't sack them on the spot was to keep the refinery running till the government inspection could be put off no longer. The new agreement was timed to coincide with the shutdown. If the men rejected it, the shutdown would be prolonged, and if there was a stoppage, they could stay out as long as they liked. That was the threat. Not one could last more than a week. Outside the gates men were walking the streets looking for prisons to take refuge in.

One of the men to get two letters was the Great White Father. He wouldn't go up to haggle over a lump sum.

‘Let them come for me. If the Wandering bloody Jew wants to arsehole me, let him do his own dirty work. One day they'll be so efficient they'll run out of consumers to burn their silly product.'

 

A HEALTHY ECONOMY It was another recession year, but dividend payments were high and profits rose, though understated because of loopholes in depreciation laws. At Puroil, too, after the installation of new equipment and a stable electricity supply, profits rose: the cracker was running. Puroil's reaction was to crack down even further, to keep profit rising at a faster rate. The next figure was expected to be double the last. Extensive oil fields were discovered in Australia; the price of petrol rose.

In no way was technical change benefiting those directly concerned in the change. In the mines, manpower fell and productivity rose, but those working at the coal face were no better off. Natural-gas production rose, operating crew numbers fell; dividends increased, but the operators still chased the cost of living. Car production per worker rose, so did prices with each new model. Wages didn't. The general standard of living was rising, but rising so much faster for the élites that the poor were getting poorer. Yet on paper it was progress. There was no equality of sacrifice. Labour productivity was increasing steadily, wages were a decreasing proportion of the value of production. Manhours were falling, but there were no price reductions, no decline in the cost of living, no automatic increase in the standard of living, no automatic absorption of the unemployed into industry. Productivity growth is not the same as progress, and seems to yield worse conditions to the ever-increasing mass of humans at the bottom of the pile.

A few hundred years before, men were driven off the land into industry. Now industry was driving them out. What was the next stop? In the waterless inland there were dams unbuilt, roads unmade, yet there were oceans of water underground, enough to irrigate a hundred million acres for a century. But after the roads and dams were made and the water piped up, what then? Constant wars to sop up the surplus?

And in privileged parts of the world private speculators were threatening the currencies of great nations, reminding uneasy populations that what happened once, forty years before and could never happen again, could quite easily happen again.

One segment want profits, the rest want a wage. Is that all? Is this the whole purpose of industry? Paid prisoners, no more? Where does the community come in, or is industry the whole community? Is there no place for the feeling that each can give his share of service for the well-being of all? But there is no ideology that can induce these desirable feelings in the country's human components.

The total proceeds of the country's production are distributed unjustly, but these total proceeds are so small compared to the effort available to produce them: two causes for anger.

Large-scale industry, as time goes on being concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, can't be left to itself. The community sees its advertising everywhere but its account books nowhere, yet everything it does in the privacy the law allows affects the lifetimes of every man, woman and child in the community, all who by their consumption of its products support it.

22
ESCAPE ROUTES

HOT SPOTS The hot spots on the outside skin of the catalyst regenerator were bigger. The Samurai came in from his weekend off and demanded to know what was to be done about them.

‘There'll be no decisions made today, hot spots or no hot spots,' said the Slug, and the Samurai wondered where he got his sudden strength. It was because of his own recent reluctance to take action on behalf of any of his fellows, and his tendency to keep to himself. Like a jackal, the Slug sensed this stand-off attitude as weakness and isolation; he had no means of understanding a man who could lay down his arms for a while, then take them up again when he felt like fighting. He interpreted everything he saw in terms of a man doing his utmost to his own advantage, only ever stopped by a force outside himself. The Samurai seemed to him to have been disabled by some larger power and now fair game for any sniper. He wondered later when he noticed no one else sniping at the Samurai; then, feeling that his action isolated him from the mass of men, he quickly side-stepped back into the ranks and aimed no more darts at the Samurai. The Samurai didn't trouble to argue about the hot spots.

‘For the sickies they didn't pay me,' said the Samurai aloud, as he commenced to take his usual slice off production. The hot spots didn't seem to get worse. They were promptly forgotten.

 

ANOTHER PART OF THE FOREST In another part of the refinery, the Governor of the colony was arriving to open a new plant. Clerks wore dustcoats and directed traffic, eager middle-responsibility persons thrust their way forward to be nearest to the vice-regal car. The Governor would never know them or ever want to, but the great thing was to be seen there by Puroil people. In some mysterious way, known to all primitive people, there was virtue in being physically near the great and revered personage. Magic flowed from his body, his garments, his Rolls Royce, to the lower orders.

Eventually he was conducted to a place a little above them where he stood and spoke nonsense to office workers who knew nothing about the plant. Looking round at the attractive lawns and the native trees and shrubs, he was pleasantly impressed. The Whispering Baritone saw him look, and knew that the money spent on gardens was worth every cent. Word would get back to London from this man who, after all, had the power to dismiss State premiers and dissolve governments. Some two or three men who would operate the plant were there, insignificant beside the throng who escaped work for an hour to hear the Governor. Taking advantage of this diversion, other enterprising prisoners were at the stores like rats. Voracious, enthusiastic, undaunted rats.

The Governor described the energy tensions that create the illusion of a solid substantial company. He used words such as co-operation, team-spirit, unselfishness, harmony. He avoided words like orders, discipline, dismissal, obedience, lower costs and retrenchment.

 

OVERHEARD IN A LOCKER-ROOM ‘Did you hear about the Python?'

‘What about the mongrel of a thing?'

‘Someone flattened him.'

‘What with?'

‘Lump of pipe. Back of the neck.'

‘Is he a good Python?'

‘What?'

‘Is he dead?'