An Economy is Not a Society (4 page)

Like the Holden plant, you can still find the Heinz factory: you turn down a laneway off ‘Progress Way' in Dandenong. The guardhouse is gone but you can still make out where it used to stand. The footpath we all once took into the factory proper is still there. It used to take you to the changing rooms and the clock-on point, where you would press your card into the slot with a
kerthump,
before filing it on the wall. Now it's just empty tarmac; in fact, I realise soon after stepping out of the car that I am standing pretty much on top of the cafeteria. It's a parking lot. Joni Mitchell wrote a song about this sort of thing.

The space has changed so much since I worked here thirty years before that I find it hard to visualise where everything once was. Panda has come with me and is just as perplexed as me. At a large factory building his politician's charm gets him talking to a young guy, who tells us he rents the space as a warehouse for his small business, which distributes the Yellow Pages to the surrounding suburbs. He seems genuinely sympathetic to our nostalgic quest to find out what had happened to the place, so he offers me a fluoro vest and tells me to feel free to walk around and take photographs; ‘just pop the vest back when you finish.'

As at Holden, I can see one or two people rattling around in the cavernous space. At the far end, which is leased by another company, trucks can be seen coming and going, but again there are only a handful of employees to be seen where once hundreds would have swarmed. We find that the old R&D building – where new food products and their marketing strategies were once devised – is now a logistics training space for Toll. Below the roof line you can still make out the words ‘Research and Development', although the sign that once hung there is long gone.

Amid it all, where the Dry Goods building stood and barrels of cucumbers and crates of tomatoes once awaited canning, there is now a Hino trucks distribution and spare parts centre. I walk into the showroom and ask a friendly older man at the counter what he knows about the site. Not much, he says. I ask him how many people he sees walking around the site each day. He can't really say, but he reckons that about forty or so work there for Hino. At least 1200 people once made things here; now well under 100 on-sell things made in places like China.

On my second visit I take Fred. Having driven a forklift around the site for more than thirty-five years, he calmly walked around it with me, pointing: ‘Sterilising, labelling and packing were there … The two-storey kitchen was next to that … The boiler house beyond that, at the end of the site.' Some of the original buildings remain. The Yellow Pages warehouse had been the Finished Goods Store. ‘And over there,' he says, ‘is where
you
worked.' It was the Preparation Shed.

Ignoring the ‘Do Not Enter' signs, I walk in. (In warehousing, it seems, the best camouflage colours are fluorescent yellow and orange.) Yes, he's right. In fact, I can see the very spot where my little piece of surplus-value-extracting capital had been fixed to the floor, and where my Marxism had started to evaporate along with the tomato pulp. The familiar saw-toothed roof, with its thousands of square feet of glass, is intact, the dirty machinery is gone and the floor stretches out pristine, functionless and worker-free except for one or two men chatting next to an exceedingly clean-looking truck.

My bearings restored, I could now see it all again: sauces, beans, tomatoes and soups plopping into the sterilised cans; Dawn and her friends labelling and packing them after the lids were closed; Fred lifting them with his forklift onto trucks and off to the supermarket; Mum further beyond in the Cafeteria keeping the crew happy and contented; all well with our little world.

Some of the Heinz buildings remain, but what became of the people? I know about Mum, Fred and Dawn, of course, but what of the others? I am given a great chance to find out because I've been invited to the five-yearly reunion of the factory's former employees. Despite the fact that the place closed fifteen years ago, the old social club committee still has 800 people on its books, nearly 400 of whom have managed to make it. The venue – the Berwick Bowls Club – looks eerily familiar; I realise I've been here before, having watched Kim Beazley deliver a speech I'd helped write on the evening of 9/11; he was still on his feet when the first tower came down and snuffed out any hope he'd had of winning the forthcoming election. That's another story, of course, but had those planes missed those towers, things here might not have turned out so badly. Perhaps Kim would have made it more bearable.

I move around the room, chatting to people and taking notes. I meet people who worked at Heinz for twenty-eight years, thirty-five years and forty years. I meet the man who closed the gates on the day the plant closed; another who had been made redundant and was then rehired the next year to demolish the buildings, which took three years. He did well out of it, having received a hefty redundancy payout and plenty of super, followed by a job, but he tells me he'd have preferred to have kept his original job. I talk to people from Baby Foods, people from Marketing, people from Payroll who tell me of the gradual winding-down of the place; managers who claim the union's unreal demands were to blame; other managers who tell me the factory needed too much capital injected into it to remain viable, there being asbestos in the roof and the boiler room that had to be removed; and other managers who come clean on the fact that there were un-unionised workers in New Zealand on half the pay and half the holidays and half the conditions (and who, I guess, were probably prepared to eat stale sandwiches in some cold and crummy shed they called a canteen), which made the decision to close a no-brainer. One former tradesman tells me he helped dismantle and ship the ‘hydrons' – the giant hydroscopic sterilising units for tin cans – off to New Zealand, where our Heinz products are now largely made. It's the old story: there was more money to be made where labour was cheaper, and it was all the unions' fault. Isn't it always?

I put this to Dawn's friends, the packing girls Cheryl, Anne, Lorene and Louise, whose faces I vaguely remember and who have a different take on what happened. Sure, they had occasionally gone on strike, sometimes over big pay disputes and other times over matters that to the managers seemed trivial – but then the managers weren't earning unskilled wages, and didn't have to work when it was hot in summer, cold in winter and noisy all the time. I quickly realise, though, that the concept of industrial relations – which came naturally to me, having read Marx's early draft of
Das Kapital
up there on my machine – is not what Dawn's friends first think of when they talk of their work at Heinz. In their memories, Heinz wasn't a series of strikes or class struggles, but more like a family. That sounds suspiciously like just the sort of sentimentality you might hear at a reunion after a couple of drinks, but when I pursue the idea I can tell that it is genuinely felt; even the managers say something similar. Being at Heinz, with its steady long-term workforce, its friendly cafeteria that was rather like a lounge room, its social and sporting clubs, its Christmas parties, its friendships and marriages (and divorces) and babies and grandchildren, its share of conflict and tragedies but also of common effort and achievements, its rhythms of soups and spaghetti in winter, tomatoes and overtime in summer, its sheer predictability and employment certainty, its air of being there not just for the boss and the managers and the shareholders but for everyone, was just like being in an extended family.

Dawn's friend Cheryl is the most voluble, although the others are nodding and butting in with comments, and she says she looks back on the closure of the factory with genuine sorrow. So I ask the obvious question: for her, was working life better back then? She stares at me with utter incredulity and says, ‘Oh,
yeah!'

Then it comes out, like a message in a bottle that has just washed ashore and been uncorked. Fifteen years later, instead of working in manufacturing, she's working as a storeman for a labour-hire firm in a warehouse, earning just $17 per hour ($16.86 to be precise, or $640.90 a week; the employers' lobby wanted it to be just $630.70), with no union, no overtime, no real job security and not even a canteen; some fellow employees even have to buy their own safety boots, and no one gets the sort of Christmas bonus they used to get at Heinz. It's no surprise she's not enjoying it much at all. Worst of all, she says, is that as she is now living on her own, without a husband's job to help support her, she can only just get by. Whenever she needs to get ahead, she has to take on a second job – not at double time, not even at time and a half, but at single time (yes, $16.86 per hour). The better life promised to us by all the managerialist politicians and their favourite economists and their boosters in the press clearly hasn't been delivered to everyone.

A few days later I read a front-page story in the
Age
which reports that, after two decades of uninterrupted economic growth, there are now 1.5 million Australians living in poverty. Apparently, we haven't reformed enough yet. Cheryl's story is a narrative more informative and eloquent than statistical abstractions like Gini coefficients could ever hope to be. Her share of GDP has clearly been redistributed elsewhere, perhaps paying the school fees of an accountant living in some leafy suburb she will never afford, and her feeling of inferiority has become someone else's feeling of superiority.

In the last scene of Rob Reiner's terrific coming-of-age film
Stand By Me,
the central character, Gordie Lachance (played by Richard Dreyfus), who has escaped his home town and its constrictions to become a writer, is lamenting the loss of his childhood friend Chris (River Phoenix), who has just been killed in a senseless knife attack in a fast-food restaurant. The death pricks at his memory and inspires him to write the story that becomes the narrative of the film, a story about his old town, told in flashback. Thinking about how to end the story, Gordie turns to his word processor and writes: ‘I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was twelve. Jesus, does anyone?'

The movie became an instant classic because it appeals to a very human yearning most of us share: to know what has happened to the friends from our childhood. It's the sort of impulse that makes us go to school reunions, often against our better judgment, only to leave early and disappointed. I'm now over fifty, and it's one of the great satisfactions of my life that I've managed to keep in close contact with virtually all of the friends I had when I was twelve.

It's a truism that every cohort passing through a school or college considers itself unique, somehow better than the ones that came before and after. We've all felt this, only to realise later that it was an error induced by perspective. But something tells me that my school friends were indeed extraordinary. Let me tell you about them briefly, because they're central to my story about what's happened to Doveton. Their names and nicknames are the sort you'd expect of boys of that generation: Panda and Jim I've already mentioned, but there was also ‘Chook', ‘Hen', ‘Molesy' (there was an animal theme to our nicknames), Nick, Grant, Dave, Chris, John (who was ‘Pommy', for obvious reasons), Henry and George.

For the sons of mostly factory workers they've all done incredibly well, becoming, in the order mentioned above, a state Labor MP and minister, a draughtsman and factory manager, an IT engineer and now small-business owner, a banker, another banker, an insurance executive, another IT engineer, an owner of a labour-hire company, an investor, a park ranger, an international development consultant and an accountant. Their wives, many Doveton girls, have done just as well. Some return to Doveton regularly to look after their ageing parents, but all have more or less left and moved to newer or fancier suburbs, even living overseas for a time in low-tax jurisdictions, and they've educated their children at supposedly better and definitely more expensive schools than our old high school. While I went the furthest academically, most would, I guess, be better off financially than me (and if not, the reason is divorce).