By this time next week, Stewart Harris and his workmates will all be unemployed. They've known this day was coming – for three years now, in fact – since Ford, Holden and Toyota told Australians they were closing their car factories down forever.
But in the blue-collar auto sector – where the average worker is 50 years old and has spent two decades with one company – the long notice hasn't made things that much easier.
More Business Videos
- Video duration
- 01:47
History of Holden
- Video duration
- 01:37
Big four banks to face inquiry
- Video duration
- 03:03
Disappearing act: Bernard's Magic Shop forced online
- Video duration
- 01:36
Germany denies starting Deutsche Bank rescue plan
- Video duration
- 02:02
The most powerful people in Australia
- Video duration
- 02:23
The watched housing pot is nonetheless bubbling
- Video duration
- 01:05
Amazon could be moving to Australia
- Video duration
- 01:42
Wells Fargo boss takes $50m pay cut
History of Holden
Football, meat pies, kangaroos and... Holden's decision to cease local production will mean the end of an icon.
"What's going to happen after Friday?" Mr Harris asks himself out loud.
"I've been thinking about it a lot. These are some of my last ever shifts here after 26 years, but I'm just trying to keep to my normal routine of going to sleep, getting up, going to work – otherwise I would get too overwhelmed."
Sometimes sleep doesn't come, though. The worries come instead: about how his life is soon to be up-ended, or about the tough labour market he'll have to squeeze back into. Sometimes, it's simply the "unknown" about what will happen to him next.
His colleague, Paul Boulos, is a few years older, and says he has little choice but to retire.
"I started at Ford at 18, now I am 58," he says.
"I'd rather have kept working until 65, but if we can't find jobs for the young kids, what hope do I have?"
Lights turning off
One by one, and section by section, the lights are being switched off across the colossal Ford factory in Melbourne's Broadmeadows. A shop floor once filled with hundreds of vehicles every day is now stripped bare.
October 7 – this Friday – is set to go down as one of the industry's darkest days yet.
Ford, Australia's oldest car maker, will shut both its plants in Melbourne and Geelong, putting 630 employees out of well-paid jobs and triggering thousands more redundancies in the national supply chain.
Simultaneously, in Adelaide, Holden ends production of the Cruze model at its Elizabeth plant, a move which has forced about 270 employees out of work.
My car basically goes by itself. Next Monday when I wake up, I'm not going to know what to do.
Ford worker Paul Boulous.
The slow death of Australia's 90 years of car making has well and truly gone up a gear.
"We will be losing substantial economic activity, jobs and productive investment," says Tom Chappell, the head of the Federation of Automotive Products Manufacturers.
"The fact that the industry has had three years to prepare for this closure does not diminish the significance of this event."
Victoria hit
Industry Minister Wade Noonan predicts one-quarter of suppliers will close. Photo: Jason South
In Victoria alone, Ford's closures risk wiping out as many as 6500 jobs across the economy, according to the latest government modelling.
Industry Minister Wade Noonan says more than 50 per cent of state's 137 auto parts suppliers have so far failed to diversify away from cars, and, for many, it's already too late.
"About half of them will go on an trade without there being any reduction in staff, and in some cases there will even be expansion," he says.
"About a quarter will be downsizing in some way but staying in business, and another quarter have an uncertain future – either they have closed already or will close at the end of assembly production later next year."
Mr Noonan says this Friday will be a sad day for the car industry, retrenched workers and the communities they have operated in for decades.
Front-line hardship
Photo: Darrian Traynor
Front-line social services are already reporting significant hardship in the regions where the bulk of the nation's car sector jobs are located.
At a financial counselling clinic in Geelong, where Ford has its historic engine plant, wait times for people seeking help with their financial stress has increased from a fortnight to six weeks before their first appointment.
Rene Ploegmakers, a financial counsellor at Diversitat, says a rising number of his clients are blue-collar workers who have previously earned good wages but are now struggling with irregular or not enough employment, and a lack of income security.
"More and more we are seeing professional, or highly-skilled trades people with significant assets where their employment position has changed and are unable to secure work in time to avoid significant financial hardship," he says.
"Work that is available is often casual, with no minimum hours, leading to unpredictable income for the household."
Forecasts improving
Photo: Arsineh Houspian
In early 2014, the Productivity Commission estimated that the end of local car manufacturing would cost a staggering 40,000 jobs across the nation, fanning fears of an unemployment crisis and a possible recession.
But latest forecasts from economists paint a less troubling picture of future employment trends in Australia's auto manufacturing states.
The Commonwealth Bank projects unemployment in Victoria will drop to 5.2 per cent in the coming two financial years, while South Australia will drop to 7 per cent in 2016/17 and 6.3 per cent the year after.
"There is going to be enough growth in a whole lot of other industries ... in services, education, health, tourism, accommodation, and that should more than offset the aggregate level of job losses coming out of the car closures," CBA senior economist Gareth Aird says.
"A lot of people employed in the industry have been preparing for this, so it's very different from someone turning up to work one day and finding out you don't have a job."
But despite the sunnier statewide forecasts, Aird shares government concerns that specific communities – like Adelaide's north, Melbourne's north and Geelong – will face a painful period of decline. And the problem of under-employment will continue to swell.
"We are able to generate enough jobs to absorb new entrance into the labour market, but the quality of those jobs will be more in the part-time space – fewer hours – while a lot of car manufacturing jobs are full-time," he says.
"We are not going to be able to generate enough full-time jobs to replace them."
Living standards
Australian Manufacturing Workers Union state secretary Steve Dargavel. Photo: Arsineh Houspian
Flinders University, in 2006, launched a study into the fates of workers who were laid off after Mitsubishi closed its Adelaide engine plant two years earlier. It found a third of retrenched workers were in full-time employment, a third were out of the workforce or unemployed, and a third were under-employed – that is, working in part-time and casual positions and not working as much as they would like to.
The Australian Manufacturing Workers Union says most ex-auto workers typically had six months of unemployment, before moving into casualised employment, on vastly less pay and often irregular hours, "lowering the standard of living for working-class Australians".
Steve Dargavel, the union's state secretary, says political leaders have drastically failed to grasp the economic and social value of local manufacturing, and had effectively abandoned the industry.
"All advanced economies with automotive industries have actively supported them, because it's in their interest," he says.
"Australia has provided the least amount of support to their automotive industry compared to any other country ... and we also have the most open market for imports compared to any other country."
Dargavel says high-quality, working-class jobs that meant non-university graduates could secure a decent life and raise a family are crucial to national economic wellbeing.
"So much of the rhetoric now is around innovation, but that appeals to folks who are not these folks in the car industry," he says.
Sticking with manufacturing
Photo: Wayne Taylor
The preliminary results of fresh research from the Australian Catholic University highlights a pressing need for government and business to generate job opportunities in manufacturing, not just services.
The study of 400 workers from the big three car makers and their supply chains found nearly 50 per cent intended to stay in the same or a similar occupation in the future.
Forty-five per cent left school before reaching year 12, while 48 per cent don't have a trade qualification.
Pushing the "reset" button after you've spent, on average, 19 years in a stable and reliable career was never going to be easy.
The union, Ford and Auto Skills Australia have developed the Ford Transition Project to help the hundreds of remaining employees move into the next phase of their working lives.
It offers one-on-one career counselling, and has been taken up by the majority of Ford staff, since it was established in 2013.
"When we started, we had Holden and Toyota still breathing, so people were wanting to stay in auto manufacturing," says project co-ordinator Vince Panozzo.
"After they announced their departures, too, this focus changes dramatically. Now we have a list of other industries that have absorbed our people. We have cases of people going from pressing sides of cars moving to soft-tissue therapy. Someone from Geelong who wanted to work in the medical space found a vacancy in a hospital operating theatre as a technician, so we facilitated the training."
Skills transfer
Photo: Wayne Taylor
Mr Panozzo says auto workers' skills are broad and transferable, despite common misconceptions.
"As we speak right now, case managers in Broadmeadows and Geelong are diligently going through the back end of the program to ensure people are engaged."
Beyond the end of Australia's car making, the auto industry will continue to be a large employer.
Ford will continue to employ about 1500 staff in development, engineering and design, located at Broadmeadows, its research and development centre in Geelong and its Lara testing ground.
Holden, too, will retain a strong design and engineering workforce of hundreds of employees and Port Melbourne and its Lang Lang testing ground, after it exists local manufacturing.
Ford, the federal government and state government have poured tens of millions of dollars the Geelong Region and Melbourne's North Innovation and Investment Funds.
Mr Noonan says the Andrews government has funnelled $135 million of targeted taxpayer assistance into grants, programs and training for businesses and staff from the auto industry.
He called on the federal government to make more funds readily available for supply chains to create new opportunities.
"The Commonwealth government has now stood back, and I don't think that's acceptable," he says.
Opportunity for some
Photo: Wayne Taylor
One components manufacturer, Dolphin Products, is based in a double-storey building in Heidelberg West. There is no large smokestack or any other giveaway signs that inside its walls is a very busy factory.
With about 36 employees hard at work, Dolphin is in the business of making things – just like they have done for decades.
Most of what it produces here – about 40 per cent – are parts for cars: seatbelt components, door-handle assemblies, drink holders and wheel-nut caps.
But with a blueprint for the future and a focus on grants, the plastics manufacturer is in the process of expanding. Dolphin has managed to "diversify" away from cars, and now, it also makes drink bottles, food containers, clothes line pegs, medical equipment and even grenade cases for the military.
"We've gone from four different areas to probably about 20," managing director Mario Turcarelli says proudly.
And the company recently landed a major contract with explosives giant Orica for the production of booster shells, which, by next year, will make mining the biggest slice of Dolphin's work and plug the gap left by automotive.
"It's a major step into large-scale mining and construction as Dolphin Products gears down its automotive production," Mr Turcarelli says.
"It will create additional employment opportunities as we ramp up from two to three shifts next year and go to 24-hour-per-day operation."
Commonwealth support
The first Ford Falcon rolled off the Broadmeadows line in June 1960.
The Turnbull government says Ford's decision to close Broadmeadows and Gezelong was made in 2013 "despite government funding of around $7 billion" since 2000.
Federal Industry Minister Greg Hunt says the government's focus is working with the industry and the Victorian government to help workers move into new jobs.
"We recognise the future of advanced manufacturing in Australia lies in value-adding activities from product concept, research and development, design and efficient production systems, to distribution and after-sales service," he said
"We have already put in place important measures to support this transition over a number of years."
Mr Hunt says the government has invested hundreds of millions of dollars to support for supply chain firms, create jobs in the hardest-hit regions, and encourage innovation and expansion in the manufacturing sector.
Mr Boulos wears his age pretty well.
You wouldn't know he has spent the better part of four decades in manual labour at Ford Broadmeadows, starting off in spray-painting, detailing, and "worked through almost every job there".
"I'm so used to getting up every morning and getting to work by 7.30am ... from Coburg to Campbellfield, I start it, and my car basically goes by itself," he laughs.
"Next Monday when I wake up, I'm not going to know what to do. I'm really starting to feel it."
168 comments
Comment are now closed