The Unknown Industrial Prisoner (53 page)

The Two Pot Screamer from his pleasant cloud of genital pain—he'd been to see the girls—told them to go ask the Samurai. Men from the scattered plants sent ambassadors to speak for them.

‘You remember how we went out—to show the company we meant business? Then pulled our horns in and accepted everything they offered? Like whipped dogs? And three weeks later there was a Union meeting. Not a summons meeting. No fuss. Just a meeting. And the Chairman got up with three little points. Remember?'

Some vaguely recalled a meeting. None knew what had been said.

‘I'll tell you. That third little point was a request from the management that in the event of any stoppage we'd see the plant was manned. That's all. Fair enough? Oh, one other thing. The company reserves the right to say how many will be left on the plants when we have a stoppage. They know plant requirements—we can trust them in a little thing like that, they reckon.'

He paused and examined their faces. They seemed to be following him.

‘You remember me standing up? And pointing out what this meant? No? Well, it might be better if you did. It means no stoppage can be more than a token stoppage.'

‘Why? We can stop. We have the right.'

‘The right means nothing. If you have to leave a crew on the plant, production goes on. The company doesn't feel the pinch. The idea of stopping work is we make them suffer. If we vote stoppage who stays on the plant? Those the company picks. Will you be one?'

‘Oh,' said several.

‘But,' said another, ‘we can reverse the decision of that meeting. There were only a dozen there.'

‘That's where they got you. They held up the printing and signing of the agreement until they got the word from the Chairman and included it.'

‘Why did he do it? Why did he sell us out?'

‘You're the Union. You're the ones have to do the thinking. He's not a leaning-post. You have to go to the meetings and think before you vote. You lean on your leaders at your own risk.'

He'd said it all before, he knew they wouldn't change. He walked away, trying not to show his disgust. They were surprised that so much business had been done at that little meeting.

21
PAYBACK

PROFIT When the shutdown was over, repairs done and new equipment installed, the cracker got off the ground. Several new columns had been added as further refinements to the process. Reflecting their overseas masters' increasing elevation above them, the tall steel columns towered higher over the heads of the humans who tended them, and since to look up it was necessary to tilt their heads far back so their safety helmets fell off, they removed them first. Not that the columns looked down and saw the humans; they looked steadfastly, proudly, far over their heads, towards structures similar to themselves.

The birds were glad of the extra columns and came there in greater numbers to sleep at night. Someone with nothing better to do started a campaign against them and squeezed out sticky jelly to snare their feet and clog their feathers. They fell to the concrete apron, fluttering and exhausted, and were gathered up in empty tin drums to die together, their bodies tossed into a mass grave.

Down at ground level, men were called in one by one to be shown by their foremen the reports the foremen had written out about them, before they were sent on to the Python. The men's eyes were infallibly caught by the new metal board on which were posted their names on coloured magnetized blocks that could be moved anywhere on the board. Or taken off. There didn't seem to be much of a pattern to the reports, except that men over thirty-five all did badly. These little things seemed to be accepted as the price of progress. On the cracker, new air-blowers, pressure valves and a certain electricity supply were keeping the process going steadily just as the company had hoped three years before.

Six months went by, a year, eighteen months of constant twenty-four-hour-a-day production. The prisoners kept their heads down, hoping these technical changes would benefit them.

Someone scratched the words
Unknown Industrial Prisoner
in the concrete near the base of the gasoline-splitting column. The concrete was swept and kept clean by an unknown hand. Later a bronze plate appeared with the three words engraved on it; the plate had four legs brazed to its underside and was cemented into four holes in the concrete. No one was game to show ignorance by asking who did it, or initiative and dig it out.

Gradually, on the cracker, the supervisors supervised and no prisoner was able to get his head down on night shift. The much older plants, without the attention given by management to the cracker, still retained sleeping rights, but had to be more careful. Bubbles started to work, and surprised everyone. Bomber Command stopped his Gotchas, and men moved about in less fear for the safety of their genitals. He could no longer be persuaded to show his dirty black and white photographs, but dozens of new men were being recruited, mostly ex-Navy, and little bundles of even more exotic photographs—in colour—began to be circulated.

 

One day, six months after the start-up, a Sydney newspaper printed a tiny paragraph showing a yearly profit figure for Puroil Australia. It wasn't much, only three million dollars. The Humdinger tore it out and pasted it on a notice board at the cracker. It lasted half an hour. Bomber Command personally scraped it off.

A year after the start-up—that is, after a year of continuous running—two morning papers published a yearly profit figure for Puroil's Australian operations. They'd got it from their London offices; the figures weren't available in Australia. Seven and three-quarter million dollars. This time the prisoners got a supply of cuttings and glued them up as fast as the foremen and supervisors tore them off. The financial editors of both papers made peculiar remarks about the company's heavy depreciation figures and large provision for tax.

At the same time the Actor, in the role as Education Officer, was delivering prepared speeches to the lower reaches of management, hammering home the point that Clearwater was still losing money and radical new changes were about to take place in staff policy. No one was game to ask what the word
loss
meant—and the Actor wouldn't have known—but it meant that although the cracker was nearly paid for and making an increasing profit, some of the items of cost such as maintenance and wages were higher than the company wished. If they had been lower, the profit figure on paper would have been higher. Therefore there was a loss of profit.

Down on the cleared clay flats, for months heavy trucks had been delivering thousands of tons of beach sand, graders spread it out into rectangular plots of three to five acres, just the size of the dozens of new plants.

On the cracker the great compressor struggled on. Every day for eighteen months vibration readings were taken and heads were scratched, but it held together. The cracker was going so well the company applied to the Department of Labour and Industry for a deferment of their regular pressure-vessel inspection. An inspection meant a shutdown and a shutdown meant an interruption to production.

During this idyllic eighteen months there were eleven fires. One was funny. The Gypsy Fiddler was standing sunning himself not far from a slurry pump with leaking seals. Maintenance had been under pressure to fix them, there had been no asbestos seals, only teflon, so teflon was used. They leaked white vapour. Fifty yards away, the Samurai saw the vapours change to blue, then flash. He charged forward past the Fiddler, grabbed a dry powder extinguisher and put the fire out. When the Fiddler turned and saw what had been happening behind him, he fainted in terror. He said it was his blood pressure and begged the Samurai not to report him.

The worst fire occurred when part of the plant was bypassed so that a quick cleaning job could be done and some repairs welded. Several bundles of heater tubes were isolated and one of the foreman-pleasing prisoners, the Western Salesman, insisted the operation was depressured and gas free. Everyone wanted to believe it, so the tubes were opened while a welder was working below. Hydrocarbons under pressure spewed out and down as far as the welding torch, ignited, and the whole thing flashed while eight men were on the tube landing. Four went over the side, three climbed higher but were burned, and one was set alight while they watched. He was in hospital six months and even after he was on his feet had to go back for twelve months for more skin grafts. One of his hands was a claw.

There were several more small fires at intervals of about a month, half of them in wet weather when the drains filled and hydrocarbons floated on the water. The refinery siren could be heard ten miles away and began to worry residents of nearby suburbs who complained querulously about possible danger to themselves. It was reasonable in the circumstances that an order should be conveyed by word of mouth—it was never put in writing—that no future fires were to be notified to the company fire station. The firemen would blow the siren automatically and this was undesirable. Instead, the foreman on the job was to take charge, use the portable foam and powder dispensers and only make a fire report if it looked like getting out of hand. Anything was preferable to bad public relations.

Thieving hadn't stopped. Stealing from each other was so frequent that gradually all the men on shift equipped their lockers with U-bolts and padlocks. Men walked out with bags so heavy they could hardly carry them. Whole welding sets, oxygen cylinders, stocks and dies, hammers, wrenches, gauges, blowtorches, grease-guns.

Several were caught and in amusing ceremonies removed in the charge of plainclothes police. One arrest attracted so much attention—two men had been taking metal scrap meant for the scrap merchant—that all classes of prisoners watched police chase them over fences, buildings, plant structures, through workshops and excavations, before they were caught and kept on the ground by a few judicious short kicks to the body. Just as, two hundred years before at Tyburn, pickpockets plied their trade in the crowds watching pickpockets hang, two others, while justice was seen to be done, helped themselves to a truckload of wooden crates covered with expenditure symbols such as 6
^A
/352/1/16/7/02/9/0/001. They hijacked the truck and drove down to a cluster of spare construction huts near Eel wharf where they could look at their finds and hide them till they got transport. One man's share was a hundred thousand flyscreens; the other got two thousand white safety hats decorated with the Puroil emblem. They hid the screens, to get them later. The safety hats they took to the water's edge. Standing side by side, cursing and laughing, they pitched them into the river one by one. The tide took them out into the bay, all two thousand of them. White petals bobbing on the waves.

On the other hand, those who had little accidents began to cover them up. Several vigorous fitters who pinched fingers or barked knuckles began to be called accident-prone—their foremen said so in monthly reports—so the rest took the hint. Many twisted backs and sprains were masked by days off in bed with flu: doctors' certificates were easy to come by if you picked your doctor.

 

THE SPOTTED TROUT The Trout had to go, too. They cut the training officer out of Personnel; might as well get rid of the PRO. Admin had to do its bit to economize.

‘What's this?' The Whispering Baritone had the Spotted Trout on the mat. His fingers stabbed irritably at a yellow expense sheet.

‘Scotch, of course.'

‘Whisky?'

‘It's the only Scotch I know.' Here was a man who couldn't make an engagement presentation of a cheap vase to an office girl without stammering, blushing, sweating and probably dropping the blasted thing—telling him how to do a PR job.

‘It's not good enough.' He was red and flushed and the thin, flaking fingers trembled. ‘Too high. We can't sanction these expenses.' He used the company ‘we' and loved it.

‘Damn it, man! I must entertain. That's why I'm employed! I have people in—I must give them a drink. Do you want me to invite only teetotallers?' He knew the Baritone was one and mentally curled a purple lip.

‘These expenses must be reduced. You'll buy cheaper drink and less of it.' Firmness.

‘Oh for god's sake!' shouted the Spotted Trout. His face took on its purple round cheeks and neck, shading to mauve under the roots of his hairs which stood up singly like tall trees in a thinning forest. ‘How cheap can we get? This is a great company not a tinpot Parents and Citizens Club. I can't give decent people Australian whisky. If the drinks are cheap, what do they think of our products?'

‘That's not your concern. I want these expenses down.'

‘It can't be done. There's not an ounce of padding in it. I've been absolutely above board. The amount I'm allowed is ludicrous. What are you running here? A five dollar brothel?' His own honesty hurt him.

‘I'll teach you to shout at me. Get out. I'll have your cheque posted.'

‘What? Are you sacking me?'

‘Obviously.' The Whispering Baritone felt easier. He had the whip hand. His fingers no longer trembled.

‘The Colonel was right! You
are
a refugee from a male whore-shop! No wonder the company's going to pot if they keep poofters like you!' He stamped out.

He drove out savagely past the guards at the gate and didn't slow down for inspection. Damn the company to hell! He took out his anger on the car. He didn't really believe he was sacked. He found out the following day when he tried to get into his office.

They gave the PR job to the Actor. Something to do in his spare time. The very next week he sent a story and glossy prints to the local rag about the most recent construction at the refinery, including a mention of several new stacks over three hundred feet high to take away noxious gases like sulphur-dioxide. That did it. He was six weeks in print trying to explain away the noxious gases.

 

REPLACEABLE PARTS After eighteen months the prisoners remembered a new industrial agreement was due to be drawn up and in order to give themselves a better bargaining advantage began to canvass the members of other trades; the engineering unions, transport men. It seemed a good idea, a combination of all unions on the job. Men smiled at each other and raised their voices a little to foremen: if they got a combined shop they might get a decent rise in the new agreement. All they needed was a good, honest leader, a man who would take the kick if things went wrong, a man who wanted the best for his mates but was not greedy for himself.