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ART, TRANSFIELD AND REFUGEES
A Russian
doll of inhumanities
Sometimes you
may need to bribe, to be tough, even to be inhuman, to reach your target. Every
contract is a battle. What counts in the final victory. The victory is not to
complete the contract in time, but also not to make monetary loses. If at the
end of your career you go bankrupt, and you say you treated everyone humanely,
you helped everyone, they will laugh at you. The choice of friends, selection
of enemies is part of management today. We camouflage this with a veneer of
civilisation.
Franco Belgiono-Nettis, co-founder of
Transfield Corporation, in the official history by Gianfranco Cresciani, Transfield, The first fifty years, ABC Books, Sydney, 2006, p. 170.
Transfield
is in a position to profit from running off-shore detention only because of
nearly six decades of exploiting its workers and putting their lives at risk. A
recent poll suggests that 60 percent of the population want the government to
be tougher against refugees. There are many reasons why it has come to this,
above all, the vileness of both the ALP and the Coalition. To excite a majority
of Australians against the mis-treatment of refugees will require paying attention
to the mistreatment of working people here. Tying their exploitation to the
profits from compulsory detention opens pathways to showing who threatens our
security every hour of every day.
A start towards linking the fate of
refugees under Transfield to the needs of working people is to track through the
corporation’s origins and record. The details are drawn from my Framework of flesh, builders’ labourers
battle for health and safety, (2009) and We Built This Country, builders labourers and their unions (2011),
both from Ginninderra Press, Port Adelaide, and accessible through
www.surplusvalue.org.au
Clerical fascism
In
1951, an Italian firm won a contract to erect power-lines from the Tallawarra
station to the Sydney suburb of Homebush. The company sent out twenty-five
workers, stuck them into tents, with no running water, but with a priest to
keep watch. The engineers applied the mentality that they had acquired as
officers in Mussolini’s military: labourers were soldiers on a battlefield for
profit. Two of these engineers, Franco Belgiorno-Nettis and Carlo Salteri,
broke away to set up Transfield in 1956. They had so little capital that they
could not pay wages in full, or on time. Men got half their money in cash and
half as cheques, and were warned not to cash them all at once. The foremen told
the workers to pinch all the materials and equipment they could.
Transfield kept its labourers isolated
in camps as an anti-strike device. If they did stop, Transfield closed the
camps and refused to readmit their spokesmen. In May 1962, forty BLs on the
Vales Point power station struck against having to pay for their board and
keep. Conditions in the Transfield camps were more like the military than a
village, the site managers behaving like NCOs. To break up a stop-work meeting,
one foreman threw some labourers
into the back of truck before threatening to drive over the rest. A steel
inspector recalled:
It wasn’t the matter of working with
Transfield eight or ten hours a day, that was twenty-four hours plus four or
five on top of that before you got relief. Those men worked like dogs in the
early days, and they were sometimes treated like dogs.
Transfield
saw itself as taking care of its workers by binding them together like sticks
in Mussolini’s symbol of fascism.
Belgiono-Nettis advanced his corporate
interests through his ‘choice of friends’ throughout the NSW Labor Right and
the State’s Catholic mafia to the top of the premier’s department. He was the
insider to Obeid’s outsider.
Transgressions
The
official history of Transfield boasted that substituting cheap labour for
capital equipment had allowed its founders to snatch contracts from
competitors. From its origins in 1956, the firm ignored both safety rules and
trade demarcations. A foreman recalled one new arrival who had been sent along
as a rigger, but was so frightened “he couldn’t get off the ground.” Transfield
sent men up 200m television towers without safety belts. Its supervisors
claimed that protective gear added to the danger by limiting mobility. One of
the lines-man told the corporate historian:
The first rule for a rigger is stay
alive. He always thinks in terms of safety first. He analyses every problem
according to how he can maximise two factors, safety and speed. I must admit
that in the beginning with Transfield, we took risks by doing a lot of work
that ought to have been done by cranes. We didn’t have the cranes. Once, when
we were working on building the soaking pit at the steelworks, the crane just
wouldn’t reach to the top of the building to put the steel in place. So my mate
and me had to carry a channel 10 feet by 4 feet, up 15 feet, position it, which
is usually the crane’s job, and then put it together. On the ground, two men
would never do such a thing, but we did it high in the air. Of course, it was
dangerous.
Such
corporate behaviour misbehaviour did not decline once the company got
established. The firm ignored safety standards. Its bloody record continued
into the late 1990s with the City Link tunnel in Melbourne. Even Howard’s Royal
Commissioner Cole took Transfield to task in 2004 for its safety violations on
that project.
At it again
At
the same time, the firm was buying fake certificates to bring unsafe scabs onto
Sydney’s Northside Tunnel again
revealing its addiction to violating OH&S regulations when its managers on that
project hired inexperienced and untrained people to replace battlers for
safety. Transfield began this switch-over just as the project was coming to its
end, with the usual rush to finish on time and within budget. If attention to
safety slowed the operation, the corporation stood to lose.
Transfield could not get away with
sacking union activists just because they were insisting on a safe workplace.
The firm therefore had to get around the custom that the order of dismissal
accord with the number of Tickets the workers held. Hence, it bought phony certificates
for newcomers to justify keeping them on instead of long-serving and
experienced activists.
The chairman of the On-the-Job Safety
Committee told the NSW Independent Commission Against Corruption:
We had quite a number of competent
people that didn’t hold legitimate tickets but had been driving machines for
years on permits. A change in middle-management superintendent took place where
a lot of unskilled people were brought on board [to replace] the people that
were potentially creating industrial problems as regards the way the job had
been driven.
The
Safety Committee chairman had to buy himself a fake Excavator’s Ticket to hold
onto his place. When the job ended, he suffered the consequences of being
“deemed too safe”. He told the ICAC:
The last two-and-a-half years I have
been out of work … because of some of the issues that I used to raise, and I
believe that’s filtered through to the tunneling industry.
Had
the Australian Building and Construction Commission (ABCC) existed when this
worker had been battling for safety, it would have prosecuted him. As it was,
he suffered the maximum penalty – not counting death on site - for a worker by
losing his livelihood. Transfield escaped prosecution. They are not the only
serial offenders, or the only firm to get flogged with a feather for breaking
the law.
A crock of crooks
Fixers
Collusive
tendering and price-fixing are the ‘ingrained culture’ of the consructon bosses.
In 1911, the NSW MBA justified its members’ involvement in illegal commissions
by saying that they ‘should be openly recognised’ as ‘universal and worldwide’.
The 1990 NSW Royal Commission into the construction industry forced the
resignation of the executive of the NSW MBA which had been a clearing house for
collusive tending.
The playground excuse
In
1995, Leighton’s then CEO, Wal King, justified his company’s use of false
invoices to conceal price-fixing on the Sydney Casino. It was, he protested, ‘the
culture … and custom that had been long-standing in the industry that had been
handed on for years.’ So had King’s excuse. The 1995 government report branded
King as ‘not of good repute, having regard to character, honesty and
integrity’.
The Australian Securities and
Investment Commission (ASIC) recently fined Leightons $300,000 for not
supplying information to the stock exchange. Leighton’s came under
investigation here and in Iraq into whether one of its subsidiaries paid bribes
to win a contract. (Australian, 6
June 2012, p. 43.)
Lend Lease paid fines and restitution
of $54USm. for ten years of ‘a systematic pattern of audacious fraud’ in the US
of A. Yet again, the defence was:
‘everyone does it’.
The ABCC was surprised early in 2012
when Victorian police charged thirty building inspectors with ‘alleged
corruption, serious misconduct and harassment’; they allegedly took kickbacks
to block formal investigations. On the same day, the State government announced
its own construction-industry police to attack the Construction Division of the
CFMEU. The new body will not pursue the employers who paid the bribes to the
public servants. Nor will the new Commonwealth Royal Commission into unions.
Missing in action
Three
collapsed companies - Reed, St Hilliers and Kell & Rigby - had failed to
file accounts on times over several years. As the Age concluded: ’It seems there is no one to stop building companies
from calling in voluntary administrators and transferring assets to another
clean corporate entity and starting anew.’ (20 June 2012) They do that to avoid
fines for deaths on site.
Killing not murder when done for
profit
The
gravest matter is the Hardie
asbestos horror. On appeal, the High Court disbarred Hardie directors for seven
years for rigging the books about its compensation fund. Their victims had ‘No
appeal from the grave’.
Barbarism and civilisation
Transfield’s
co-founder, Franco Belgiorno-Nettis, patronised the arts with a slice of the
profits he screwed out of his employees. He boasted of corruption and
inhumanity: “We camouflage this with a veneer of civilisation.” He differed
from his fellow capitalists in acknowledging that, in a class society, each act
of civilisation involves acts of barbarism against workers whose creative
capacities pay for the art patron’s beneficence.
The arts community was beside itself
with grief when their patron Dame Elizabeth Murdoch died. None of them asked from
where she had got the lucre came? She never did a day’s work in her life. All
the money she gave away came from her husband’s and son’s exploitation of their
employees. Rupert might be a shit but he is not such a swine that he let his
mother pay tax.
Similarly, the beneficiaries of Dick
Pratt’s arts funding did not want to know that they were living off a crook who
stole from every Australian through his price-fixing racket. The $40m. fine imposed
by the Australian Consumer and Competition Commission (ACCC) indicates the
expanse of his thievery. The mentality of his class became blatant when the big
end of town attacked ACCC chief Graeme Samuel for prosecuting Pratt after
accepting his hospitality, of being a guest in his home.
The rule that you ‘don’t bite the hand
that feeds you’ extended into the parliamentary arena. Pratt put his personal
jet at the disposal of his then son-in-law, Bill Shorten, as an AWU official. Although
Pratt had been exposed as a corporate crook, Anti-Labour Party prime minister Rudd
flew to the shyster’s bedside to pay homage for Pratt’s giving away a fraction
of the stash he had nicked from us all.
The latest affront is Twiggy
Forrest’s campaign against chattel-slavery on the proceeds of his wage-slavery.
(see post on ‘Systems of slavery’ )
Re-imagining
Corruption
and exploitation will not be ended by outrage. Indignation will not even deter
Brandis from blocking funds to anyone who turns down corporate cash, aka, a
‘veneer of civilisation’. Artists from the Biennale have made a start towards
linking corporate capital with its inherent inhumanity. The next challenge is
for all of us to shout NO whenever corporations attempt to patronise art,
education, health or sport with the proceeds of their crimes. A stiffer task is
to imagine a world without them, a world without the want, the war and the
waste that the inhuman system which is capitalism over-produces. The finest and
noblest of art forms will be our envisaging the kind of society that we can
build as our collective efforts enrich individual creativities. Placing the
highest moral and aesthetic value on social labour opens pathways to a time
when corporate blood money will no longer be a distraction because ‘human being’
and ‘artist’ will again be synonymous.
Humphrey
McQueen, 18 March 2014
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