PACIFIC BRANDS
Pat Rafter has a lot to answer for. A Proud Australian, Pat relocated to Bermuda, a US tax haven, for eight years and slashed his tax bill. (Australia’s then richest man, the late Kerry Packer, famously declared “If anyone in this country doesn’t minimise their tax they want their head read.”) Following in his footsteps, Pacific Brands have decided to relocate to China.
People not only wear our brands, they sleep on our brands and accessorise their homes with our brands.
They play sport, go to work, dress their children and relax in our brands.
Every day.
Every week.
Every year.
Announcing the loss of 1,850 jobs, Chief Executive Officer, Executive Director, Sue Morphet, noted “The reduction in complexity will deliver the future strength, growth, profitability and sustainability of the business – for our shareholders and employees.”
- Sue was appointed CEO in January 2008 and prior to this was Group General Manager of Underwear & Hosiery at Pacific Brands, the largest operating group within the business.
Sue joined Pacific Brands in 1996 as General Manager of Tontine, following which she became the General Manager of Bonds in 1999. Under her leadership, the Bonds team relaunched the iconic brand, more than doubling sales and taking the brand to women for the first time. Prior to joining Pacific Brands, Sue held senior marketing roles with Sheridan and Herbert Adams.
Sue is a director of the L’Oréal Melbourne Fashion Festival and is a member of Chief Executive Women together with various other philanthropic interests.
“When Sue Morphet took over from Paul Moore just over a year ago, the company’s equity value was closer to $1.2 billion than yesterday’s $176 million” (Pacific’s Morphett needs debt extension, Martin Collins and John Durie, The Australian, February 25, 2009).
PB owns Berlei, Bonds, Clarks (children’s), Dunlop, Everlast, Grosby, Holeproof, Hush Puppies, King Gee, Mooks, Mossimo, Sheridan, Slazenger, Sleepmaker, Tontine and Yakka.
DRIVETRAIN SYSTEMS INTERNATIONAL
- Drivetrain Systems International sacks 230 workers, The Australian, February 25, 2009 | Gearbox factory sacks 229 workers: union, The Age, February 25, 2009
Three hundred and thirty eight workers at Drivetrain Systems in Lavington (Albury) have been sacked without pay or entitlements as management proceeds to strip the factory of an estimated $17 million in assets.
Workers are camped at the gates of the Kaitlers Road factory demanding the $5 million dollars in entitlements owed to the workforce. In December management and the AMWU assured employees that their entitlements were safe at the troubled business. On Friday workers were sacked without pay, and informed that there was simply no money.
“Between now and December they’ve been spent our entitlements” said one worker “we don’t know what on”.
Whilst all workers were sacked without pay, management and executive staff were retained on full wages. Management still occupies the factory.
Workers say that there are still $17 million dollars worth of gear boxes still at the Kaitlers Road factory, but they fear they won’t see a cent. The administrator has announced that the payment of financial creditors comes before giving workers their due entitlements.
The Kaitlers Road factory used to employ 1024 workers; this is not the first time that mass sackings have occurred. The factory is the only manufacturer of gear boxes in Australia, and was until the recent sackings the largest AMWU shop in the state.
Management has embarked on a deliberate campaign to split workers at the Kaitlers Road factory. Management has said they will re-employ a third of the workforce for a period of eight weeks, but have not stated which third of the workforce will be re-employed.
Action by workers has been hamstrung by this move. Desperate workers struggling to support families have said they cannot afford to jeopardize the possibility of eight weeks pay. If workers refuse the eight weeks work, they jeopardize future claims to Centrelink payments. Workers find out who will be re-employed on Wednesday, and will vote on whether to return to work on Wednesday morning.
Support the picket line on Kaitlers Road, workers appreciate all supporters who drop in. In you’re not in Albury-Wodonga, you can join the Facebook group, contact media outlets, and raise this issue with your local member.
Why will workers entitlements only be paid after debts owed to banks and suppliers? Surely the families of workers must have a higher priority than the profits of foreign banks, when a business like Drivetrain International collapses?
This report from the picket by:
Dave Fregon – 0434000234
Kieran Bennett – 0430509913
If you need information or contacts for the workers, please contact us.
- ‘Tent town’ resident may lose his home
Border Mail
February 24, 2009
SIMON Parkinson, 28, is one of the younger members of the 338-strong workforce at Drivetrain Systems International.
He has spent the past four nights camped out at the 24-hour “tent town” outside the Kaitlers Road property and is now wondering whether he might have to sell his home in Wodonga.
Mr Parkinson is one of hundreds of apprentices produced by the Lavington factory since it opened in 1971.
“Most of them have stayed here as it’s been a good place to work and the wages are above the award,” he said.
As an engineering technician, he is well aware of the slim chance of getting similar work in Albury-Wodonga, and says he doesn’t want to move from the Border…
See also : AMWU renews calls for entitlements protection scheme as Drivetrain enters receivership, AMWU, February 17, 2009 | 400 stood down at car parts factory, Howard Jones, The Age, February 17, 2009 | Drivetrain Workers Picket, The Border Journal, February 23, 2009.
After working in factories and watching the disasters flowing on from the state picking winners in the economy ( National Socialism) I oppose Left-wing protectionism.
Indeed, I think a case can be made that agrarian socialism in the EU and US contributed mightily to the present GFC.
Anarchism also has a long tradition of opposition to state interference in the economy and so anarchists came out for FAIR trade once they started to be painted as ‘anti-globalist’. Let’s be clear here. If state capitalism is the answer then what was the question?
Anarchists might also remember that Luddism wasn’t just destruction of factory machinery. It was a heartfelt protest at the manufacture of deliberately shoddy goods.
And we need to resurrect Proudhon whose ideas about federalized organization and mutualist co-operatives have far more relevance to the present than anything dreamed up by authoritarian socialists.
http://www.news.com.au/business/story/0,27753,25112520-462,00.html
Look, before everyone goes jumping up and down about this — “CEO Sue Morphet’s package rose from $685,000 to $1.8m including blood money for slashing 1850 jobs” — it’s important to remember the words of Sarah Murdoch, who explained that it was a difficult decision that had to be made.
In the meantime, some good news:
Oh yeah.
Check out this sap:
Ray Wade, 43 years, $200,000 payout
Erik Jensen
Sydney Morning Herald
February 27, 2009
FORTY-THREE years ago Ray Wade started work on the knitting machine at the Bonds factory in Wentworthville. This week, he was made redundant. His whole working life ended, unexpectedly, reduced to a payment of $200,000…
No one should ever work.
Work is the source of nearly all the misery in the world. Almost any evil you’d care to name comes from working or from living in a world designed for work. In order to stop suffering, we have to stop working.
That doesn’t mean we have to stop doing things. It does mean creating a new way of life based on play; in other words, a ludic revolution. By “play” I mean also festivity, creativity, conviviality, commensality, and maybe even art. There is more to play than child’s play, as worthy as that is. I call for a collective adventure in generalized joy and freely interdependent exuberance. Play isn’t passive. Doubtless we all need a lot more time for sheer sloth and slack than we ever enjoy now, regardless of income or occupation, but once recovered from employment-induced exhaustion nearly all of us want to act.
The ludic life is totally incompatible with existing reality. So much the worse for “reality,” the gravity hole that sucks the vitality from the little in life that still distinguishes it from mere survival. Curiously — or maybe not — all the old ideologies are conservative because they believe in work. Some of them, like Marxism and most brands of anarchism, believe in work all the more fiercely because they believe in so little else.
Liberals say we should end employment discrimination. I say we should end employment. Conservatives support right-to-work laws. Following Karl Marx’s wayward son-in-law Paul Lafargue I support the right to be lazy. Leftists favor full employment. Like the surrealists — except that I’m not kidding — I favor full unemployment. Trotskyists agitate for permanent revolution. I agitate for permanent revelry. But if all the ideologues (as they do) advocate work — and not only because they plan to make other people do theirs — they are strangely reluctant to say so. They will carry on endlessly about wages, hours, working conditions, exploitation, productivity, profitability. They’ll gladly talk about anything but work itself. These experts who offer to do our thinking for us rarely share their conclusions about work, for all its saliency in the lives of all of us. Among themselves they quibble over the details. Unions and management agree that we ought to sell the time of our lives in exchange for survival, although they haggle over the price. Marxists think we should be bossed by bureaucrats. Libertarians think we should be bossed by businessmen. Feminists don’t care which form bossing takes so long as the bosses are women. Clearly these ideology-mongers have serious differences over how to divvy up the spoils of power. Just as clearly, none of them have any objection to power as such and all of them want to keep us working.
You may be wondering if I’m joking or serious. I’m joking and serious. To be ludic is not to be ludicrous. Play doesn’t have to be frivolous, although frivolity isn’t triviality; very often we ought to take frivolity seriously. I’d like life to be a game — but a game with high stakes. I want to play for keeps…