An Economy is Not a Society Read Online Free Page A

assembly line roof, which stretched far and wide around us, the same area as three Melbourne Cricket Grounds. As shrines go, it’s not much, but then most shrines are essentially about the dead things that lie under the ground, and it was enough to rouse in me at least a smidgen of emotion.
    A few years earlier I had walked seven miles in the driving autumn rain across the Scottish island of Jura to find the farmhouse in which the dying George Orwell had written Nineteen Eighty-Four. It was a walk at times I thought would never end, or that would end with me being mistaken for a wild stag and shot by one of the many hunters roving the hillsides. But I can recall the moment I rounded a bend and saw the white stone house appear, just like the white whale had appeared to Captain Ahab, and the way my heart had quickened and my confidence returned. This feeling was the same. Yes, it’s just the site of an old factory, and one no longer even really there, but this is where my family’s modest affluence was earned and where Australia’s egalitarian dream came closest to fulfilment before the economic reformers threw cold water in our faces. Such places are just as important as any disused mine or former bank building.
    Inside the new warehouse, up in Barry’s office, you get a top-tier view of what’s replaced the assembly line. It’s actually quite spectacular, and it’s almost hard to believe that the old assembly line building was half as big again as this. Around 150 people now work on the floor, and another 100 or thereabouts in administration – a fraction of the old payroll list. Barry, who is an expert in warehousing – which I find to be a far more sophisticated industry than I had imagined – quickly estimates the floor sizes of the new buildings springing up on the old GMH site, and calculates that the entire site will be lucky to ever reach 400 jobs, in addition to those at HSPO – a net loss of just under 4000 unionised, well-paid and mostly skilled and semi-skilled working-class jobs to the Dandenong and Doveton area from this site alone. You don’t have to be a statistician to draw some important conclusions from that.
    Barry generously takes me down onto the floor. As we wander around the vast, quiet space, it is obvious this is still a good place to work – safe, clean, calm, polite and unhurried. It seems efficient in the proper sense of getting things done, rather than in the modern managerialist sense of making people redundant. We see where the trucks bring in containers and pallets of spare parts each morning, where the forklifts take them to the endless rows of scientifically arranged shelves (which remind me of the last scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark), and where the ordered parts are sent to dealers and repair centres in the afternoon.
    The managers seem a decent lot; it’s more like an office than a factory. And yet … something’s missing. What is it? The movement, the noise, the urgency and pace; the energy-sapping overtime that you need an extra-long sleep on Saturday to recover from but which can double your weekly pay packet; even the conflict, the union meetings and the strikes – all are gone. What’s missing is the sense of work and life as being more than a tranquil, powerless, well-ordered, well-behaved and highly productive shuffle to the grave.
    Work and life should be more than this. They should involve an assertion of rights, a sense of power, a feeling of being part of something bigger – a movement to change things for the better. In an era that has lost religion, life itself should have this sort of religious dimension. It’s as if the new economy has done a deal with its workforce: a little more pay in return for your pride, purpose, freedom and the jobs of your friends. It’s like one of those H. G. Wells utopias, in which everyone appears happy but bored, and all the hard work is being done by a race