Culture and Life

by Rob Gowland

Big end bargains

If you live in Sydney, you no doubt made a bee line on August 
2 to the "Everything Half Price or Below Half" sale at the 
establishment of Messrs Vince Maloney. Located between Sheraton-
on-the-Park and Tattersall's Club, Vince Maloney & Co are 
purveyors of fine clobber to the gentry.

I know the idea of a sale is rather plebeian for such an 
establishment, but let's be honest, from Vince Maloney, even a 
bargain is certainly not cheap. Dear me no.

At Vince's sale, corporate heavyweights from what is called "the 
big end of town" could pick up "pure cashmere Italian sports 
coats" normally priced at $5500 for half price! That's right, a 
whole sports coat for a measly $2750.

What willpower it must have taken not to buy two. And then there 
were the Brioni French nappa jackets, normally priced at $4750 a 
pop.

Vince had three of these for only $2250 each, a snap at that 
price, I'm sure you'll agree.

And with prices like that for jackets alone, we can only 
conjecture at what obscene price tag would have been attached 
(even at "half price") to the "top international label Italian 
suits".

But then, as we all know, CEOs and corporate directors (as well 
as top lawyers and the like) do have to dress the part, 
regardless of cost. It's part of the burden they bear — and you 
never hear them complaining about it, either, do you?

It's fortunate then that CEOs tend to have plenty of money, 
mostly ours.

If CEOs sack a couple of thousand of their employees, thereby 
"saving" the company the money that should have been paid in 
wages to those workers, CEOs get whopping great bonuses for "a 
job well done".

Or else they devise cunning schemes that allow companies to be 
wound up in such a way that the workers suddenly discover their 
employer has no assets, and their legal entitlements have 
mysteriously disappeared.

When the Woodlawn open-cut mine in Tarago, near Goulburn, closed 
in 1998, its 160 mine workers were left with a big hole in the 
ground (which they didn't own any way) and an equally big hole 
where their entitlements of $6.5 million should have been.

Now Collex, the international waste-disposal company, is going to 
reopen the former copper, zinc and lead mine as a huge garbage 
pit. Collex seems to have an ambition to secure a monopoly on 
waste disposal in NSW, if not the country.

When you think about it, a monopoly over garbage disposal would 
be almost as valuable as a monopoly over water supply. In a 
developed capitalist country you cannot really exist without 
both.

Collex is certainly thinking big. The waste transfer station they 
want to set up in the Sydney suburb of Auburn will prepare 
garbage to go to the Woodlawn mine site: six trains a week, each 
loaded with 1200 tonnes of rubbish!

The people in Auburn had some funny idea this might mean 
increased pollution, noise, and traffic congestion in their 
suburb. The Land & Environment Court agreed with them and refused 
consent.

Collex is well known as a contributor to the Labor Party in NSW 
so no one was that surprised when the Carr Government legislated 
to overrule the Court and allow Collex's waste transfer station 
to go ahead.

Collex claim they have been looking at suitable country sites for 
their super rubbish dumps for a decade. After being dumped on 
big-time by the previous corporate owners of Woodlawn, the Tarago 
locals must have been identified by Collex early in the piece as 
a potential fly in the ointment.

Any attempt to use the Woodlawn mine site for a money-making 
venture without first taking care of the former mine-workers' 
entitlements was going to run into major political hassles.

So lo and behold, Collex generously offered to pay the miners' 
entitlements. Along with promising to hire "as many locals as 
possible" and paying a royalty towards local community projects, 
etc, this move effectively bought off any local opposition.

It also provided the Carr Government with a convenient 
justification for overruling the Land & Environment Court (the 
two arguments advanced by the NSW Government were "saving the 
miners' entitlements" and "averting a landfill shortage" for 
Sydney).

Collex's action also cut the ground from under the Labor Council, 
for to oppose the creation of a vast rubbish dump at Tarago meant 
to deny the Woodlawn miners their entitlements. Ain't capitalism 
clever?

It should be remembered however that the Woodlawn miners were 
entitled to their $6.5 million. It was not the mining company's 
money, it was theirs.

Pocketing workers' entitlements is theft. The CEO, directors and 
shareholders of the company that mined Woodlawn and left their 
workers in the lurch should have been pursued personally by the 
authorities to reclaim the missing money.

Their houses, shares and bank accounts — not to mention Brioni 
jackets and Italian suits — should have been seized and sold to 
repay the mineworkers who had been robbed.

Ah, but that wouldn't be capitalism, then, would it? That would 
be some dreadful, socialistic workers' state, wouldn't it?

And no one would want that, would they?