The Unknown Industrial Prisoner

by David Ireland

  The funny thing was that with all this power, employers were not the State, they were free men. They could come and go out of one industry into another, they could employ or dismiss, make new rules and change old ones. No responsibility beyond the elementary one of providing themselves with a workforce able to work. If they didn’t want to pay an extra cent in wages, they appealed to the prisoners’ patriotism—think of the economy’s good. The economy’s good consisted of each employer maximizing sales or profit or both: there was a maximum wage but no maximum profit.

  However, these considerations didn’t bother prisoners. Fifteen-odd years to go. All Blue Hills had now were the orchids and his beanie—it kept his head warm at night—and the extra money from the shift penalty rates prescribed under the provisions of the Industrial Service (General Compulsion) Bill.

  Penalties? Who was penalized? At the best of times any of them could have made only a confused answer to this question, but now all were numb, too numb for thinking, including those who had stayed up almost reading, almost sleeping, almost listening for the phone, almost alert for the steps of inexperienced foremen who did not know the ropes and might come stumbling in on those who had gone down. A Commissioner of Conciliation ruled once that a man was less than fit on night shift, showing a greater understanding of refinery working conditions than any other person who sat in judgment on prisoners’ grievances. He was preparing to reduce their shift loading percentage and in fact did, but the fact didn’t register, they thought of him as their champion. But no amount of money makes up for lost sleep.

  What was Puroil? In Australia it was a few gardens in which distant proprietors planted money and after a while tangled masses of plants grew, though with no fairy princess inside waiting to be wakened with a kiss. Their financial budgets were larger than the States in which they operated. What was Puroil? At Clearwater it was a sprawling refinery, an army of white shirts, a fleet of wagons, a number of apparently separate companies, dozens of monolithic departments protected from each other by an armour of functional difference and jealousy. On the refinery site it was two hundred and fifty shabby prisoners, a heavy overload of foremen, supervisors, plant controllers, shift controllers, up to the giddy height of section-heads (popularly miscalled Suction Heads, a metaphor deriving from pumps) who were clerks for the technologists; project and process engineers and superintendents who were whipping-boys for the—whisper it!—the Old Man himself, the Manager, who was actually only a Branch Manager and a sort of bum-boy for Head Office in Victoria which was a backward colonial outpost in the eyes of the London office, which was a junior partner in British-European Puroil its mighty self, which was the property of anonymous shareholders.

  Did these people know their humblest prisoners were asleep on the job? Could they have ridden easily on their magic carpet of dividend cheques if they had known the foundation of their empire was missing? Would they have suffered attacks of vertigo, thinking the whole edifice was tottering? Not at all. For not only was their investment spread over dozens of countries so that whatever tariff barriers were erected Puroil could get underneath them and whatever upheavals occurred Puroil would survive and only people would suffer, but with real ingenuity the humble prisoner was being replaced as the foundation on which the structure was built; machines were to be the foundation. Machines that ran day and night; machines that ran for years. Why imprison these men? Why not free them?

  This was a transition stage. The refinery processes were more automatic and needed far fewer men than a manned assembly line, but were far short of automation.

  On the job, it was not necessary to do anything about it unless a transition man was caught sleeping. If no one actually tripped over a body there was no need to find one, for owing to the many sudden, strange shifts of Puroil industrial policy, it was not always clear which body was going to be in the soup: sleeper’s or finder’s. If there was some industrial advantage to be won by turning a blind eye perhaps on the eve of a wage agreement, an eager foreman might easily find himself caned severely and with a bad staff report. It was demonstrably bad to be one of the lowest bodies, a part of Labour, but being on the Staff wasn’t all beer and kisses either. It was a one-way ladder suspended over the cruel sea of separation.

  BOOKS VERBOTEN ‘What’s this!’ the Glass Canoe exulted. ‘Books! Papers!’ He had spied the poor, torn Westerns, science fiction novels and Reader’s Digests left lying about, and the sheets of newspaper that Bubbles had used to insulate his sleeping rags from the cold concrete.

  Books were forbidden to prisoners. Even when the plants ran well for twelve months and there were hours between alarm buzzers on dreary night shifts or between routine checks and instrument readings, the men were expected to sit and stare at the concrete floor; and, to give them their due, most did. Puroil preferred zombies. Standing instructions expressly forbade reading during working hours, or the bringing into the refinery of books or newspapers.

  Yet there they were. The company guards in their smart field-grey uniforms and peaked caps—if you took the stiffening wire out of the crown you could have a real Rommel cap, and they did—the guards realized that operator bods could cause them a lot more work if they chose, so they went easy on them. When the men’s bags were opened under their noses on the way out each shift, they were blind to little things like paperbacks. They looked mainly for 44-gallon drums. In return, the men obligingly failed to report them when they neglected to open the boots of certain outgoing cars.

  The Glass Canoe picked up the reading matter, pocketed a war novel he hadn’t read and shot the rest in with the rubbish.

  THE HOUR OF THE PEARL The frightful noise made by the Glass Canoe in the locker-room woke the foreman, who sat in the far corner of the foremen’s room, his back to the door, apparently gazing down at his hands. He had dozed off. He, too, observed the rule that you didn’t sleep obviously. Man is a day animal and Stillsons was very tired. He got his name from a habit of trying to do fitters’ work: this led unfailingly to Union trouble but he couldn’t kick the habit. Supervisors were not to do operators’ work. Operators were not to encroach on tradesmen’s work. This was the custom of years—without it where would they all fit in?

  When Stillsons pulled himself together and tried with cold water to splash the sleep from his swollen face, he found from the Western Salesman, who volunteered the information and asked for action, that the Glass Canoe had damaged the men’s lockers. He didn’t mention he’d been cruelly wakened. He was one of those at Union meetings who sat well back on the outskirts of the crowd and hurled comments, like grenades, into the centre. Then ducked. Stillsons was on the point of tackling the Glass Canoe about it when some of the others came after him into the amenities room where the Glass Canoe was mopping. He mopped with such vigour after his pill, backing out of the room as he worked, that Stillsons was in danger of being impaled on the mop handle. Those behind pretended they couldn’t see him and had him in a squeeze. They turned their backs and wouldn’t move, pretending to look at the coloured nudes on the wall. To make clear his position you need to know that the amenities room, where fourteen men had their meals, measured fourteen feet by eight; a large part of the space was taken up by three tables, a cold box, oven and sink, all decrepit trade-ins from a dealer’s yard; it was half the size of the foremen’s office, which accommodated three. Like every building on the refinery it was designed somewhere in Europe. Stillsons was rescued by the Samurai, who came to the door of the amenities room and said, in his cold voice that was never loud but always managed to silence everyone, ‘The Enforcer’.

  The Samurai never allowed himself to be awakened by reveille, he was up and about before the cleaning roster had to start. No one ever surprised him, but then no one was eager to tangle with him either on the job or outside the massive blue steel gates which so impressively guarded the entrance to the works. The first thing he was told when he started on shift was to keep out of the Enforcer’s way. ‘Tread on his toes and he’ll get you if
it takes years.’ The Samurai had met men like this before.

  Stillsons, however, was made of different stuff. He turned and brushed his obstructors aside and scream-whispered, ‘Where is he?’ The mention of the shift superintendent’s name was enough. He darted around, his head sinking down into his shirt as if he were an animal retracting its vulnerable parts, as if his body remembered the flogging past, his face white from night shift and blank with fear.

  ‘Where? Did he come in? Did he ask for me?’ In his anxiety he made to touch the Samurai, perhaps by the shirt, but even this human support was denied him. You didn’t casually touch the Samurai. It was very hard to touch him. You didn’t see his feet move, he simply slid out of reach. Now he kept after Stillsons.

  ‘Time you went up to report to the Enforcer. There’s nothing for you to do here.’ Stillsons hesitated. Thank God the Enforcer hadn’t seen him asleep. He’d dob his own mother. ‘Unless you want to help with the mop.’ The mob laughed heartlessly; no one wanted to side with a foreman, not in a crowd. They would sneak into his office later one by one and square off.

  Since this specimen of Puroil management still hesitated, it was necessary for the Samurai to put out a greater effort to get rid of him. To be without a foreman in this part of the morning was a good thing. Once the evidence of the night had been safely stowed and the floors of the amenities, locker-room, toilets and hundred-foot control room had been swept and mopped, and this latest day marked off in scratches on the cement walls, there was time for leisurely dressing and, if you got in early, a shower. There were two showers among the fourteen men, but one wouldn’t work if the other was started first. Bubbles was first showered. He wiped a pore closing stink repressant over his armpits for that fresh cool carefree feeling. It kept the sweat in. Choking clouds of baby talc surrounded him. He loved his body and overhauled it for the girls. His tongue was still cocky-caged from the night before, his huge pink belly tight as a drum. He’d had his six hours down. All he had to do now was order a new pair of boots, his present pair were slightly worn at the heel. They’d be worth three dollars at the pub.

  The Samurai was quickly dressed and had the next hour to himself for thinking or just picking over the laundered overalls to see if his friends had left him one of his own pairs. He enjoyed this one hour of the shift. At seven they would be out the gate and gone. He had never worked on the better sections of the refinery—pump-houses, utilities, bitumen, distillation, platforming plants—where, on night shift, if the plant was producing and running steady, the men waited for the visit of the mobile canteen at midnight, then for the foreman’s visit soon after, then half went straight down, taking their turn in a civilized manner and were wakened at six by the foreman ringing their phone. Yes, that was a better reveille. There were no vacancies on those sections. Months ago, when the Good Shepherd was telling them of the European owners’ expansion plans, he’d said ‘The honeymoon’s over.’ With the new investment would come a more rigid control. The cracker was the first big complex needing its own on-the-spot supervision. On all other plants supervisors were visitors; the men kept the plant steady so there’d be no visits.

  BIG DADDY The Samurai sat watching the rest of his shift come dressed from the locker-room. Technically they were citizens, allowed to reproduce at random. A place had to be found for their children, too. As he watched, something like a fine despair seemed to spray up from somewhere inside him and shower his organs of concern with a set of patterned words, the same words that had often risen to his tongue when he saw them attacking each other openly or in secret. It was man against man at every level and the company suffered from the situation’s wastefulness, but no one saw it as a blot that should be published, condemned, eradicated. Poor devils, you can’t take care of yourselves, you need a father to watch over you and fight the battles you should be fighting against the false and the unfair, the cruel and the oppressive…And, as usual, he knew that although he had heart and ability for such a fight and many wanted him to be their delegate, to stand in the front line and take the company’s first shots, he had never convinced himself that he had the basic inclination. Mostly the Union attracted men looking for an excuse to get off their plants when they felt like it. Those with ideas, energy and initiative got a second job outside. The Union knew only one thing: how to go for money. But what was the use of a wage increase awarded because prices had risen and industry could afford it, when as soon as the increase was awarded prices rose again because industry couldn’t afford it? If the Samurai had been a man of ambition, self-seeking could have carried him through and he could have built a career on serving them, but not from love. He did not—he could not—love his brothers.

  And yet he had no inherited ankle scar to scratch.

  Official, pompous things amused him. He chuckled still over the name Puroil Refining, Termitary & Grinding Works painted in large letters on control block walls. Every so often it was painted out, but it always reappeared. He repeated the name aloud to the others. Few laughed. Only the Great White Father, who had written it. He met this man on his first day at the plant, as he started on afternoon shift, just before the day workers went home.

  He said, ‘There’s our termitary’, as they passed the administration block in the company bus, and sure enough there were the little ant-people running up and down stairs, on view behind plate-glass, arguing silently with each other or sitting impassively for hours in offices equally on display. A glass box, completely enclosed except for tiny ventilation holes. He had worked there himself before transferring to the works, but he had never seen the building this way before. A great manorhouse watching over its feudal fields and wage-serfs.

  ‘What about the grinding works?’ he asked the Great White Father, who was exceedingly tall and bony and good-natured.

  ‘The whole thing is a grinding works. Each man, if he lets it happen, is ground down a little each day until, finely and smoothly honed of all eccentricities and irregularities and the originality that could save him, the grinding suddenly stops at sixty. Then they shot you out. You wait five years to qualify for the old age pension, and when you qualify you make your choice: whether to take the government one or carry on with the company pension. They’re pretty close to the same thing, in cash. Under our beneficent social system, one disqualifies you from the other. Most of us won’t have to worry, we’re all specially picked and processed so we peg out within a year or two of retiring. The system is further safeguarded; in the last few years of service they down-grade you so your pension won’t be much, anyway, in case you escape the health hazard. You see, your pension amount is tied to your earnings in your last couple of years service. Demote you, pay less. You’re just an item of cost. The bigger the organization, the smaller the value of each man in it. And this one’s huge.’

  The very tall man’s sea-blue eyes sparkled and danced so much during this short lecture that the Samurai kept listening attentively so as not to miss the joke, which he felt sure was coming. But no, the Great White Father was serious. He seemed to enjoy talking—the sort of man who enjoyed everything. Laughter patterned his deeply creased face, lined with the scars and lacerations of a varied, reprehensible, non-respectable, wholly enjoyable past.

  ‘You said, if a man lets it happen…’

  ‘If you let them grind you down, yes. You don’t have to.’

  ‘What else?’

  ‘Fight ’em! Every step of the way!’

  ‘They’ve got the whip hand. What do you fight with?’

  ‘Smiles, a quick wit, sex, alcohol, and never say Yes to the bastards. Once you recognize the place is a prison, you’re well off. The best that can be said is everyone draws an indefinite sentence. The final horror of a life behind barbed wire is mercifully withheld.’ He glanced out at the high wire fence they were passing then, topped with several strands of barbed wire. ‘You see, the battleground where they beat you is in here.’ His long, friendly brown hand lay relaxed on his own high, resonant chest.

 
; But just where the Samurai was expecting him to go on, he suddenly stood. The bus stopped. Their crew was decanted like a carelessly handled bacterial culture outside the host body of the low grey control block on their growing plant. Drawn by a power unseen, the human bacteria quickly made their way inside and were apparently devoured. Gunga Din, lean, brown, small and dry, went first to the urn to check the water level and turn it on ready for the first cup of tea.