“How the Cookie Crumbled”

UNEMPLOYMENT IN AUSTRALIA AND THE IMPACT OF GLOBALISATION

Ray Pierides and his wife Terri stood crying outside Arnott’s biscuit factory in Melbourne after learning in May that they and 600 other workers will be sacked. The couple, both aged 40, are long-term workers at the factory and they want to know how they are going to feed their two young children when the factory shuts.

“I feel sick in the stomach about it” Ray Pierides said. “How am I going to put food on the table now?” he asked.

Mr Pierides, an Arnott’s worker for 12 years, said he had no money in the bank to keep his young family going. “We’re just living from wage to wage. We take it week by week and struggle through like most families do these days”, he said.

Another tearful worker said: “They say business is going very well. So why do they close down?”

Terri Pierides said: “For young families like us, it’s really bad. We all have mortgages on our homes. We thought Arnott’s was a company that would back us up all the way. It won’t be easy to find a job. They’ve shafted a whole community”, she said. “They don’t care. As far as they’re concerned, we’re just factory workers. We’re the lowest on Arnott’s chain”.

State Finance Minister, John Brumby, warned that if the company did not reconsider its decision, the Government would offer to help its rivals. “Here we have an American multi-national company with plants around Australia with a great brand name, thumbing its nose at Victorian families and Victorian workers”.

“We need to meet the American directors who are the faceless men who made this decision to put 600 workers out of a job”, he said.

Arnott’s, which delivered profits of $64.9 million last year to its U.S. owned Campbell Soup Company on sales of $788.8 million, said the Melbourne plant would close in September. Industrial