4 March 1999: Workers have been laid off in the sudden closure of the Aurora Glass Fibre plant in Dandenong, Australia, according to a recent press report.
The company, owned by the Amatek Group, rec…
4 March 1999: Workers have been laid off in the sudden closure of the Aurora Glass Fibre plant in Dandenong, Australia, according to a recent press report. The company, owned by the Amatek Group, recently announced that the plant would close next month, putting 330 people out of work. The shutdown is one of the biggest to hit the Victoria area in recent years. Aurora, making reinforced fibreglass for boats and swimming pools for the local and international market since the early 1960s, found itself too small to compete in a deregulated global market, the report said. “There will be counselling, a comprehensive redundancy package and an outplacement programme – but it“s never easy doing this. A number of people here have been with the company for a considerable time,” said John Nolan, the company“s chief executive. Nolan said Aurora was a modern, highly technological and capital-intensive plant. “It“s not a labour issue, it“s a global issue. It“s a size factor. We were too small to compete on a global scale. The Asian crisis didn“t help and it has been exacerbated by the recent gas crisis.” “Plants in Asia switched to exports and competed successfully for some of our markets in Europe. The margins were getting thinner and thinner,” he added. Australian Workers Union organizer Mick Eagles said the closure caught workers and the union by surprise. “I was out here to talk about a couple of unrelated redundancies and they said I better hang around for an announcement – and then, bang!” he said. “This is terrible. The people were herded out into the back yard like cattle and told they didn“t have a job. Some of them have been here for years.” Eagles said ethnic groups, particularly the Albanian community, would be devastated by the retrenchments. “There are whole families who work here and dozens of husband and wife teams. The pressure on the social service system is going to be pretty big.” He said the union would assess the closure and anticipated demands would be made of the company. The secretary of the union, Bill Shorten, said the plant closure was a further example of the disaster of Australia“s tariff cuts. “Until we go back to tariff protection, the taxpayer will have to foot the bill for this through the social security system. There“s no financial advantage to this country having a global policy when our taxpayers pick up the tab,” Shorten said.