Redundancy, space, and localism: The tales of former SECV employees Mathin Biswas PhD Student Monash University mathin.biswas@monash.edu 1
Redundancy, space, and localism: The tales of former SECV employees Space and space-based identity or localism influence how a person constructs their individualcommunity connection. This was found in a study on experiences of redundancy and individual-community connections of former employees of the State Electricity Commission of Victoria (SECV) living in the Latrobe Valley region. The SECV was established in 1921 under the leadership of Sir John Monash to provide electricity to the Victorian community from a single source (Rainnie and Paulet 2003). The SECV developed open-cut brown coal mines, power stations, and briquette factories and built a company town, Yallourn, based on the Garden City concept. Between late 1970s and early 1980s, Yallourn was demolished to mine coal underneath the town (Fletcher 2002). In the 1980s and 1990s, the corporatisation and privatisation of the SECV led to the loss of employment of approximately 8400 employees in the Latrobe Valley region through a program of voluntary redundancies (Fairbrother and Testi 2002). The current study explored the experiences of redundancy and individual-community connections of twenty former SECV employees through interviews using a semi-structured interview schedule and a photo book developed from site visits in the Latrobe Valley. Following Ellem and Shields (1999), space is understood as a human construct that is central to employment relations (Herod, Rainnie, and McGrath-Champ 2007), industrial relations (Rainnie, Herod, and McGrath-Champ 2007), and social relations (Ellem and Shields 1999). These relations provide the context for workers to create their individual-community connections within and outside the work space. The SECV employees interacted with their colleagues and managers within and outside workspace because the SECV, as a paternalistic organisation, encouraged community activities involving taking workplace relationships and skills into the community. As a result, the former SECV employees developed the sense of community worth and sense of belonging to a larger Latrobe Valley community. The participants talked about this sense of belonging while describing the Yallourn town. They remembered the company-owned garden town as a well-planned, beautiful, and attractive town that was maintained by the SECV: 2
It was a beautiful [town]. Councillor (worker and elected union official) It was a beautiful town that had all the facilities, it had everything catered for. Wasi (worker) It was a beautiful town. It was heavily treed. Most things that you would need were there. Danny (manager) Yallourn was a very integrated community. University Lecturer (manager) Yallourn was a close-knit community. The residents of the towns as well as people from the other towns in the Latrobe Valley used the Yallourn space regularly because this town had all modern community facilities including sports, health and entertainment facilities. Being in this space created a sense of belonging to the community among the residents. Figure 1 A close-up of Yallourn map next to the site of former town, personalised During the demolition of Yallourn, the physical history the town was lost but neither demolition nor the redundancy affected the sense of belonging to community space for the majority of the residents. Former residents continued to create the Yallourn space through an ongoing 3
mental activity using different media. For example, creating an online platform, organising annual re-unions, collecting and reading books about Yallourn and the Latrobe Valley, collecting memorabilia, personalising the map of the former town located next to the site of the town (Figure 1), and participating in this research project which gave them the opportunity to tell their tales to keep them alive. The construction of the Yallourn space by the residents reinforces the argument of Ellem and Shields (1999) about space being a human construct that extends beyond physical geography. Former SECV employees maintained their links with the town because that gave them the sense of continuity of self and the sense of belonging to the town. This was an expression of localism which was shared by the majority of the former Yallourn town residents. Localism is understood as identity associated with a particular geographic space, which provides employment and social interaction for particular individuals (Patmore 2000, 53). Localism is a spatially-oriented identity that is based on economic infrastructure and social structure. Economic infrastructure provides employment and income and social infrastructure is based on family, work, and social interactions within a particular space (Balnave and Patmore 2006). The space-based identity that former SECV employees constructed were shaped by the hierarchy and paternalistic benevolence of the SECV and family and community connections. For them. Both economic and social structure were influenced by the SECV. Patmore (1999) identified social and economic networks as building familiarity and dependence, which is certainly true for the former SECV employees in the Latrobe Valley. In a local community, space is important because networks develop within family, community, and work-based relationships (Patmore 1997). This was also found in the present study. Patmore (1999) maintains that localism does not deny other identities such as class, gender, and race identities but, similar to these identities, it influences the activities of workers (Patmore 2004). The constructions of the SECV employees of Yallourn space did not deny other identities but it added to their views of themselves and functioned as a medium to create the sense of self and self-worth lost through the redundancy process. After redundancy, former 4
SECV employees turned to their space-based identity because their sense of belonging and the community self-worth were tied to their sense of self-worth and doing something for the people of Victoria and feeling connected to them. They lost the job that was the connection between them and the people but retained their sense of localism in order to keep the connection alive. 5
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