The evening’s lecture was the 10th annual Ted Wheelwright Lecture and it was by Professor Katherine Gibson from Western Sydney University. Gibson is the first Australian to give the Wheelwright Lecture.
Dr Elizabeth Hill, head of the Department of Political Economy at the University of Sydney, was compere for the evening, and Annamarie Jagose, dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the university, opened proceedings. Simon Tormay, head of the School of Social and Political Sciences at the university, introduced a new portrait of Emeritus Professor Frank Stilwell by artist Judith O’Conal-Prinz (who introduced herself: “As an artist and a socialist as I’ve always been ...”). At the front of the room there was also a portrait of Wheelwright that O’Conal-Prinz had painted at the beginning of her career. In both portraits, the men wore red ties.
Wheelwright taught at the university from 1952 to 1986 and was a critic of orthodox economics who warned of the dangers of global capitalism. He died in 2007. Wheelwright’s research looked at the contours of foreign ownership. He was awarded an Australian Research Council grant to study manufacturing.
Gibson helped write the book ‘The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It)’ with Julie Graham (who died in 2010); the two women used the name J.K. Gibson-Graham to cowrite books. Manufacturing was a key interest of Ted’s, Gibson said. His father was a steelworker. Gibson’s father helped set up Pecks Paste after WWII. He was the production manager and would often manage refugees at the company’s factory at Rosebery in Sydney.
She said there are primary challenges facing manufacturing, and pointed to recent science that shows the appearance of “manufactured materials in sediments including plastics, aluminium and concrete” (‘Science’, 8 January 2016) proving that the Anthropocene is functionally and stratigraphically distinct from the Holocene. The Anthropocene also “coincides with global spikes in fallout radionuclides and particulates from fossil fuel consumption”. It is, Gibson said, “What we drink from, what we live in, what we move with.”
We have seen massive wealth generation as a result of modern manufacturing processes, she went on. There have been decades of wealth redistribution, but more recently there have been decades of wealth polarisation. How to address this disparity in wealth distribution?
She asked if manufacturing can be part of a solution to global warming, and used a quote from a 2003 book by Julian Agyeman and others: “The need to ensure a better quality of life for all, now and into the future, in a just and equitable manner, whilst living within the limits of supporting ecosystems.”
She also quoted from a book by Chantel Carr and Chris Gibson (2016), ‘Geographies in the making: Rethinking materials and skills for volatile futures’: “how humans manipulate materials, compose objects and construct economies and societies around material things – as well as how this might be done differently.”
There is now a shift from machinofacture to robofacture. In her research, Gibson selected companies that are doing different things. Gibson pointed back to the mid- to late-1980s when Laurie Carmichael was the assistant secretary of the ACTU. (He had also been the head of the Communist Party of Australia.) In those days, workers enjoyed well-paid employment in the car industry. But innovation around cars of the future was stymied.
Gibson said that the future of Australian manufacturing lies in upstream small manufacturing companies. She has an interest in class and a process and pointed to regional capitalist Mondragon of the Basque country in Spain. She pointed as well to Race Mathews’ work on the history of cooperatives. At the time her first book was published, Gibson recalled, her brand of thinking was labelled “Hills-hoist socialism”. But she said that post-structuralist feminism liberated her generation. It had a performative aspect because it contributes to making some things more real than others.
She pointed to the Earthworker Cooperative, a manufacturing cooperative in Victoria. (I wrote a story about Earthworker in 2011 for ‘Ethical Investor’ magazine.) It demonstrates a community-led form of economic development.
Then Gibson gave us four examples of innovative types of businesses in Australia, starting with Interface Carpets. The company was started by Ray Anderson in 1973 in Atlanta. The company is an example of a circular economy, recycling carpets into new materials. In 1995, the company had looked at ways to reaching a target of “mission zero” and they found that way through the reuse of carpet tiles.
Gibson put up a slide quoting a former CEO of the Australian company saying:
The second company Gibson looked at last night was Varley Group. The family-owned company was founded by George Henry Varley in Newcastle in 1886. In the late 1990s it faced closure. But free from the influences of the stockmarket it adapted and now has 600 employees. “It’s not just the business, it’s our Varley culture, our way of how we want to run the business,” said the managing director of Varley Engineering. The general manager of Specialist Vehicles said:
She also pointed to a study of automation by Hugh Dwyer and the work by James Ferguson studying ownership of land in southern Africa. For Gibson, it has been an epistemological epiphany, being imaginative. She said it is important to keep your critical sensibilities.
Gibson is currently working on a project titled ‘Reconfiguring the Enterprise: Manufacturing Culture in Australia’ with Dr Stephen Healy of Western Sydney University’s Institute for Culture and Society, and Associate Professor Jenny Cameron of the University of Newcastle’s Centre for Urban and Regional Studies. The project received ARC discovery project funding for 2016 to 2018. Gibson is also involved in Community Economies Collective.
Dr Elizabeth Hill, head of the Department of Political Economy at the University of Sydney, was compere for the evening, and Annamarie Jagose, dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the university, opened proceedings. Simon Tormay, head of the School of Social and Political Sciences at the university, introduced a new portrait of Emeritus Professor Frank Stilwell by artist Judith O’Conal-Prinz (who introduced herself: “As an artist and a socialist as I’ve always been ...”). At the front of the room there was also a portrait of Wheelwright that O’Conal-Prinz had painted at the beginning of her career. In both portraits, the men wore red ties.
Gibson helped write the book ‘The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It)’ with Julie Graham (who died in 2010); the two women used the name J.K. Gibson-Graham to cowrite books. Manufacturing was a key interest of Ted’s, Gibson said. His father was a steelworker. Gibson’s father helped set up Pecks Paste after WWII. He was the production manager and would often manage refugees at the company’s factory at Rosebery in Sydney.
She said there are primary challenges facing manufacturing, and pointed to recent science that shows the appearance of “manufactured materials in sediments including plastics, aluminium and concrete” (‘Science’, 8 January 2016) proving that the Anthropocene is functionally and stratigraphically distinct from the Holocene. The Anthropocene also “coincides with global spikes in fallout radionuclides and particulates from fossil fuel consumption”. It is, Gibson said, “What we drink from, what we live in, what we move with.”
We have seen massive wealth generation as a result of modern manufacturing processes, she went on. There have been decades of wealth redistribution, but more recently there have been decades of wealth polarisation. How to address this disparity in wealth distribution?
She asked if manufacturing can be part of a solution to global warming, and used a quote from a 2003 book by Julian Agyeman and others: “The need to ensure a better quality of life for all, now and into the future, in a just and equitable manner, whilst living within the limits of supporting ecosystems.”
She also quoted from a book by Chantel Carr and Chris Gibson (2016), ‘Geographies in the making: Rethinking materials and skills for volatile futures’: “how humans manipulate materials, compose objects and construct economies and societies around material things – as well as how this might be done differently.”
There is now a shift from machinofacture to robofacture. In her research, Gibson selected companies that are doing different things. Gibson pointed back to the mid- to late-1980s when Laurie Carmichael was the assistant secretary of the ACTU. (He had also been the head of the Communist Party of Australia.) In those days, workers enjoyed well-paid employment in the car industry. But innovation around cars of the future was stymied.
Gibson said that the future of Australian manufacturing lies in upstream small manufacturing companies. She has an interest in class and a process and pointed to regional capitalist Mondragon of the Basque country in Spain. She pointed as well to Race Mathews’ work on the history of cooperatives. At the time her first book was published, Gibson recalled, her brand of thinking was labelled “Hills-hoist socialism”. But she said that post-structuralist feminism liberated her generation. It had a performative aspect because it contributes to making some things more real than others.
She pointed to the Earthworker Cooperative, a manufacturing cooperative in Victoria. (I wrote a story about Earthworker in 2011 for ‘Ethical Investor’ magazine.) It demonstrates a community-led form of economic development.
Then Gibson gave us four examples of innovative types of businesses in Australia, starting with Interface Carpets. The company was started by Ray Anderson in 1973 in Atlanta. The company is an example of a circular economy, recycling carpets into new materials. In 1995, the company had looked at ways to reaching a target of “mission zero” and they found that way through the reuse of carpet tiles.
Gibson put up a slide quoting a former CEO of the Australian company saying:
The stories you hear in the business were that when he first started to communicate that to, say, Wall Street, they really thought he had lost his mind. He used to raise that subject on occasions and the share price would go down afterwards. But we’re talking in the nineties, yeah. Then it became an advantage … So you go from being a heretic and a complete lunatic to … actually you’re [in] a leadership position.They had a fire in 2012 at their plant at Picton but gave workers 12 months’ pay to stay on while they rebuilt. A new plant was opened in Minto in 2014. The former CEO said that at the time “we knew that to start up the new plant rapidly we needed to retain the skills of our people because carpet manufacturing or textile skills are very thin on the ground in Australia these days”.
The second company Gibson looked at last night was Varley Group. The family-owned company was founded by George Henry Varley in Newcastle in 1886. In the late 1990s it faced closure. But free from the influences of the stockmarket it adapted and now has 600 employees. “It’s not just the business, it’s our Varley culture, our way of how we want to run the business,” said the managing director of Varley Engineering. The general manager of Specialist Vehicles said:
That’s one thing that Varley do have, is people are human beings and do we really need – can we get through this as a team? You’ve got to give them credit to it. That may be one of the things that has kept the place together, it has a reputation that … the senior staff are loyal too, and those people are committed.Then Gibson looked at Norco, a 125-year-old cooperative in northern NSW that is owned by 220 dairy farmers and has three manufacturing plants. The company employs 800 people and has $1 billion in sales. It pays above-award wages in its plants, including an ice-cream factory in Lismore. It uses succession planning with younger farmers taking on production while older farmers stay on the farm. The chairman of the board of Norco said:
Globalisation has served its purpose and made us all aware that we need to change and move forward, but it doesn’t mean that we need to abandon our own.The fourth company that Gibson looked at was Soft Landing. The company was originally established by Mission Australia as a way to process the hundreds of mattresses that were being dropped off at its collection points. There are 1.6 million mattresses thrown away each year in Australia. Gibson also pointed to Resource Recovery Australia. She said there is national mattress stewardship scheme in which Soft Landing has taken the lead. The national manager of the company said about its cooperation with an automated partner (which had wanted to take over the company):
Still a partnership; we’ll be the front face, we’ll do the collection, we’ll be the social enterprise, we deliver to you the volume of mats that can go through your machine and you push the button on, and the widgets and whatever go. Great, we’ll keep some mats aside for our guys that are existing. We want a net gain in jobs, so we don’t want to lose any jobs, we want more jobs.These are businesses that operate at some distance from private shareholder primacy. There are glimmers of new cultures of production in Australia, Gibson said.
She also pointed to a study of automation by Hugh Dwyer and the work by James Ferguson studying ownership of land in southern Africa. For Gibson, it has been an epistemological epiphany, being imaginative. She said it is important to keep your critical sensibilities.
Gibson is currently working on a project titled ‘Reconfiguring the Enterprise: Manufacturing Culture in Australia’ with Dr Stephen Healy of Western Sydney University’s Institute for Culture and Society, and Associate Professor Jenny Cameron of the University of Newcastle’s Centre for Urban and Regional Studies. The project received ARC discovery project funding for 2016 to 2018. Gibson is also involved in Community Economies Collective.
No comments:
Post a Comment