Normal text size Larger text size Very large text size Henry Fuller rarely attracts much notice. A short man with a bushy moustache and salt-and-pepper hair, he lives in an outlying suburb between Geelong and the Surf Coast in a house at the end of a no-through road. With a neatly kept garden and small pet terrier, he leads a quiet life here. But in the autumn of 2013 his quiet world was upended and his face was broadcast everywhere. Henry Fuller, now a bus driver, was one of the hundreds of laid-off workers when auto giant Ford shut down its Geelong plant in 2017 Credit:Joe Armao For two days, Fuller became the human face of an unfolding landmark news event – one that roiled the country, divided legislators and sent shivers across the economy. His employer, Ford, had dropped a bombshell: after nearly a century of making cars in Australia, it was shutting all its local plants and culling hundreds of jobs, Fuller's included. "I feel gutted," he told the television cameras outside the factory where he'd worked for 27 years. He was flanked on the lawn by Victoria's then opposition leader Daniel Andrews. In his mid-50s like many of his co-workers, Fuller described his chances of finding full-time employment in the future as "very slim". The impact on Geelong, he said, would be "terrible". Henry Fuller leaves the Geelong Ford plant in 2013, the day the closure was announced. Credit:Penny Stephens


From 2013 to 2017, the exit of Australia's final three car makers – Ford, Holden and Toyota – wiped out jobs on a scale rarely seen before. Under pressure from an overvalued Australian dollar, a consumer shift to smaller foreign cars that the local makers largely missed and government cuts to the industry's taxpayer subsidies, factories around the country closed one by one pushing legions of blue-collar Australians out of secure work for the first time in their lives. And for the many thousands more employed in the national supply chains of car-parts makers, a similar fate was feared. The predictions from some economists were bleak, worried about how masses of displaced older workers would adjust to the modern labour market. And what would it all mean for the areas where car factories were the beating heart? Victoria and South Australia, some warned, risked falling into a recession. Loading Others – usually those who argued time was up for the billions of dollars of taxpayer money being poured into the industry – predicted the workers would be picked up in a strong economy and that adaptation would be the name of the game. The Productivity Commission estimated in 2014 that government support for the industry had run to $30 billion since 1997. It's almost two years now since the industry closed its doors, and the gathering verdict, buttressed by detailed research from unions and the companies themselves, is that neither school of thought was entirely right. Regional economic apocalypses did not develop. But for many, at an individual level, the road has been a tough one. Within six months of his departure, Henry Fuller was able to find a new job – a good one – as a bus driver for CDC Geelong, whose depot sits immediately across the road from the town's now-defunct Ford engine plant.


"I was concerned about what jobs were out there … who's going to employ older people?" he said. "But I was lucky enough to get full-time employment." Loading Most of his colleagues and others across the industry, however, have not been as lucky. Soon-to-be-released research commissioned by the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union for the first time has evaluated the long-term employment outcomes for the thousands of staff retrenched from the automakers and supply chain. The research has tracked hundreds of workers since the plants closed. It found that 12 months after the last closure in October 2017, one in five of the laid-off employees who wanted to continue working was jobless. And of those who have managed to land new jobs, only a minority – 45 per cent – were hired on a full-time permanent basis. Many had been through one or more jobs since their retrenchment, the research found, while angst over "job insecurity" and financial pressure was rife. "My contract is up in February next year," says one former Toyota employee currently working on the docks in Melbourne. "February is actually not that far away, so I'm looking for another job now. Especially one that's full-time." On top of the insecurity he feels in his role, the 47-year-old single father-of-two says he earns a much lower wage than he was at the car factory, meaning he is struggling to keep on top of household bills and children’s school fees. Having previously earned about $1500 a week, he now takes home $770.


It's hard to find a full-time job out there that actually pays reasonable. Former Toyota worker "It's hard to find a full-time job out there that actually pays reasonable," he says. "I didn’t expect it was going to be the same money we were getting at Toyota … but I didn't expect it to be this low, put it that way." On a macroeconomic level though, the worst-case fears of what could have happened in the aftermath of the car industry's exit from Australia did not come to pass. There has not been a meaningful jump in jobless numbers. No state-based recession. On many measures including GDP growth and the value of regional manufacturing production, some of the areas hit hardest by the closures have remained steady or even begun trending back upwards, explains Terry Rawnsley, an economist with SGS Economics and Planning. In Geelong, manufacturing production slowly declined from $1.6 billion in 2012 to a low of $1.2 billion in 2016 – the year of the Ford shutdown. But the next year it climbed to $1.3 billion, then to $1.35 billion the year after that. In Melbourne's north, where Ford ran its Broadmeadows assembly operations, the value of manufacturing production has in fact been increasing over the same period, from $1.8 billion to $1.9 billion. Elizabeth, home to Holden's South Australian plant, bucked the trend as manufacturing value almost halved to $287 million and unemployment is well above the avereage, but even there GDP grew strongly.


Rawnsley says wider manufacturing industry didn't simply drop off a cliff when the car factories closed their doors. Pace mattered too. In Townsville in 2016 the closure of Clive Palmer's nickel refinery effectively unfolded overnight and triggered mass layoffs. In contrast the beginning of the end for Australian car manufacturing was five years in the making, starting when the dollar leapt to $US1.10 and swung a wrecking ball across the sector. The supply-chain companies knew they couldn't rely on Ford or Holden anymore and the long lead time made it possible for them to diversify. Terry Rawnsley Then there was the long notice period – about three years – from when car makers told Australians they would be leaving to when their last vehicles rolled off the line. "The supply-chain companies knew they couldn't rely on Ford or Holden anymore and the long lead time made it possible for them to diversify," says Rawnsley. "That's why the impacts on the economy weren’t as big as some of those doomsday scenarios." One of these companies, Luna Nameplate Industries, made adhesive labels and exterior badges found on Australian-built cars.

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