Tobias passing
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 25: After the Crisis
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Brett Caldwell
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Tobias Fox, vice president of sales, arrived at our Canberra sales office by taxi. This was the last stop on his nationwide recession-chasing tour. For some weeks prior to his arrival, motivated by primal emotion, our team pored over spreadsheets, deals and opportunities, trying to construct a future. Our creatively optimistic forecasts failed to obscure the fragility of our predicament. The numbers looked terrible, and for Tobias the numbers meant everything.
Growth is a fundamental imperative of capitalism, and for some it is an end unto itself. For more than a decade the world forgot that endless growth is unsustainable. That's why we have great recessions – to remind us. Since the late 1990s my wife and I had reclined on a bed of puffed-up middle-class comfort. Like so many we were oblivious to the growing troubles and ignored the debt hole beneath our mattress: a mortgage, school and university fees, HECS debts, tax debts and big-boy's-toy debts.
Before the recession, Australia's economy roared. In Canberra, industry flourished with ripe government contracts. Companies grew fat; sales managers made fortunes and some entrepreneurial ex-public servants even made BRW's rich list. Most ignored the faint voices warning of trouble ahead. And for a while Canberra was sheltered by its isolation and the public service; but eventually the financial plague came to its bushland suburbs.
MY COMPANY EMPLOYS SEVERAL hundred thousand people globally and reaps tens of billions in revenue every year. Tobias rules the Australian roost; our clients are mostly government departments and agencies. In October 2008 business started to recede. The recession sucked the marrow from some of our most loyal clients. They delayed, reduced or abandoned acquisitions. Profit and loss ratios and budget cuts dominated boardroom discussions – survival plans replaced expansion strategies. The Rudd Government set forth on a crusade early in its tenure: bands of bureaucrats and high-powered consultants roamed Canberra's byways, lanes and alleys, seeking out inefficiency, duplication and waste – and there was much to find.
When the crisis hit, our company's corporate surgeons panicked and cut deeply into muscle and bone. The first to go were the middle managers, followed by the backroom sales support, administrative people and the inventory they managed. The sales force thinned as revenues declined. Senior managers celebrated the profit savings that buttressed their own positions, but they mortgaged common sense and forced untenable sales numbers onto the few ragged troops that remained. Some of the slack was taken up by low-paid Malaysian and Philippine workers, who took to the phones armed with naive enthusiasm, phone lists and scripted introductions.
Anything that smelled like a perk came to an end: office managers stopped buying newspapers, stationery and the Tuesday fruit basket. We could buy coffee for clients but not fat-boy lunches. In order to save power and costs we were encouraged to work from home. Tobias cancelled our hallowed sales symposium and stopped inviting ex-Olympian motivational speakers to motivate us. One final indignity remained: the CEO asked each employee to ‘volunteer' for a pay cut of ‘only' one-tenth. ‘Your small sacrifice will assist us avoiding "hard" decisions,' we were told. ‘Hard decisions' translated as mass sackings, but there was no guarantee that a pay cut would save any job. I hedged my bets and voted yes.
OUR CEO ALSO TOOK a pay cut, but he earns more in a few days than I do in a year. He earns more over a long business lunch than some of our Malaysian teleworkers earn in three months. An e-net magazine reported that the company's board awarded him $32 million in cash last year, a $1.8 million salary and $30 million in bonuses. The figures were posted on the day of President Obama's inauguration, when he declared: ‘Our economy is badly weakened, a consequence of greed...a nation cannot prosper long when it favours only the prosperous.'
Our company favours only the prosperous. Tobias could sack me on a whim. He can cut my commission, or change my accounts, my role and conditions without consent. I wondered how many people Tobias would sack once he had examined our business. How would he do it? I read that a Singapore company activated the building's fire-alarm bells. When the employees assembled in the car park, a security officer appeared and read a message: ‘Dear employees – with sincere regret I have been asked to announce that for many of you it will be your last evacuation drill. Due to the recession, the company is laying off almost half of its employees. So when this announcement finishes, I ask all of you to move back into the building and if your building pass does not work then it means you have been laid off, in which case you will not be allowed inside. Hope you have had a rewarding career with us and all the best ahead. Please move back in and try your luck.'
Later I read the story was a hoax, or that the event occurred in Houston in 1994, when an oil company downsized. Regardless of veracity, it made me nervous.
Tobias commenced the one-on-one interviews early on Friday morning. When I'm nervous I eat doughnuts and listen to music, large headphones jammed on my ears and a sign attached to the back of my chair: ‘Please Do Not Disturb.' I cannot hear the talk of sackings or alarm bells as I savour my sugary deep-fried dough.
A workmate taps my shoulder, startling me.
‘You're next in with Tobias, but not until Monday morning. Make sure you take your account plans.'
‘You still got a job?' I ask, smiling.
‘Maybe. Make sure you enjoy the weekend.'
I DON'T WANT TO THINK about Monday morning. I'm taking my family away from Canberra, away from the recession and fear of failure. We drive to Dubbo for the weekend. On the northern side of Yass the land turns from Canberra brown to fertile green. We pass fields of canola spread across the countryside like lemon butter, and scattered mobs of sheep and alpacas grazing, unmindful of human things.
There are only a few cars on the road. We overtake a truck stuffed with cattle and a tractor towing bails of hay; we pass tired-looking old men towing caravans and a Greyhound bus crammed with Chinese tourists who wave and photograph us.
The country town of Burrowa is overflowing with people, ewes and wethers. The annual ‘running of the sheep' is finishing and we stop to gawk at the remnants of the spectacle. I wander along the swarming street and for just a few dollars I buy a huge jar of homemade marmalade from the Country Women's Association.
We eat a late lunch at the Japanese memorial gardens in Cowra, where we explore the traditionally styled Japanese house with its sunken bath and impossibly small bed. None of us contemplates too deeply the reason the gardens exist, but take pleasure in their meditative beauty and enjoy feeding the koi.
My daughter buys a postcard to send to her Japanese penfriend. I glance at a newspaper. The recession has faded from the front page, replaced by news that North Korea has fired a missile across Japan's bows and America has deployed a squadron of F-22 fighters to Okinawa – just in case. Curiously, the jobs-vacant section remains thick.
Late in the afternoon we arrive at the Dubbo Western Plains Zoo and set up camp. We meet our polite uniformed guides and drink tea as a furious storm erupts. We walk through the zoo that night in torrential rain, our squelching pathway lit by lightning and the guides' spotlights. I smell the rancid stink of the Galápagos tortoise before I see her massive, rain-sodden bulk. She is a hundred years old and may yet outlive me, although her kind may not see another century. She has already lived through two world wars, the Great Depression, the Spanish flu pandemic, and the rise and fall of thousands of tides.