Edit: my previous post may have crossed with yours - I hadn't seen yours when I posted mine.
I did have a guided tour through the Pt Kembla works many, many years ago, but I didn't see the machine shops. You and I have slightly different definitions - I think yours is based on a business focused on in-house work, while mine is based on commercial factories that included a jobbing shop for outside customers. I also think BHP/AIS had a union agreement that provided some rather specific conditions concerning jobs being assigned rigidly to trade classifications, provision of tradesmen's assistants, and other things that were pretty much unheard of in commercial shops. In other words I'm not disputing the accuracy of what you have said, but the only plants in Australia that I have personally visited that had those highly prescriptive union agreements, aside from government operations and government-influenced operations such as defence contractors or factories receiving government assistance, were BHP and oil refineries, both of which had fairly highly contentious industrial climates in those days.
Of course all of that is the way I see things, as a Victorian who has been exposed primarily to places that were trying to sell their manufactured goods and services directly to outside customers at arms-length. I have met many people whose backgrounds were different, and consequently so were their experiences.
Last edited by grumpy; 09/01/14 07:32 PM. Reason: Add detail, & delete irrelevancies
