← PreviousLooking for work in SydneyAs for me, I started work on 13 February, almost a month to the day after we arrived in Australia. Alarm at 5:15. 324 steps, 220 metres' walk. The 5:27 bus, Botany Road stop at 5:39. 500 metres' walk. At 5:45 I was at the entrance of Savino Del Bene, an import-export company trading between Italy and various countries around the world. Just in front of me, a man built like a wardrobe was walking at my pace in the same direction. Hearing my steps, he stopped and turned to ask if I was the new guy. That was me, and he took me to the warehouse, where I met Luigi, an Italian in his fifties with an accent you could cut with a knife.
He'd decided to rename me Stefano because my name was too hard for him to pronounce, and he quickly showed me what I'd be doing that week. This storage space the size of a football pitch received containers one after another, and we had to unload them. It was always a surprise when we opened them: if the goods were on pallets, you just unloaded them with the forklift, but if the boxes were stacked on top of each other, you were in for an hour of manual handling. My colleague was called Tarué, and during one of our chats I learned he came from Niue, an island near Samoa and Tonga, and had emigrated to earn a decent living.
Later, on our travels around the country, we'd discover that the small islands off Australia formed a formidable pool of precarious labour for the land of kangaroos. Between containers we were allowed to do nothing, and the three of us waited sitting and chatting. The days went by quite quickly and my one-week assignment came to an end. Luigi wasn't happy to let me go, but I was only covering for someone.
I'd applied for lots of jobs and been to several interviews at temp agencies. I got a call from my contact at Insync offering me a job. I wasn't in a position to negotiate and accepted without thinking twice. When she texted me the details, I saw that my new workplace was fifteen minutes' walk from home, with hours from 8:30 to 4:30: close to perfection. I'd earn 24.50 dollars an hour, which after tax came to $20.82 an hour, so $781 a week. Being paid that often was also a huge novelty for us.
Australia, like many English-speaking countries, paid weekly, and we found that extremely handy in our situation, as it let us see the fruits of our efforts very quickly. I turned up on Monday morning at 8:30 at the warehouse of Sunshades Eyewear, a sunglasses company. Shelly, a slightly tomboyish young woman in her twenties, showed me around and I worked with her all day. She handled all the incoming deliveries and knew a great deal about France.
In fact, she'd had the misfortune to be in Paris during the 13 November attacks and admitted she'd had the fright of her life that night. My job in this warehouse was really simple: I brought down pallets and filled the shelves so the order pickers never ran out of stock. In practice, it happened regularly, and they'd come and ask me to find the missing box with the forklift.
Cassandre, as we'd expected, was having a harder time. We'd noticed lots of ads for flyer distribution, a practice we'd forgotten existed. For lack of anything better and to tide us over, she called the number given and got an appointment fairly quickly. There was no interview, as the job was very basic. They dropped you off with a bag full of leaflets and you had to cover a defined area.
The managers were all Indian, and to say they didn't care about Australian law would be an understatement. They had employees come in at eight in the morning, but the organisation was so chaotic that nobody left before nine at the earliest, and then you still had to drive to sometimes very distant suburbs.
In practice, Cass never started her round before ten, and the two lost hours were of course unpaid. She had a GPS and was paid per map, a predefined zone of several neighbourhoods. She'd been told a map took about four hours, but that was naturally an underestimate, and she often finished after five long hours of walking under a leaden sun or in the driving rain Sydney does so well.
On top of the walking, there was the weight of the bag full of paper, around twelve kilos at the start. The luckiest had three different kinds of flyer in their bags and were better paid, but that privilege went to the old hands. Newcomers lugged a single type of leaflet around bigger maps.
This kind of job was pure and simple exploitation, of a kind we'd often see in Australia. Paid by output in dubious conditions, it was heartbreaking to see very elderly people forced to do it to make ends meet. Cass came home physically and mentally exhausted, but she didn't want to give up without another source of income. Fortunately, Choukri had given us a contact for a job at a DVD factory. I hadn't needed it, so Cassandre got in touch with Emer.
Luckily, she needed someone immediately, and Cass found herself working the next day at the Technicolor plant in Alexandria. The contract was casual on-call, meaning she was a temp and could be called in to work at any time. We quickly understood that Australia was an ultra-liberal country and that the job market would be very precarious for us.
My warehouse boss was called Joe and he quickly put me at ease. Happy with the quality of my work, he came to congratulate me on day two and bought me a coffee, which we drank in the break room. He explained that he never hired Australians because they were too lazy and often didn't turn up on sunny days. In conversation, I mentioned I'd come with my girlfriend, and he said that if she was looking for work too, he'd be happy to take her on. That didn't fall on deaf ears. When the run of the latest hit video game ended and work became scarce at the factory, I asked Joe if Cass could join us, and he gladly agreed to take her into the team. It was the perfect plan for us. No more odd hours, no more transport to pay for, and the same workplace. Cassandre earned slightly less than me, but between us we brought in 1,500 dollars a week and tried to put a thousand aside. At work we became friends with two Chilean women, Patricia and Valeria, which made everyday life even more pleasant.