'Australia can help the neighbourhood'

My housemate Andreana has an opinion piece in today's Age, about Australia's new scheme to allow 'unskilled' workers from the Pacific to come and work here:

The Government has announced this initiative after extensive lobbying by the National Farmers Federation — the scheme will tackle critical agricultural labour shortages by allowing Pacific islanders to work temporarily in Australian horticulture. Through the remittances that will be sent home to Pacific communities, this scheme also has the potential to help lift households out of poverty.

Read the full article here.

Recycling at work

A couple of months back Steve Said wrote on Advoc8 asking people about what they do for work and why. I mentioned that one of the things I do is clean offices:

I don’t know much about the companies whose offices I clean, but I don’t think I agree with some of the stuff some of them do. But my job is just cleaning, and I don’t have any problem with doing cleaning. However, I am bothered by the fact that when I take the rubbish out I have to chuck everything out, even stuff that’s recyclable, because they don’t have any recycling bins, and I can’t really talk to them about it because I don’t have any way of communicating with them.

I’ve been thinking a bit recently about how we’re often willing to do things for a company that go against our own personal ethics. (They look at that a bit in The Corporation.) Today I decided that I’d leave a note at the main office that I clean, who chuck out an awful lot of paper, saying that it could be recycled. I also left the number for the recycling company that picks up our paper.
I don’t know if they’ll decide to get the paper recyled, or just ignore what I wrote. (When they leave notes for me they’re usually pretty rude, and when there are people working there while I’m cleaning they often ignore me if I say anything to them, and I assume that’s because I’m just a cleaner.)

Laneway lunches

We've started having cooking meals on Fridays that are really easy to cook, so that we can spend more of the day doing stuff as a community, rather than just cooking and cleaning up.

Yesterday we had hamburgers (except me and Ray had tofu burgers). Damo got there late because he'd had class, and there was only one piece of bread left, so he had a piece of bread between two burgers, instead of the other way 'round.

Yesterday we spent most of the day doing maintenance and improvement work in Credo - basically working together to look after Credo so that Credo can keep looking after us. We could get professionals to come in and do everything, but we believe that it's good us to do it ourselves, and know that we've done some good work together.
We got a lot of cleaning done, put up some rails for drying teatowels, and took the door off the pantry so that it's easier to get in and out of. I spent most of the day painting the flu.

Working at Green Collect

Yesterday I worked at Green Collect for the first time. Green Collect is a recycling company that shares part of the church building with us, and where a number of people who come to lunch at Credo work. Started off getting cork, aluminium and steel that had been sorted out of the store room, and loading it into the metal onto the trailer to be taken to be recycled. Someone going to come to us to pick up the cork. I also organised all the stuff that was still in the store room (mostly plastics), and then spent the rest of the day sorting different kinds of plastic and answering phone calls.
Don't know how regularly I'm going to be working at Green Collect yet, or what I'll normally be doing, so I'll still be doing my cleaning job out in the suburbs, at least for a while. I'm only getting about four and a half hours a week of cleaning now though, compared to about seven hours a week when I started at the end of 2005.

The crapness of public transport in the Outer East

Just gotten home from work. I actually finshed at 11:30pm, but because of the crapness of public transport in the Outer Eastern Suburbs, I couldn't get a train home (I missed the last one by a few minutes), and thus had to catch a bus to Burwood, where I caught a tram to Camberwell. From Camberwell I had to walk all the rest of the way home, through Hawthorn, Burnley, Richmond and East Melbourne. My feet are very sore, and I'm very tired, having been busy since 9am.
I normally work Saturdays, but I can't this weekend because I'm going to a wedding tomorrow, and I've also got to pack stuff for Sydney.

Credo retreat

Yesterday afternoon everyone left for Halls Gap, for the annual Credo Retreat. A lot of the people who are part of our lunch community don't get any other opportunities to get out of the city.
I couldn't go last night because I couldn't get out of work.

I'm going up in about half an hour with Brent, Mark, Robyn and Rachel.
Next week I'm on holidays, and will be down at Phillip Island, saying hello to the penguins for EcoPaul. So, until I get back:

Nauru House

I have a job now! At Sean's party my friend Jess said that her dad is always looking for more cleaners. So on Monday I called him up. He got back to me Tuesday night and asked if I could come in to Nauru House and work yesterday.

The Nauruan government build Nauru House as an investment when they realised that their superphosphate was going to run out.
The whole island of Nauru is made of superphosphate, which is baiscally fossilised bird crap, and is very good for making fertiliser. So for ages Nauru sold it's superphosphate to Australia, and was a really really rich country.
When the superphosphat started to run out they made heaps of investments in important cities, like Batmania. When Nauru House was built in the '70s it was Batmania's tallest building. And they bought 80 Collins Street and knocked it down, so they could say that Nauru House was at 80 Collins Street. It was octagonal, and there was a great big pillar of superphosphate out the front.
Nauru's economy got stuffed up in the '90s, and in recent years they're been asking Australia for a homeland, because their's will be underwater before long, due to global warming.

Anyway, yesterday I was at 80 Collins Street cleaning up one of the floors where all the interior walls had beed demolished. There's no work today, but there probably will be tomorrow. Once I start at Urban Seed I'll just be cleaning an office block in Syndal, on weekends.