Work opportunity in Australia
Welcome to our article number 5: Work opportunities
in Australia
When I came to Australia I ended up working in the building industry building houses and other buildings, working on building sites is hard work and usually is not a permanent job, because when one building is finished you don't know if your employer has been able to find another job to do, so your job is never secure, but if you want to work usually you will be able to find another job pretty soon. anyhow that is the way it was then and perhaps even know, if you are working in the building industry.
Compare work opportunity in Australia
Compare work opportunity in Australia
Dear readers, in this article we are asking
if Australia is still the land of opportunities. As you may know when you start
asking this sort of questions other questions arise, this is only natural
because we need to compare the present with the past.
So, let us start by telling you the
opportunities that we had in the past when I came to Australia, So that, we
would be able to compare the opportunities of the past to today opportunities
in Australia, and how those opportunities played a part in the lives of those
people that migrated to Australia then. Today it might be slightly different,
but I suppose that every one of us whether we are migrant are have been born
here have a story to tell, and we are pretty sure that everyone have a
different story and different views of the past, according to our experiences
and work that we did; but let me tell you my personal story, so that you could
see my experience the same way as I have seen it and then compare it to today’s
opportunities.
If I were to use only my personal experience
in Australia as a standard, we will have to say that Australia opportunities today
are not as good as they used to be, because things have changed a lot since I
came to Australia. Now if we would like to compare the fewer opportunities that
are still available today, with what used to be available in the sixties I am
going to write the opportunities of the sixties in my life story right here,
just the way I have lived and seen them happen to me personally and to the
other people that came to Australia in the early sixties, as well as the
Australian people that were born here, and then, my life story opportunities
could be compared with what is available today; but first of all let us start
with what the majority of people in the world think about Australia today.
Today, everybody in the whole wide world
thinks that Australia is still the land of opportunities, and that is the
reason why people are still trying hard to migrate to Australia; but, are all
those opportunities there still one may ask? Or is it just a myth now and the
opportunities that existed in the past do not exist any longer, or they are a
lot less than they used to be especially for those unskilled people that are
coming to Australia these days.
Having been a migrant myself a long time ago
in the early sixties, and being in a way lucky to find some relative that
helped me to settle here in Australia, I know that migrating to another country
is not an easy thing to do specially if there is no one waiting for you and
help you when you arrive, and it is even harder if you don’t speak the language
of the country you are migrating to, but today there is a great movement of
people throughout the world that migrate from one country to another, and a lot
of people want to come to Australia one way or another, they even risk their
lives during their journey, boarding unseaworthy boats that might just break up
and disintegrate in the ocean.
Therefore, when I hear or see people
migrating today like desperados that want to reach Australia at all cost, I
always go back mentally to the times when I legally migrated myself and think
what I could and would have done if there had been no one to help me when I
arrived in Australia; here I should say that just thinking about it makes me
shudder, so, to see these people these days trying to come by boat illegally
and knowing that they may not
be welcome here make me
wonder how desperate they are to try to migrate at all cost; they must be
really desperate to try to migrate this way.
But then, there is also this other reason,
because of the television and the computer people compare their own standard of
living in their countries with what they see on TV. Or say public programs on
the computer like Face-book and others programs, and they compare what they see
with way they do in their own country, so they believe that they would be
better off if they would be able to come to Australia, because everybody seems
to think that Australia is the land of opportunities.
Looking at what is happening these days we
know that the world has got a real problem with people migrating to other
countries like Australia, as we all know, here in Australia we are very upset
about those people coming in by boats, and we would like to stop them and even
send them back where they came from. Now, here I need to say that in Europe is
even worse with people coming in from North Africa every day, they are so many
that is hard to count them and we might have a guess and say that the same
amount of people that migrate illegally to Australia in a year may migrate to
Europe in a week or even less than that. But anyhow here we are not going to
talk that much about illegal migrants, because we want to talk about if
Australia is still the land of opportunities.
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But, is Australia still the land
of opportunity?
In this case we have to ask; is Australia
still the land of opportunities today?
As I have already said above, if I have to
use my own personal experience as a standard, then I have to say that today in Australia
work opportunities are not
as good as they used to be. But then not everything is or might be as it seems
to me, because my judgment is that of a single person and therefore I might be
wrong.
Anyhow let us try to see what has changed
since I came to Australia in the sixties. There are many things that have
changed since then, because of the progress humanity has made and continues to
make even today; therefore working opportunities have also changed a lot, so
today it is a lot harder to find a manual job; this is due to the fact that
today we do not need as many hands to do a job as we used to on the past,
because a lot of the hard labour is being done from machines, therefore people
that have no skills and rely only on their physical strength are not in high
demand, for this reason there are a lot less jobs available for these people,
but if people have a trade or have studied there may well be opportunities for
them.
Now that we have explained how we see today
working opportunities the, allow me to go back to the days when I came to
Australia, so that I could tell you what sort of opportunities existed then,
and after that we might be able to compare with what opportunities are available
today.
In order to understand what we are going to
say next, it is important also to know that economies and for that matter
opportunities for jobs have high and lows of their own, therefore this effects
everybody around that are looking for work.
Now if you do not mind let me tell you my own
experience when I came to Australia, because this is probably the only way that
we might be able to compare the work opportunity situation, while at the same
time, I would be telling you my life story that could also be used to compare
with today ways of living.
There have been times in Australia when
everybody had a job, so there was no unemployment at all, from stories that I
have been told from people that were already here when I came, there have been
times that the employers had not enough employees and they would go down to the
wharfs when the ships arrived and select a few people that seemed good enough
for them to do their jobs, therefore, in those days there were no unemployed
people, but unfortunately those times are rare and did not last long, as I said
working opportunities go up and down.
Now to compare those times with today’s’
opportunities, we are going to describe to you hereunder part of my own life
story, and therefore, what I found easy or hard to cope with when I came here,
and then how I was able to cope with the hardship of those times and the way
that those things became solved, as this is the only
way that I know how to measure,
whether Australia is still the land of opportunities, so let us see what sorts
of opportunities were available then.
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What sort of opportunities were
available in Australia
What sort of opportunities were available in
Australia in the sixties
When I arrived in Australia in March 1961 my
relative and friends were all working, at the same time they were telling me
that there were not many job vacancies readily available, so, I had to be
patient until a job would be available. But what sort of work I could do they
were not sure just we had to wait and see, what I knew about working for other
people was that if a job was offered to me I had to work hard, since in my
country when we hired some workers to do some work in our family farm, we would
aspect them to work hard so that they would earn their pay, therefore I was in
my right frame of mind to go out and work hard, whatever job was offered would
do me just fine. I have said this, because it is necessary to understand that
whoever attempts to migrate to another country, he/she must be ready to work
hard if they want to succeed, and it all boils down to this that you need to do
a fair work day for fair daily pay.
Beside my willingness to work I was also
young and fit enough to do any manual job that I was offered, the only problem
was that I didn't speak English, I had learned perhaps a few words on the way
to Australia while we were sailing, as there was an English teacher on the ship
for that purpose. But as we all know English is a very hard language to learn,
especially if one comes from a country that their language is phonetic and once
you know some rules, one can read from a book and somehow come close to the
sound that those written words are pronounced, but English is not written
phonetically so to learn English one must be exposed to the English speaking
people and slowly learn from them, so as you can see I and other emigrant like
me had a lot to learn, before we could speak English well enough to look after
ourselves and to fit in the Australian speaking community.
Anyhow, now let us tell you that although I
had very little English somehow everything turned out all right in the end,
perhaps this is another reason why people think that Australia is still the
land of opportunities, we think it is based on the assumption that because
people before us have been able to succeed, we will be able to succeed as
well.
For me when I came to Australia I was still
thinking the Italian ways, so, I was thinking that I was on my own and I had to
find my own way around, but here I had a pleasant surprise when for the first
time some relative took me to see the unemployment office.
In Italy when you go to an Italian office if
you want something done quickly you need to know somebody in there, otherwise
before your turn comes the office hours are over and you have to come back the
day after, so I was wondering how could we succeed in these Australian offices,
since I didn’t speak English and my friend was just a little bit better than
me.
Anyhow we waited our turn and soon we were
being interviewed from this middle aged man that seemed to have so much
patience and understanding of the whole situation, he slowly worked out what we
wanted by asking and repeating what we did not understand, and he noted
everything down as he asked me many things to see what sort of job I would be
able to do, I remember even now that one of his questions was if I were afraid
of heights and I said no as I was going up some tall trees to prune them, he
also asked if I knew anything about building or building maintenance, here
again I said yes as we sometimes would repair some farm building. I believe
that these two things gave me the first job in the building industry, as I was
called one day to go to work for the
first time in Australia. My first job was on a chimney stack in the
brickworks where bricks are made, which somehow I managed to hold for a couple
of weeks, until a bigger gang came and I became a bit confused in the middle of
all those people, and I lost my first job for lack of knowledge or lack of
understanding English. But anyhow I had my first work experience and I was sure
that soon there was going to be another one.
Before I close this page and start another
one, I really want to say that Australia is/was a great country to be in, just
because people are given their opportunities as they deserve, as long as they
are willing to work hard for what they deserve.
And in the unemployment offices the officers
are just great people to deal with, or at least they were when I came to
Australia. I am going to continue this article and talk about how I ended up
working in the Australian building industry for good.
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Australia building industry
Working in the Australian building industry
As I have said above my first job in
Australia was in the building industry, because I ended up to work as a
bricklayer’s labour, but I lost that job for a couple of reasons. I believe
that I lost the first job, because I didn’t know much English and at the same
time I had no much experience in the sort of work we were doing, and for that
reason I could not guess what they wanted me to do next. After that I had
another job which ended very much the same way; but then one day suddenly a
small Italian builder needed a labour and he knew that I could be available, so
he came to fetch me and asked if I would be interested to work for him, and
this is how I ended up to work in the building industry, I worked for this
builder for about two years, but then he went on holiday to Italy for a long
time, therefore he temporary closed down the business, but by then the Italian
building community new about me, so, in a few days I had another job to go to,
always in the building industry with another builder or contractors working as
a bricklayer labour.
You see in those times there was a lot more
work for people wanting to work, but at the same time we knew that we had to
work hard because there was a lot of competition going on even in those days,
so what could we say if we work hard for it, we would always find somebody that
would give us work, because we earned our wage plus a bit more for the
employer. This is how I understood about the ways of earning your living in
this capitalist society, which is based on competition and you are paid with
what you deliver. Now, we have to say that this capitalist way is very good, as
long as the workers are not pushed beyond their physical capacity, because when
they are asked to do more than what is possible for them to do, a lot of
troubles and injustice are happening, so everything needs to be fine-tuned, so
to speak. But let us compare those times with our times.
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Compare the old ways with the new
Here we would like to compare the
opportunities that we had when we came in Australia in the sixties as legal
migrant, to the opportunities of today with all these illegal migrants that
arrive by boat and other illegal ways, so let compare the old ways of migrating
with the new ways.
So, let us compare the way that I and most
other emigrants around the sixties, with what is happening today illegal
emigration, so that we might be able to spot some of the reasons why things
don’t seem to work as good as they used to work.
When I and the other emigrants that came to
Australia wanted to come to Australia during the sixties we had to be screened
before we could have a visa that would allow us to come to Australia and work
here.
This screening was somehow strict, as they
did not want anybody that could become sick easily, so we had to go through a
medical check, and there was another even stricter check about being legally of
good character, even if you had ever had trouble with the police, in fact they
were so strict about this that if one had been somehow involved with the
communist party, just by saying that he would vote for the communist he would
not be allowed to come to Australia.
Now I hope that I have explained how strict
they were then, but I believe that this was a good thing then, because as I
have already said when I went to the unemployment office even though I did not
speak much English they did everything possible to find us a job, and if they
could not find us a job they would pay us the unemployment benefit.
Just anyone
that has come to Australia and has
seen Australia the same way that I have seen it, they know that Australia is a
great country to live in; and if there is somebody that does not like
Australia, it must be because they have their own personal problems and they
are home sick, or they are just unwilling to work hard.
Today Australia does not seem to be as good
as it was when I came to Australia, because before anyone that could see
Australia the way I saw it would fall in love with the Australian ways of
living; but we have to say that we are still very well off compared to other
countries. So, we would like to conclude this hub by saying that Australia
could be still the land of opportunities, if the people that come here come
with the intention of working hard as we have been working in the past, they
should not come with the intention of ripping us off, just because they would
like to have an easy life for themselves.
Anyhow this hub is becoming too long, so see
you next time with another hub called; Australian building industry, where we
will be continuing telling you my life story and what I have done in Australia
to earn a living. See you there.
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