LEJOG Day 89: Golspie to Helmsdale

Weather: Cloudy with fresh northerly and the threat of rain

Distance covered today: 29.4km (18.3mi)

Last night's B&B: Blah Mhor (£30)

Cumulative distance: 1848.7km (1148.7mi)/ % Complete: 95.6%

GPS satellite track of today's route: Day 89 (click!)

Today proved to be quite demanding. I knew from the start that it was a long leg, but there was a stiff head-wind and my early efforts at avoiding the A9 by making use of a coastal path, while visually very satisfying, just added to the distance I had to cover. I had also anticipated that today’s leg would be reasonably flat as it was more or less all along the coast, but in fact the A9 kept going up and down to avoid coastal obstacles.

The fact that I am getting close to the end is also having a psychological effect. I’m feeling quite exhausted and I can’t find a single part of my body that isn’t hurting!  This is probably mostly imaginary, and the aches and pains will disappear as soon as John O’Groats comes into view, but I am concerned that the next couple of days will be more difficult than I had anticipated.  One good thing is that the A9 is already a little less busy than it was, so staying alive is getting progressively easier!

Last evening in Golspie, while talking to Veronica on the phone, I couldn’t help noticing the huge statue on a hill above the village, apparently the largest statue of a man in the UK. It turns out that this is a statue of Lord Sutherland, the man responsible for the Highland Clearances in this part of Scotland. A charitable view says that he moved people to the coast because he realised they couldn’t make a living in their tiny farms in the Highlands and they would be better off in the more productive farmland at the coast. The commonly held view though is that he simply wanted their land for his own huge sheep farms and for hunting, and the people were in the way.  In which case, I find it completely amazing that the statue wasn’t torn down years ago!  Thinking of the attitudes of minorities in power and their high-handed approach to ordinary people immediately led me to think yet again of my South African experience, and in particular, of a harrowing set of events that took place in the late 1980s, a few years before the momentous changes in that country.
 
I had been tasked to manage a “re-refinery” which cleaned and refined used lubricants, and produced some very innovative and sophisticated products based on the re-refined base oil. My company had bought the business from an entrepreneur who had found an effective niche in the market and was competing successfully with much larger competitors such as ourselves.

By any standards, the situation was extraordinary. The entrepreneur, in typical fashion, had lived in a small house right inside the factory walls.  The business was located in Boksburg near Johannesburg in South Africa. As the business prospered, so the entrepreneur had embellished his residence with some of the trappings of conspicuous wealth, such as external guest suites, gold-plated taps, vast multi-rosed showers, a swimming pool the size of a small lake; all within the huge security walls that guarded the factory, as if inside some mediaeval castle.  This was where Veronica and I were to live with our two very small daughters, right in the middle of an industrial suburb that surrounded the factory.
 
It was a time of seething unrest in South Africa, and conservative places like Boksburg were at the epicentre of the struggle.  The black workers in the factory were under great pressure both from their unions and from the liberation movements to withdraw their labour, because the widespread belief was that the apartheid regime would fall under sustained economic pressure.

Of course, I was trying to make a profit. My problem was that at the time, the price of oil was steadily declining after the heady price-rises of the seventies and early eighties. This meant that our competitive advantage, the comparatively low cost of our re-refined oil, was being eroded and the profitability of the business was on a knife edge. It had reached the point where it would have been just as cheap for us to use crude oil derived base oil to make our products, rather than the re-refined oil that we produced in the factory.  I was though all too aware that the majority of the workforce, more than 200 workers, was employed in the re-refinery, and most of their jobs were therefore in jeopardy.  I was convinced that the price of oil would soon start rising again, and that if only we could tough it out, we were in a future-proof business. We also had vital skills that would have been permanently lost if we had closed the plant.  However, the shareholder was demanding an early and reasonable return on investment.

The unions were very much aware of the situation and were constantly trying to persuade the workers to go on strike to increase pressure on the company.  Meeting after meeting was held with worker’s representatives explaining that a strike would be the last straw. The pressure on me to close the re-refinery would be overwhelming. A strike would be industrial suicide for the staff.

I was away on holiday when I got the news that a strike had been declared.  I rushed back and we managed to persuade the workers to think again, but the pressure on them from the unions steadily increased.  In the end, the issue was clearly political and not a matter of industrial relations. The shareholder couldn’t understand my attitude. If anything, they felt that a strike would present an excuse to close the re-refinery without consequence. Why not use it?  I found myself in a most unusual situation where a small committee of workers representatives and my own small management team were completely in agreement about the right way forward. But all the external pressure, whether from the unions or the shareholders, was to do the thing that would cause the most pain for the workers themselves and which would destroy forever a “green” business that was conserving resources.

Ultimately, the pressure became too great and all the workers agreed formally to go on strike. I could no longer resist without resigning. I took the decision to close the re-refinery and informed the workers of my decision that as they went on strike, so their employment would end. Even then, we hoped they would come to their senses when they realised that there would be no pay-out, no social security, nothing; just unemployment and extreme poverty for themselves, their families and all their extended families. We decided to use office staff to keep the blending plant operating where the final products were manufactured, to keep supplying our customers while hoping against hope that sanity would return.

Veronica took charge of the blending plant. I was amused to see her start ordering the office staff around as if they were all married to her. In no time at all, as is so often the case in these extreme situations, a skeleton staff of less than a tenth of the usual crew were meeting the normal daily production targets and our customers were kept supplied. It became clear that we would soon run out of base oil and we steadily moved into using new crude oil-derived base oil instead. The fate of the re-refinery was sealed.  We wanted to make a statement that it was business as usual, especially to prevent our customers from leaving in droves.  I had made the decision that we would not move out of our home and despite the high security walls, we were extremely vulnerable. My judgement was that moving the family would have been interpreted as a sign of weakness. We would stay. To this day, I regret playing industrial politics with the safety of my family. In the end it worked out, but in retrospect it was not an acceptable decision.

The day the workers returned to receive their final wages, I insisted, against the advice of my management team, on going to the main entrance of the factory to say farewell to each of the workers as they left. Passions were aroused and the situation was potentially extremely violent. I didn’t know what to expect.  In the event, I offered my hand and every one of the dismissed workers shook it. I was highly emotional through the entire period. Right at the end, the dismissed re-refinery foreman came up to me, shook my hand in the African style and told me that the problem was bigger than all of us and that I should not hold myself responsible.  He was out of a job. I doubt he ever again got a job with anything like that level of responsibility. And yet he was big enough to be magnanimous to me at the point of his own personal despair.

In retrospect, it is hard to judge the rights and wrongs of that situation.  It is certainly true that economic pressure was the key factor in the peaceful change to democracy in South Africa.  The people who paid the price were the workers who lost their jobs as a result of that pressure. The winners were all those people who benefitted from the peaceful transition. In most cases they were not the same people.

I think that in these situations, everything is clear for the people on the extremes. For the people in the middle, the people in ordinary jobs doing everyday things, the situation is much less clear. The points of principle are confused and contradictory. The right course of action can be very difficult to determine. I often think of that when I hear news of Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Egypt.
 
Thank goodness I am no longer in those situations….

The statue of Lord Sutherland on the hill behind Golspie

A Westie in a window, objecting to my presence!

My alternative to the A9; this glorious grass path next to the sea

Dunrobin Castle from the sea-front

This lady was painting it in watercolours, rather skillfully

A bay on the coastal walk

The grass path continued along the coast...

And through these woods....

But only too soon, I was back on the dreaded A9

Ruins of the broch, Carn Liath, a well preserved prehistoric building, between 1,900 and 2,300 years old

A rather pleasant beach along the coast between Golspie and Helmsdale

Counting down the miles!

A bay near Helmsdale

The fishing village of Helmsdale. My B&B is among the houses on the left

I could just see oil production platforms and rigs on the horizon out in the North Sea