Holden stopped making cars in Australia five years ago — what happened to the workers?

As Holden supercars take to the Bathurst 1000 start line for the final time, this October marks five years since the last locally made Commodore rolled off the production line.

It brought to an end mass car manufacturing in Australia, following Ford and Toyota’s exit over through 2016 and 2017.

New research shows former Holden employees have struggled to find secure work since the shutdown, amid calls for lessons to be learnt for other industry closures.

More than two dozen business are now operating on the site of the former plant in Adelaide’s north, with campers and batteries being built where cars were constructed for decades.

‘It never leaves me’

As a 16-year-old, Stewart Underwood started making cars at Holden — it was the beginning of a lifelong passion.

“It never leaves me and it never will,” Mr Underwood said.

“I made best friends for life — my best friend from 1969 is still my best friend today.”

He spent more than 40 years at the company he loved before it announced its Australian manufacturing plants in Melbourne and Adelaide would close.

“I thought, ‘what did I just hear?’ To me it was like Kennedy, John Lennon, Princess Di, all over again; ‘where were you when you heard the news?’,” he said.

“I was shocked.”

After announcing the closure plans in 2013, the final car came off the line in Adelaide on October 20, 2017.

A report for the federal government found 805 Holden workers in Adelaide lost their jobs that day and the shutdown came in the same month Toyota ceased production in Melbourne.

Flinders University academic Gemma Beale followed the journey of more than two-dozen Holden and supply chain workers for three years after the closure and found there was a roughly-even split of employment outcomes.

One-third of former employees retired, one-third struggled to find work and the remainder did find a new job, but it often involved insecure employment.

“A real problem of extended periods of insecure work is that we start to see it really negatively impact individuals, their families and communities,” Dr Beale said.

“In the cohort I followed, there were really high incidences of depression, and that ranged from maybe what you might call more moderate depression, to really quite serious cases of suicidal ideation.”

She said for many it was like grieving the loss of a second family.

“They really talked about their colleagues (as family), who had really heart-warming stories about shared meals and about working across cultural and language barriers,” Dr Beale said. 

“There was a really high proportion of first and second generation migrants in that industry.”

However Dr Beale said it was not all “doom and gloom” for the former Holden workforce.

“For some, the closure was a catalyst for them to approach a new job or a new industry they might otherwise never have engaged with,” she said.

“They loved it. They loved an opportunity to work with people instead of cars.”

The workers that never left

Paschal Somers migrated from Ireland in the 1990s and rose through the Holden ranks before the shutdown.

He is one of 11 former employees who never stopped working at the Elizabeth South plant in Adelaide’s northern suburbs.

Once production finished, the group was kept on to help transition the plant to new owners — Pelligra.

Mr Somers now manages the 122-hectare site which is being converted into a business park known as Lionsgate.

“We’ve got over 30 tenants in here at the moment, ranging from structural steel to battery manufacturing,” he said.

At the moment, there are about 1,000 people working on the site each day with a plan to grow that to more than 3,000 once more of the available land is built on.

“There’s lots of the Holden employees that come in and out. There’s a lot of them working here in the various businesses,” he said.

“There’s a lot of them coming through from the defence industry, for example, looking for space, looking for opportunity here.”

When asked what the fifth anniversary of the shutdown meant to him, Mr Somers said it was “good to see” the site alive.

“That’s what it means to me,” he said.

“It’s good to be playing a part of the journey of the site really, like many that have been here before.”

Lessons to learn

Dr Beale said lessons should be learnt from Holden’s closure as other Australian industries face major disruption and change, such as the move towards a low-carbon economy and increased automation.

“We need a really holistic support program that lasts for a fairly long time and provides individual catered support,” she said.

Dr Beale said many of the support programs offered by Holden and the government ended after a year, while the problems many former employees faced did not emerge until 18 to 24 months post-shutdown.

“It also tells us that transition programs are ultimately limited by what jobs are available,” she said.

“So we really need to be creating good, secure, ongoing work because if we don’t have that, then you can’t transition into it.”

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