NSW: Unions and community rally to save Batlow

AAP General News (Australia)
04-19-2000
NSW: Unions and community rally to save Batlow

By Natalie Davison, Industrial Reporter

SYDNEY, April 19 AAP - The battlers of Batlow are no longer saying "she'll be apples".

The local community of the tiny town near the New South Wales-Victorian border is instead
pleading for help to stay alive.

The Australian Manufacturing Workers Union (AMWU) said employees at the town's remaining
lifeline, the local cannery, had petitioned the union to come to Batlow and help find
ways of injecting business into the area.

Union spokesman Phil Morgans said Batlow had always been a union town and the locals
were now calling on the union to help them.

"It's your classic country town story where the population has dropped by 50 per cent
over the last 10 to 15 years, bank branches have closed, the hospital has been downgraded,
the school's lost its technology high school status," he said.

"It's always been a union town with the cannery and with Batlow apples and I think
it's with a sense of frustration that the locals came to union and said: 'Can you help
get some stakeholders in to the town?'"

The union is tomorrow holding a meeting in Batlow, with union officials, politicians
and local businesses to try and revitalise the town.

AMWU food and confectionary state secretary Jennifer Dowell said the town, with a population
of 950, believed the future of Batlow was grim.

"Job opportunities are reducing all the time," she said.

Ms Dowell said the local cannery, which produced Mountain Maid products, once employed
up to 100 people during peak times, but now only had only 40 employees left.

"The cannery has just sold out of its vegetable production, and that's been a big cut
in jobs, and it's struggling," she said.

"There is now only apple production at the cannery and people are concerned - they
don't believe it has a long term viable future."

She said the viability of the Batlow Fruit Co-op, the home of Batlow apples, was dependent
on the season.

"This meeting is just about getting ideas from people about ways they think we can
help to get some development, improve the infrastructure or whatever to encourage some
form of manufacturing to the Batlow area," she said.

"The people need some sort of future in the area because the locals feel everything
is going to keep reducing until there's nothing left."

AAP nd/sb/cjh

KEYWORD: BATLOW

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