The communication failure I’ll never forget.

The livestock trucks arrived under the cover of night, but the stench of slaughter lingered long after I arrived at the office each morning.

The pigs became bacon for cafés, Cheese Kranskys for lunch bars, and hams and salamis for Coles and Woolies. I was working at Watsonia in Spearwood, an end-to-end smallgoods manufacturing site. The day the colour technician got me to choose the exact shade of pink of a new polony was, sadly, a rare highlight.

Second- and third-generation migrant workers were part of staff, with most living in the nearby streets. When someone in the community passed away, we had to discuss it in our weekly production meetings because so many workers would be attending the funeral, the schedule was out.

Watsonia, along with a few other small brands, had been folded into George Weston Foods, itself a subsidiary of Associated British Foods (ABF). One week, it was announced that there would be a visit from a couple of suits flying in from Heathrow. Site guests from the parent company were so rare so we trotted down to the factory floor to hear the speeches.

The two men from London stood stiffly at the front, microphones set up, addressing a couple of hundred workers in white dustcoats and caps. They rattled off the portfolio of brands in the Group, bragged about the size of their segment share, and reminded us all how, at under 4%, margins were tight and not a scrap was wasted.

I’m not sure whether it was the butchery around me, the treeless grey concrete, or the emotional wasteland that my marriage had become, but I remember it as one of the most joyless chapters of my life.

And one of the worst communication failures I’ve seen in my career.

Donna Lamont