From the archive: two documents from a binder that spent this week being sorted - Reading, England, 1988, and South Brisbane, 2001.
There is a photograph on this site of David Mulongoti, standing in a workshop in Zambia, captioned with four words: everyone starts somewhere. This week, sorting through old records, we found where we started.
June 1988. The City & Guilds of London Institute - the Advanced Craft Certificate in Construction Services Welding, awarded to Dennis Henry Hickman, who attended Reading College of Technology. An adult apprentice in oil and gas, with some hard life experience already behind him, who treated the trade like it mattered. Because it did.
Thirty-eight years later, that certificate is why the technical interviews on this site work the way they do. You can only sit across from a tradesperson, in their country, and truly weigh what they know if you served your own time first. Know the work, know the environment, know the worker - the discipline was learned with a welding set decades before it became a sentence in a brochure.
The second document explains something else. October 2001: the CEPU Plumbing Division, Queensland Branch, writing to thank Dennis for his service on the union’s Committee of Management - with a special mention for “doing the Journal and Web site. You did a really good job.” The union misspelled his first name in the salutation - Dear Denis - which somehow makes it better.
Read that letter next to this site’s oldest promise - workers pay no recruitment fees or costs, not ever - and the promise stops looking like a policy. It is where he came from. A union man became a recruiter, and the recruiter kept the union man’s rules. As for the Journal and the Web site: he has, it turns out, been publishing for workers for twenty-five years. You are reading the current edition.
The first company followed on April Fools’ Day, 2000. The rest of that story lives on Our People, and both documents now sit on Dennis’s profile, where records like these belong.
A welding certificate from 1988.
A thank-you letter from a union.
Everyone starts somewhere.