The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) discovered a while back that homicide tops the list of occupational hazards causing job-related deaths among women in the U.S. “Violence is a contagious disease,” as H.G. Wells once said. On average, 158 female wage-slaves in the U.S. lose their lives each year serving the capitalist class. The CDC’s National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health division chalks up this phenomenon to women working in retail sector jobs and to a lack of safety precautions like better lighting, safer cash handling, bulletproof barricades and the like. Despite their medical expertise, they are being most unscientific in distinguishing symptoms from causes in this morbidity. Even Mahatma Gandhi had a better grasp of cause and effect, as we can see from his diagnosis: “Poverty is the worst form of violence.”
So long as we live in a society where one must buy life’s necessities, there will always be a desperate compulsion to acquire money by any means possible. Why are women in this dangerous position of confronting desperate robbers to begin with? The same reason. Like their killers, they too must make the acquisition of money a top priority to live in this capitalist set-up. For the ruling (capitalist) class will have it no other way. No reform or precaution will change this objective fact of competitive society. It can’t help but breed violence and death.
Dr. Catherine Bell, an epidemiologist with the CDC, alluded to the trends in the sexual division of labor as a contributing factor. She inadvertently indicted the conditions of labor in general as a systematic killer of the working class. “Part of it may be that women tend to be employed in places where the risk of homicide is elevated instead of places where they are likely to be electrocuted or crushed or killed in traffic accidents.”
Right to self-obliteration
Life’s little career trade-offs! You can risk being murdered at the cash register, or you can utilize your “right” to equal employment and increase your chances of being electrocuted, crushed or wiped out in a traffic accident! Only in a free (to exploit) society can such challenging choices of self-obliteration be put before us. The CDC report finds that most on-the-job fatalities involve male workers dying from the above-mentioned non-homicidal causes. Whether from a robber’s gun or a boss’s job requirement, the end result is the same.
Violence at the workplace is clearly a problem symptomatic of the class oppression of both sexes in general. It is the quest for profits that makes production (and work generally) a life-threatening activity. It is the artificially imposed poverty that compels the working class to run the gauntlet daily. Each day many are struck down. The hazardous conditions in which this takes place are only symptomatic of the disease, not the cause of it. The disease is capitalism.
Capitalism, with its parasitic ruling class that owns and controls the means and instruments of production: subjecting the overwhelming majority to inhuman conditions like violent competition, pay-as-you-go insecure housing, second-rate food, dangerous daily amounts of stress. The list of these symptoms could go on and on; capitalism creates countless avenues of misery for the human condition.
The cure for this ailment is socialism, and it begins with socialist consciousness. The administration of this cure includes you. Your clinic is the World Socialist movement. With enough house calls and mass innoculations, we can witness the eradication of this morbid scourge in our lifetimes!
W. J. Lawrimore
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