The Joy of Capitalist "Peace" (1971)

From issue number 1 (1971) of The Western Socialist

A recent report on health and safety conditions facing workers in the U.S.A., published by a group of Black militant unionists who call themselves the League of Revolutionary Black Workers revealed the following shocking facts. The U. S. Labor Department has estimated that 75% of all workers suffer disabling injuries on the job sometime before retirement. Each year 15.000 workers lose their lives in industrial accidents. 1,700,000 workers suffer impaired or lost hearing due to excess noise levels in plants. More coal miners have accidentally died in the last 60 years than all the casualties in the Korean and Vietnam conflicts. In automobile stamping plants around Detroit an estimated 25% of the workers have lost fingers, arms, or other limbs due to accidents. In 1966 there were 13.2 disabling injuries per 1 million man-hours worked, 27,000 injuries daily, 6000 of these disabling, 250 permanently disabling and 55 deaths each day.

With 260 deaths attributed to civil disorders since 1965 the ruling class screams for law and order. With 225 deaths every week from industrial accidents the ruling class is strangely silent. With 24 million man-hours lost due to strikes in 1966 the capitalists screamed for anti-strike legislation. In the same year 255 million man-hours were lost due to accidents, but the capitalists lost their voices in the call for better industrial safety legislation.

For every worker who dies of industrial accident, it is estimated that 50 die from heart attacks on the job. Industrial diseases take a tremendous toll among workers. Black lung disease, silocosis, pneumonsoniosis, all 20-year lung aliments, have killed millions in the mines and foundries of America. In Pennsylvania alone 2000 workers die each year of black lung. Most workers in Detroit auto foundries have silocosis after 5 years exposure to the dust-ridden foundry air. Metal miners contract bladder cancer from long exposure to radioactive dust. Many workers are subjected to intense toxic fumes from chemicals used in metal plating and processing; sulphuric acid, nitric acid, sulphur dioxide, carbon monoxide, dyes and chemicals causing bladder cancer, ozone from heat welding, dirt and oil in the air are all entering and destroying the bodies and internal organs of healthy workers.

Those workers who miraculously escape physical damage suffer nervous tensions, mental illness up to psychosis, extreme fatigue from speedup, anxiety over job security. The character of factory work, its strenuous nature, the unending repetition, the immense boredom, the noise, the nagging foreman, all lead to total alienation of the worker from his or her environment. Alcoholism and drug addiction often are the escape routes used to flee the living hell of industrial production.

In response to these conditions. all-Black unions such as DRUM (Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement), ELRUM (Eldon Avenue Assembly Plant), FRUM (Ford), and the League of Revolutionary Black Workers have been organized to combat white racism in the trade and industrial unions and to get safety and health legislation for the protection of workers. But these “revolutionary" unions are bound to fall because they are organized on a minority racial instead of a majority class basis. To create healthful, safe and exploitationless working conditions workers of every color must unite politically in an independent, working class socialist party (World Socialist Party), capture the governmental powers now in the hands of the capitalist ruling class, and thereby transform the means of wealth production and distribution into the common property of society with democratic control of the industries by the workers themselves.

Carl M. Vrooman