Most nights, the Northern Ireland News on television has something to say about employment. If the news is good, if new jobs have been “created", the accompanying picture usually includes a group of people, sometimes with the Minister himself present. These are not the people for whom work has been created, of course; these are people drinking champagne because. the voice-over tells us, they have arranged for other people to work. The exercise is called “job creation".
But this “job creation" is a funny business. When the capitalists who have come to Northern Ireland to make a profit are being entertained by the Minister and an army of job creators, when the corks are popping and the actual number of millions of pounds being contributed by the government (to enable the new entrepreneurs to get going in a rent-free factory) is being announced, everybody present is happy. Well, two or three hundred jobs, in an area where there might be 60 or 70 percent of the local population unemployed, will be widely regarded as a joyful occasion.
Of course, the two or three hundred jobs will not be created overnight. Oh no, no. You see job creation doesn't work like that.The two or three hundred jobs are for the future . . . say in five years time. The Minister knows that, and so do the job creators. But there will, maybe, be twenty or thirty jobs immediately—if they can get people to come off the dole to work for that sort of money.
The reverse of this job creation business takes place too. If the economic climate is not too bad, we can have job creation and the redundancies and sackings on alternate nights—which is good for the television company's Industrial Correspondent. Unfortunately, the one doesn't balance the other; which probably explains why, despite all the job creation, the skillfully-adjusted unemployment figures continue to increase and are now a province-wide 20 percent.
Job losses
The other night the busy Industrial Correspondent told us that a local firm, in an area of chronic unemployment, was “getting rid" of 260 workers and that most of the remaining 300-odd workers would be going on to a three-day week.
The company, James Mackie and Sons Ltd. used to employ 9.000 in its hey-day. Its textile machinery was exported throughout the world. But the world has changed; the place of the intricate machinery and the highly-skilled craftsmen who produced this machinery has been taken by electronic chips and. somewhere else, in a contracting market, there are workers who take even less than the low pay paid by Mackie’s in Belfast.
It was a family business. But the family is OK. The millions they got from the American company which took over the firm a few years ago will be working for them and saving them the inconvenience of having to work for themselves. The workers whose labour created that for which the American company paid millions . . . well, they're just redundant.
When the take-over was announced a couple of years ago. there were about 900 in the Mackies' employ. The new owners entered negotiations with the unions; 300 jobs would have to go in order to secure the jobs of the remaining 600.
Nothing very unusual in the story, even if we mention that the Minister and the job creators were also deeply involved doing their best for the new owners. Nothing unusual, indeed. Men and women walking out through the heavy iron gates for the last time. Men and women, thirty years, forty years, fifty years and without hope or promise for the future.
In a sane society it would be a good story. A story showing us how progress had made it unnecessary for working men and women to go into what is still a dark. Satanic mill. A story depicting how. away from the priorities of the market and the profit system, human beings could use science to emancipate themselves from drudgery and dangerous tasks. Unfortunately we are not living in a sane society, and the thing that these workers feared more than their slavery was the poverty that would accompany their emancipation from drudgery.
A reporter spoke to five workers. All complained that the media had learnt about the sackings before they had. All complained that the Company had failed to advise the unions. All expressed their fears for the future. And all ended their comments by making the same point, each in a different way but covered in a short sentence: "there's nothing we could do".
Paradox
Of course, it is the people and the institutions of capitalism, who tell us that we live in a democracy, where we, the people, are the source of all power, who also manage to promote the notion that there is nothing we can do. It's a formula for all situations: there is nothing we can do about poverty; about war and violence; about slums. In a word, about capitalism.
It is the working class which not only produces the goods and services required by people in capitalism but also carries out all the utterly wasteful administrative and other functions made necessary only by the casino economics of capitalism itself. Yet we have this paradox of a class which runs society from top to bottom within a system where its majority status should give it political and, thus, ultimately, economic control, accepting the tyranny of democratic powerlessness.
The paradox is explained by the political success of capitalism's institutions: its educational system, its class system, its political system and its control over the means of communication. These are the means by which we are conditioned to accept the idea that there are those intended to be leaders, those entitled to position, to wealth and privilege, and those who, if they display the required aptitudes, will be allowed to work for a wage or salary. Properly processed through this machinery of acceptance, most workers—and, ironically, especially those who boast that they live in a free and democratic country—will accept the idea that "there is nothing we can do".
The belief that we, the working class, are powerless to change society in our interests is a fundamental bulwark of capitalism's wage-slavery. The more skilful of capitalism's defenders are conscious that there is nothing that can be said in favour of an economic system which, through a complex process primarily intended to enrich a minority, creates such terrible problems for the great majority in our world. Such apologists, rather than attempting to defend the indefensible, concentrate on attacking those who offer an alternative form of social organisation. Essential to their apologia is the promotion of the idea that the working class is incapable of changing society.
If it was true, it would be the epitaph of freedom.
Richard Montague
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