Children in labour (1988)

From the October 1988 issue of the Socialist Standard

The traditional view of child labour is summed up in a Low Pay Unit pamphlet:

"Child Labour" conjures up images of the pauper apprentices of Tudor times and the rag and dust sifters and mill children of the early industrial revolution. Its heyday was during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when industrialisation drew upon the labour of children in new and more wholesome ways than had been customary in the family economy of earlier years.

(Working Children 1985)

Newspaper reports in recent years however. suggest that child labour is neither a thing of the past nor confined to delivering newspapers, baby sitting or similar chores normally associated with children's work. "Scandal of pin money Pupils'' was the headline in the Daily Express on 12 December 1977; "Slave Labour ", screamed the Daily Mirror, 20 October 1982. In April 1973 The Times reported that three schoolboys, all aged thirteen, were employed in a factory operating highly dangerous, defective power presses for 17 pence an hour.

Child labour does of course have a long history. In an agrarian economy, where there was no distinction between employment in the home and other labour, men, women and children each had a task to perform tending crops and providing for everyday necessities. Children also played a role in industrial labour. The daughters and sons of artisans frequently helped in the manufacturing process or were apprenticed in the trade of their parents. Children of weavers had a staged career of tasks given to them according to their age and abilities, ranging from fetching and carrying to treading cotton, winding bobbins and spinning. Life for these children was hard and often involved long hours of work.

In the late sixteenth century children orphaned due to the death or poverty of their parents became the responsibility of the parish in which they lived. A system arose of apprenticing orphans to local craftsmen or placing them in special workshops to learn a trade. This was administered by local justices whose main concern was to rid the parish of any unwanted burden. The treatment of orphans varied from employer to employer but cases of cruelty and sadism were not unknown.

With the coming of the industrial revolution the parish workshops evolved into factories and the exploitation of children as slave labour was common. The practice of apprenticing orphans continued as late as the 1840s, when boards of guardians in Staffordshire, Yorkshire and Lancashire were found to be

. . . still getting rid of pauper boys of six. seven and eight by apprenticing them to colliers with a guinea thrown in "for clothes".

(E.P. Thompson: The Making of the English Working Class)

Child labour in modern times is seen as one of the unacceptable features of capitalism. Apologists for the system moralise about it but at the same time seek to convince us that a society in which a majority are economically coerced and treated as mere factors in the profit-making machine is the best the human race can hope to achieve. Workers are employed because they produce an economic surplus over and above their wages, which are inevitably very low for a large section of the workforce. According to the Low Pay Unit, figures for April 1986 show that 17 per cent of full-time workers were being paid less than £2.40 an hour, while over a third were receiving less than £3.00. Of the women who work part-time, 50 per cent were earning less than £2.40 an hour and 75 per cent received less than £3.00 an hour. In total, around 2 million women part-time workers and 1.6 million full-time workers. both men and women, received less than £2.40 an hour, including overtime pay. (Low Pay Unit: Britain's False Economy. 1987.)

When confronted by the exploitation of child labour socialists reply that the only answer is to end the system where a majority of men. women and, in many cases, children are treated as economic units. This can only be done by establishing, by democratic political means, a world-wide system where the means of production are owned in common and production takes place solely to meet the people's needs. In such a society the exploitation endemic in employment will be replaced by voluntary co-operation to produce the things people have democratically decided they need. All will have the right to take part in decisions about what is to be produced and how production is organised. Let's take a look at what the alternative — doing "something now" — has achieved in the last 180 years in the area of child labour.

One of the earliest pieces of legislation was the 1802 Health and Morale of Apprentices Act. Its aim was to limit children's working hours and its main concern was with pauper apprentices. It sought to abolish night work and limited the working day of apprentices in cotton mills to twelve hours. There were also provisions made for school on Sunday and proper clothing and sleeping arrangements. [To]  make sure that employers complied with the act, four independent factory inspectors were appointed to enforce the law among the 3,000 textile manufacturing establishments of the time.

Apart from the low standards set by the act, its major flaw was that enforcement depended on magistrates who were in most cases mill owners themselves. Similar problems affected another act passed in 1819 and sponsored by Sir Robert Peel, which outlawed employment in cotton mills for children under the age of nine. As it had no independent inspectorate it was largely ignored by mill owners.

Next came the Factory Act of 1833, which was based on the evidence of the Sadler Committee of 1832 and the Factory Commission of 1833. It outlawed the employment in all textile factories of children under the age of nine; between nine and thirteen no child was allowed to work more than 48 hours a week; for those aged thirteen to eighteen the limit was sixty-nine hours and anyone under twenty one years was prohibited from night work. Such was the concern to [missing text]

In 1840 a further factory commission investigated employment in the mines, discovering even worse conditions than those existing in the mills. Small children were used to operate ventilation traps which involved sitting in the dark, sometimes thirteen to fourteen hours. Other children were used to hurry coal down shafts, pushing great loads for miles with their heads while bent double. Soon after the commission published its report in 1842, the Mines Act was passed which prohibited the employment underground of children under ten and women. It also restricted the number of hours and types of work performed by children.

An important turning point in controlling child employment came with the Elementary Education Act of 1870. This provided elementary education on a national basis and set up an administration system of local school boards to keep track of attendance. The 1880 Education Act made school attendance compulsory for the first time and a child could only leave school at ten if he or she satisfied the attendance requirements. Children with poor attendance records were not allowed to leave until the age of thirteen. Prior to the 1880 act. the Factory and Workshops Act of 1878 had extended the 1833 Act to all factories and raised the minimum age of employment to ten. which also limited the hours children under fourteen could work to half the normal working day.

In 1920 the International Labour Organisation and the League of Nations met in Washington to draw up a convention on the employment of children binding on all ratifying nations. In Britain it was embodied in the Employment of Women. Young Persons and Children Act of 1920, which tied together past legislation and provided a list of types of employment which were prohibited to children under a minimum working age.

Subsequent acts such as the Children and Young Persons Act, 1933, the Factory Act of 1961 and the Infants Children and Young Persons Act. 1963 form the basis of modern child labour law. The most important aspects of these acts are the prohibition of child employment in industrial undertakings, a minimum age of thirteen for part-time employment, restrictions on hour and times of work done by children and the provision for local authority bye-laws which can set higher standards than the minimum requirements. There exists a wide variation between local authorities as to the extent of provisions under these bye-laws and the degree of care that is taken to see that they are enforced.

As with the nineteenth century act the major problem with more recent legislation concerns enforcement, responsibility for which falls mainly on three bodies — the Health and Safety Inspectorate. Local Authority Health Officers and the Education Welfare services. All of these bodies have other tasks apart from discovering the illegal employment of children and all are massively understaffed. It is estimated that the Health and Safety Inspectorate has only 750 general factory inspectors to cover 730,000 manufacturing establishments. Much of the education and welfare surveillance work on child labour is done by educational welfare officers through voluntary overtime, patrolling the streets outside normal hours of work.

Due to this understaffing routine inspections are more frequent in large firms or those where the risk of accident is considered high (for example, chemical plants). Less visible firms may never see a factory inspector. As a result "back street firms" — most likely to employ child labour illegally are least likely to be visited. In addition, educational welfare staff have no specific right of entry. As the Inner London Education Authority states:

The more serious kinds of illegal employment in factories, restaurants and building sites tend not to be detected because educational welfare staff have no specific right of entry.

(Working Children, pp. 12-13)

In 1973 an attempt was made to reduce the uncertainty surrounding the legal protection given to working children. The Employment of Children Act received the Royal Assent on 23 May of that year but as yet it still remains on the statute book and has never been fully implemented.

It is therefore not surprising that child labour is still widespread in modern Britain. A survey carried out by the Low Pay Unit and Open University in 1982-3 estimates its extent. Interviews of 1,700 children in the London, Luton and Bedfordshire areas found that, apart from newspaper delivering, children were employed in a wide range of jobs including retailing, catering and cleaning. Close to one in ten children in the survey had more than one job and half of these had more than two. While newspaper delivery accounted for one third of all children working, shop work accounted for one in five and farm work and cleaning both accounted for 13 per cent. A variety of other work performed by children included hotel and catering. painting and decorating, sewing machining. modelling, clerical work and work in street markets. More than one in five children were employed in manual jobs, cleaning, furniture removals, construction labour and garage work. The findings confirm that a majority of these children were in one way or another working illegally. An analysis of the data for London found that four out of five were illegally employed, either under age, working illegal hours or working in jobs they should not have been doing.

It does not require a degree in economics to appreciate that children are forced to work because of the financial position of their families. The survey indicated that there was a definite relationship between the socio-economic position of the families and child labour. The highest proportion of working children in the survey were from manual working class backgrounds (51 per cent) and the unemployed (52 per cent).

Neither is it any mystery why employers use child labour. It is of course a source of cheap and easily disposable labour power and savings can be made not only directly on wages but also indirectly. Children are invariably paid "cash in hand", do not appear on employers’ records and therefore are not subject to national insurance contributions. They are not members of a trade union even where the company is unionised. Neither have they any of the rights of adult workers, such as the right to claim unfair dismissal, the right to an itemised pay slip and, as they pay no national insurance, they have no right to sick pay. Furthermore they are not classified as employees under the Health and Safety at Work Act. If injured at work children have no right to compensation unless their parents can prove in court that the employer has been negligent in some respect. Since most children are employed illegally, taking such cases to court could result in the parents being deemed parties to such negligence.

Despite the large number of health and safety regulations applying to the employment of children, a large minority of those surveyed reported having accidents while in their current jobs. One third of all boys and 29 per cent of girls reported some accident or injury. The main causes were heavy weights, broken glass, slipping or falling and injuries from materials and machinery. Of all the children at work only 19 per cent of boys and 18 per cent of girls were given uniforms or any kind of protective clothing by their employers.

Apart from accidents, the health of working children suffers in other ways. In 1970 a group of teachers in Tynemouth conducted a survey of pupils to discover why so many were falling asleep in class. They discovered that of the 390 interviewed over one third were working illegally and many of them were being grossly overworked and underpaid. As the Low Pay Unit pamphlet suggests, these findings illustrate the fallacy of the view that employment is good for children's health and education. An official of the National Association of School Masters stated:

Children are late to school, fail to do their homework, fall asleep during lessons and are unable to take part in any out of school activities such as sports because they have to report to work.

(Working Children, p.32)

The exploitative use of child labour is not a thing of the distant past. Reform via legislation has failed. The enactment of new laws may give the illusion that something is being done but this is merely a surface appearance; the problem remains because its root cause has not been treated. Doing something now may sound appealing but the reality is that nothing changes because a system unfit for men. women and children remains firmly in operation.

Ray Carr

Blogger's Note:

Sadly, the original text was garbled in places. It looks like there was a typesetting/proof-reading mishap. I couldn't see any notices of corrections in later Standards.

Death on principle (1982)

From the October 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

Asbestos is the Greek word for unquenchable, which fairly describes its devouring effect on the human body. It is a fibre embedded in a rock found in many parts of the world — Canada (where there are the largest deposits). Zimbabwe. Russia and Cyprus. South Africa has a lot of the especially unquenchable blue asbestos and the USA is the world’s principal manufacturer of asbestos products. The rock is quarried from holes in the ground, then crushed to extract the fibre which can be processed into yarns and cloth or compounded into rubber and cement. Its great value is in a high resistance to heat and to electricity, which means that it is widely used in the building industry and for gasket and brake linings.

It is only in recent years that asbestos has been recognised as a deadly killer responsible for incurable, agonising illness. One of the victims featured in the TV film about asbestos sufferers — Alice, A Fight for Life — recalled when the mill workers would lark about with the stuff, wearing it in wigs and beards, unaware of the appalling risks they were running. Now, a local council sends its workers-to rip the stuff out of houses and flats dressed in space suits of protective clothing, as if they were handling the most perilous of radioactive materials.

Asbestos kills through the inhalation of a dust of its minute but durable fibres which stay in the lungs for life, causing asbestosis — a respiratory disease — lung cancer or mesothelioma, a cancer of the membrane of the lungs or the abdomen. One of the companies exposed in the TV film — Turner Brothers Asbestos (TBA) — described it as a process in which the asbestos particles "get right down into the lungs and file away the tissue”. This sounds ghastly enough but was in fact a clumsy attempt to play down the risks.

This same safety memorandum, which was given to all employees of TBA. asserted that: "Health problems are caused only if a lot of asbestos dust is breathed into the lungs over many years". In truth there are examples of people contracting asbestos-related diseases after as little as two weeks’ contact and the woman who once fooled around with an asbestos wig worked with it for only nine months. One study of the TBA factory in Rochdale found that 58 per cent of the employees were showing the first symptoms of asbestos-related diseases; another found one worker in four actually suffering from the diseases.

The recognition of asbestos as a twentieth century industrial killer has loosed a flood of demands for compensation for its victims, which threatens to gather force into a deluge. This might force TBA to pay out rather more than the no-obligation grant of about £10 a week they have made to some of the families of their dead employees. Sometimes they gave nothing at all, other than the wreath which they sent to the funeral. (The TV researchers traced a lot of the asbestos victims through pathetic thanks for the flowers in the Deaths column of the local paper.)

While their workers were suffering and dying. TBA were devoting themselves to concealing the extent of the problem. Their safety memorandum breezily assured everyone: “Working with asbestos is a bit like working with gas — you've no problems so long as you stick firmly to a few simple rules". They did not publish a report of their own company doctor which showed the incidence of asbestos-related diseases at TBA to be 75 times what the company admitted to. Weeks after the TV programme, in face of the mounting evidence of the dangers, TBA conceded that some of their estimates had been wrong but they adopted a new, equally spurious, defence — that 30 per cent of mesothelioma cases happen spontaneously. TBA did not concede that they make their profits through putting people to work with a peculiarly nasty and dangerous material; the work could be a lot safer — as safe as human ability allows—but this would cost a lot of money and file away some of those profits like workers’ lungs.

TBA is not the only asbestos company to be in trouble. In America there is the more spectacular and provocative Manville Corporation, which was once the world's largest processor of asbestos. We say "was" because Manville recently went bankrupt. There was no suicide among the corporation’s penitent executives over this because Manville is in fact financially healthy. According to the Guardian of September 7, at the time it had $15 million in cash, apart from its other assets, and continues its business as normal. Manville's bankruptcy was a ruse, calculated to protect it against the claims of the sick and crippled workers. There are some 16,500 of these claims at present and more are on the way.

Of course there was an indignant outcry at Manville's cynical but effective manoeuvre. One American Congressman accused the Corporation of leaving behind “. . . the wreckage of their workers’ and consumers' lives". But there was also some support for the company, from American bankers and lawyers, who are trained to applaud an effective preoccupation with taking in the profits, even if it costs the lives of the people who make them. The tragic fact is that those smug, desiccated business people who stood up for Manville had social reality on their side, unlike those who were in pain or dying because they had worked for the Corporation or the others who were angry about it all.

The first part of that reality is that asbestos can yield some very impressive profits for the people who own the quarries where it is extracted and the plants where it is processed. The second part is that those profits arise, not just from the fact that human beings apply their abilities to the mining and the processing, but that this takes place under certain social relationships. The owners, who receive the profits, are part of a social class who monopolise the means of production and distribution. The workers, who make the profits, have no ownership; their part in the relationship is to be exploited as they produce asbestos, or things made from it, with the object of being sold to realise the profits.

Within this relationship there are no rights or moral obligations; there is only an antagonism of interests. The employers don't owe their workers a living and when a worker is killed as a result of their employment the employers are being generous when they send a bunch of flowers to the cemetery. If the facts about asbestos make an embarrassing scandal that is only because the employer/worker relationship is so widely misunderstood and obscured.

Capitalism tags everything with a price — even a person’s life. There are people, called actuaries, who are trained to work out those prices and to express them in terms of insurance premiums and payouts. 'These calculations have no room for sentiment or emotion; it has been known for a small part of one particular person's body — a film star's legs, a footballer’s feet — to be insured for hundreds of times more than the entire body of the people who watch them perform. This cold-blooded process extends into other fields and will play its part in deciding, say. whether to develop an airport runway or build a motorway or some other assault on the lives of the people living around it.

Any investment in industrial safety must be subject to those same actuarial principles. Safety itself is a profit element; to kill workers too early in their life effectively reduces the supply of future exploitation-fodder. The skill — if that is the word — is in finding the balancing point, when safety measures cost too much or when adverse publicity from meddling media people begins to affect investment in the firm. In any case it is always worthwhile to fight a rearguard action, even if it is over the wrecked and wasted bodies of the victims of actuarial principles.

Another woman in the TV film, who died at the age of 55. was at first judged to be ineligible under the rules for any compensation at all; although she was dying from asbestosis the doctors who "examined" her found no symptoms. Two months before she died, in great pain, hardly able to move and heavily drugged, she mistook the date when her disability began, which meant that under the rules she was entitled to only a limited payment. After her death, and a post mortem, the authorities agreed that she had been completely disabled and should have received a total of about £18,000.

No comment was made on the degradation of it all — the exploitation, being put to work with a lethal substance; then the sickness, the withering away onto the scrap heap observed by doctors and bureaucrats, all concerned that nobody should get more than the rules allowed. No comment was made, that all of this was done in accordance with those actuarial calculations so essential to a society in which the overriding priority is the production of wealth for profit.

At the end of the 18th century a child called Robert Blincoe was sent as an apprentice to various factories in Nottinghamshire. There he was beaten and tortured, his hair torn out and his teeth filed down in his head. His was not an isolated case and eventually there was a massive protest. His sufferings were in accordance with the actuarial principles of the first days of industrial capitalism, which laid it down that it paid to operate factories and mines with starving, battered children.

Has capitalism improved since then? Observe how those same principles operate now — the tortured bodies of the asbestos victims, the contemptuous evasions of the employers’ public relations staff, the insult of the company flowers on the grave. And be warned that here, behind the anger and grief, is this society’s enduring reality.

Ivan

Warning: capitalism can harm your health (1994)

From the August 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

Part of the socialist case against capitalism is that in a society based on ruthless competition the control of economic costs will always take priority over the needs of human beings. Therefore plans to cut government and business costs by weakening health and safety regulations are of little surprise to socialists.

The government gave notice of its intentions last November when in the Queen’s Speech it announced a Deregulation Bill which many feared was directly aimed at diluting some of the Health and Safety laws. This Deregulation Bill would give government departments and ministers the power to abolish laws by parliamentary order (Labour Research, January 1994).

At the beginning of this year it was announced that the Health and Safety Executive, the body responsible for enforcing health and safety standards, was to make 230 cuts in jobs over the next two years because the government has reduced its grant. Its budget has been cut by £5 million for the period 1994-95. In 1995-96 it will get only £192 million which is £10 million less than it asked for. In the coal-mining industry the pit deputies union NACODS failed in an attempt in the High Court to prevent the introduction of new mine safety regulations which will weaken safety standards in the pits. The Management and Administration of Safety and Health in Mines Regulations Act of 1993 takes away the role of pit supervisors to monitor safety at pits. This role will now be given to safety inspectors who will have no legal powers and can be overruled by management (Labour Research, February 1994).

Lower standards

Despite improvement in conditions for most workers since the early stages of capitalist industrial production, many workers still suffer illness, injury and even loss of life due to avoidable accidents at work or through diseases directly related to their working environment. Statistics for 1993 show that 430 workers were killed through their employment and there were 88,536 injuries reported to the enforcing authorities (Labour Research, January 1994).

An example of the type of dangers still facing workers in their employment concerns people working with or coming into contact with asbestos.

The effects of inhaling asbestos dust have been known for decades. Asbestos causes asbestosis, a disabling and ultimately fatal scarring of the lungs, lung cancer which is almost always fatal, and mesothelioma, a painful and fatal cancer of the lining of the lung or stomach. Amongst the workers most affected are miners, dockers, those involved in the manufacturing of asbestos products, building workers using products containing asbestos and those who work in or maintain buildings which contain decorating asbestos products. It has been estimated by the Department of Employment that some six million tonnes of the three main types of the product crocidolite blue asbestos, amosite brown asbestos and chrysotile white asbestos had been imported into the UK by 1986.

The widespread use of asbestos left a legacy of almost 3,000 people dying of asbestos-related cancer last year. Asbestos is responsible for more cancers than any other industrial substance. According to recent research by Professor Peto of the Institute of Cancer Research and the Health and Safety Executive, death rates due to mesothelioma alone will increase from around 1,000 in 1991 to between 2,500 and 3,000 a year. As usual under a system designed to meet profit rather than human need, the victims of these avoidable diseases are very often not properly compensated particularly where they have been exposed to asbestos contained in the buildings they work in.

Obstacles to compensation

Various obstacles are put in the way of claiming so-called benefits. To be able to claim compensation workers have to have worked in certain prescribed industries. This generally means they would have to have had some direct contact with the substance via actual asbestos materials or the machinery or appliances used in the manufacture of asbestos products. Under these limitations for claiming compensation it is estimated that 43 percent of mesothelioma victims actually die before they receive their benefit (Labour Research, March 1994).

Despite all the evidence about the health hazards from working with asbestos there are few signs of a complete ban on all types of the substance. In fact William Bernard, president of the American asbestos workers’ union, at a recent conference on construction safety in the USA, gave the following warning:

"Asbestos manufacturers are once again on the assault. They are arguing that a particular type of asbestos chrysotile is not hazardous to health. They are asking the European Community and World Health Organisation to allow it to be used again, especially for use in third world countries" (Labour Research, March 1994).

The fact that workers still suffer illness, injury and death through their employment is yet another indictment of a system of production for profit. It is also an indictment of the failure of reformism. Not only have years of reformist political parties and trade unions campaigning on such issues failed to resolve the problems, at present we are seeing moves designed to weaken already inadequate health and safety legislation.

Profits first

As with other issues reformism cannot succeed as it fails to get to the root cause of the problem — a social system where human well-being must take secondary place to controlling economic cost for the sake of profit. The failure of reformism can also be seen by the fact that in arguing for, in this case, better health and safety provisions reformists accept a capitalist agenda. The TUC, for example argue for better health and safety on the basis that in the long run it will prove "cost effective". The TUC points out that an analysis of the costs and benefits of legislation such as those prepared by the Health and Safety Executive have shown the legislation involved to be "cost positive".

The economic cost benefit argument may or may not be correct but this is not the point. From the point of the majority of us who have to sell our ability to work to an employer in order to live, and so the potential victims of the profit system, our health and lives must come first and to hell with profit. In the short-term the best way to protect our health and ultimately our lives is to organise collectively and effectively at the point of production in order to assert our own interests as against those of our employer. This factor is more important than arguing for improved health and safety legislation.

Ultimately this issue proves once again that the real choice facing us is a society' based on profit which dominates our lives at present as against that of one based on human need for which we need to organise to bring about. As with so many other issues capitalism has proved that it cannot safeguard our health and life in the production process. If capitalism cannot afford the economic cost of health and safety our answer must be that we cannot afford capitalism.

Ray Carr

Nuclear power — making it clear (1986)

From the August 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard

It has been drawn to our attention that the statement in the June Socialist Standard that "nuclear power could be safe” needs qualifying.

Nuclear fission (splitting the atom) which is the process used in all existing nuclear power stations can never be made safe, not even in socialism, since this is a question of physics not economics It can only be made less dangerous.

What we had in mind was the possibility of being able, within a generation, to construct power stations based on the principle of nuclear fusion. This is a quite different nuclear process in which there would be no danger of a melt-down, nor of any accidental release of radioactivity into the atmosphere. nor any radioactive waste products, the only problem in this respect would be that the equipment used to contain the process would acquire a relatively short-lived radioactivity

Editors.

On the Spot at Con-Mech (1973)

From the December 1973 issue of the Socialist Standard

Nor entirely satisfied with the mass media’s reporting on the Con-Mech dispute, I went along to find out for myself. As I arrived outside the Sheerwater factory, I saw a group of four or five men on the pavement. Among them I recognised Lindsey Greig, who is one of the two shop stewards. He is 21. A graduate of Warwick University, he joined Con-Mech this summer. From the company’s point of view he is a “trouble maker” and had “spent much of his working time soliciting membership for the AUEW”. The other shop steward, Ron Connor, an ex-miner from Co. Durham, has experience of trade union membership, but is also young.

Con-Mech is a small factory-cum-office on Sheerwater GLC estate outside Woking, Surrey. The Group make bread slicers and parts for bulldozers and other earth-moving machinery. According to a circular issued by Mr. Robert Dilley, the company’s chairman, on September 28th, there are 67 people employed of which he claims 51 are “eligible to join a Union” — any union. I asked him over the phone if this figure included staff workers, typists, etc., but he emphatically denied this. However the workers and the AUEW who have checked the branch’s books, assert that the total number of shopfloor workers eligible to join the AUEW was only 31. Indeed I would think that this is the correct figure, as Dilley’s 51 could only have got in with dangerous overcrowding. It is a small factory.

Before September 19th the union had only four members, of whom Ron Connor was one. At the branch meeting 22 Con-Mech workers including Greig became union members. Next day the union members elected Greig and Connor as their shop stewards and decided to apply for a meeting between the District Secretary Geoff Hardy (a member of the Communist Party) and the Company to discuss recognition, etc. The shop stewards’ account of how this application was met is indicative of the employer’s attitude:

Our first discussion with the Management was brief and to the point. We were told that under no circumstances would they afford recognition, and that the two elected Shop Stewards could “pick up their cards” on the way out. (Undated leaflet issued in the name of Ron Connor as Secretary of the Strike Committee.)

It seems that on every point at issue there are two different and mutually contradictory stories. How many shop-floor workers were eligible for the AUEW? Dilley says 51, the union only 31. How many came out on strike? Dilley says only 20, the union 26. How many are still out on strike now (Oct. 26)? Dilley says only 9 — the rest, he says, are either back at work or else have collected their cards and got jobs elsewhere. But the union say they are paying strike pay to 16 men on their books. Were the shop stewards sacked? Not according to Dilley, but it is hard to see why, immediately after their interview with him, there was a mass walkout and decision "to withdraw labour until such time as not only the two stewards were reinstated, but the Company conceded recognition”.

On September 28 Dilley took the case to the National Industrial Relations Court under Sir John Donaldson on the grounds that the strike constituted an "unfair” industrial practice because there had been no seven days’ notice. At which stage the question ceases to be a relatively simple one of an industrial stoppage over a recognition issue, but becomes bedevilled by the AUEW’s stoic masochism and boycott of the NIRC (surely they could have countered Dilley by putting their case on reinstatement of the shop stewards and recognition?), but also by the Labour and TUC opposition to the Industrial Relations Act and NIRC.

At which point I’ll get back to those pavement pickets. Their main motive for being out was nothing to do with the Industrial Relations Act and party political matters. What they wanted was union recognition, not as an end in itself, but as a means to an end, a means of compelling management to do something about unsatisfactory conditions. I was told of safety hazards on some of the machines, of poor ventilation, of the shopfloor being cluttered and dirty. I heard that rates of pay were arbitrarily and unfairly fixed — the longer you stayed the less you got in relation to blokes who had just come in on "outside” rates of pay. For instance, Lindsey Greig, a young newcomer, got a lot more than an older, better and more experienced worker.

Another factor was the high speed arrival and departure of shopfloor workers. There would be seven or eight new ones every Monday, and of these hardly a couple would still be in the place on Friday. There was a tendency to take young workers, including students, and there was a high proportion of immigrant workers — Italians and Pakistanis came to nearly half the workforce. In the event, the Pakistanis have mostly stuck with the union so far, but the Italians went back in.

In the absence of a union, inexperienced, young or immigrant workers are least likely to be aware of safety hazards in operating the machines, and in case of accident are unlikely to be aware of their legal rights on compensation; also they might not be in a position to press any claim. Is this why Dilley is so opposed to recognition of the union? Is he afraid that someone might report him for empty firebuckets? Or get him to modify some of his plant, e.g. the monstrous machine outside in his backyard which chops up metal into different lengths and which the operator can only switch on or off when inside the building? Or to give up some of his old-fashioned habits, like sacking people at the drop of a hat?

The first sentence of Dilley’s circular of September 28th claims: “For twenty-five years the employees and the management have enjoyed excellent labour relations.” The men totally disagree, and they point out that last November there was a stoppage lasting several hours over pay and conditions, which ended when another director conceded a pay increase. In the next sentence, we read: “the conditions of employment have always been superior to those laid down by any Union”. The proof of the pudding is in the eating: there would be little cause for men to stay out on strike with only £6 strike pay for weeks on end and still remain resolved to force union recognition if conditions were as "superior” as Dilley alleges. The men however know very well how badly their conditions and rates of pay compare with other factories in the area, whose workers are solidly supporting them (e.g. in such practical ways as laying on hot tea twice a day, or getting statements photo-copied for the pickets to hand out, not to mention helping out with picket duty).

The employer seems an awful ass, dogmatic and intransigent, characteristically the type who has been using NIRC. The Union leaders seemed at times to have had a stronger eye on making party policy propaganda for the Labour Party than with the immediate interests of their members on strike. But the strikers themselves have shown commendable solidarity and stamina — qualities which, added to socialist understanding, will overthrow capitalism and establish Socialism.

Charmian Skelton

Blogger's Note:

By the look of this obituary for Lindsay Greig from 2015, he would have been a member of the International Socialists group (now known as the SWP) at the time of the dispute. In fact, the strike at Con-Mech is mentioned in the obituary.

Editorial: The capitalist witches’ brew that led to Grenfell (2024)

Editorial from the October 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

The final report of the Inquiry into the Grenfell Fire makes devastating reading.

There was an active lack of interest in fire safety at the heart of central government:

‘In the years between the fire at Knowsley Heights in 1991 and the fire at Grenfell Tower in 2017 there were many opportunities for the government to identify the risks posed by the use of combustible cladding panels and insulation, particularly to high-rise buildings, and to take action in relation to them. Indeed, by 2016 the department was well aware of those risks, but failed to act on what it knew’ (Executive Summary (tinyurl.com/GrenfellExec), p. 7).

Then the most damning paragraph of the report:

‘One very significant reason why Grenfell Tower came to be clad in combustible materials was systematic dishonesty on the part of those who made and sold the rainscreen cladding panels and insulation products. They engaged in deliberate and sustained strategies to manipulate the testing processes, misrepresent test data and mislead the market. In the case of the principal insulation product used on Grenfell Tower, Celotex RS5000, the Building Research Establishment (BRE) was complicit in that strategy’ (p. 10).

A regulatory body had been captured by the construction industry:

‘The National House Building Council (NHBC) […] failed to ensure that its building control function remained essentially regulatory and free of commercial pressures. It was unwilling to upset its own customers and the wider construction industry by revealing the scale of the use of combustible insulation in the external walls of high-rise buildings, contrary to the statutory guidance’ (p.14).

The local authority, Kensington and Chelsea (RBKC), managed the property at arm’s length through a Tenants Management Organisation (TMO):

‘RBKC and the TMO were jointly responsible for the management of fire safety at Grenfell Tower. The years between 2009 and 2017 were marked by a persistent indifference to fire safety, particularly the safety of vulnerable people. […] RBKC was responsible for overseeing the TMO’s activities, not monitoring its operations on a day-to-day basis, but its oversight of the TMO’s performance was weak and fire safety was not subject to any key performance indicator’ (p. 16).

The TMO allowed an unqualified person to be the fire safety manager, who carried out substandard assessments:

‘The demands of managing fire safety were viewed by the TMO as an inconvenience rather than an essential aspect of its duty to manage its property carefully’ (p. 17).

The TMO ‘wanted to reduce the cost’ by using the specific type of cladding panel that failed so appallingly but were badly advised by an incompetent firm of architects. In fact:

‘[not] one of those involved in the design of the external wall or the choice of materials acted in accordance with the standards of a reasonably competent person in their position’ (p. 19).

Here, then, were the ingredients of the capitalist witches’ brew that caused Grenfell: a housing market largely geared towards the wealthy, with workers squeezed into as little land and living space as possible. Politicians driven by an ideological aversion to regulation and a desire to please the construction industry. A local authority holding its tenants (many of whom were vulnerable people on benefits) at arm’s length as an unwelcome cost not to be listened to. A regulator captured by the industry it is supposed to regulate. Builders concerned with growing their profits over the wellbeing of the people who will live in the buildings. Unscrupulous manufacturers willing to gamble with people’s lives to sell a few more units of their goods, knowing profit-hungry builders wouldn’t look too closely and would cut them in on the action.

Grenfell was not a mistake but the result of a combination of regular occurrences under capitalism.

Proper Gander: Temu’s temerity (2024)

The Proper Gander column from the July 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the market of online marketplaces, Amazon and eBay’s dominance has recently been challenged by young upstart Temu. Like its competitors, Temu offers a dizzyingly wide range of commodities such as clothing, household items and jewellery which can be delivered to your door in just a few clicks. Since its launch in September 2022, Temu has rapidly expanded to having half a billion users worldwide. A quarter of the British population has downloaded its app, encouraged by social media advertising and influencer recommendations.

Temu’s business model is to be a platform for thousands of other companies to sell their products direct from China to customers worldwide. It doesn’t have enormous depots like Amazon does, and therefore avoids associated costs, allowing it to charge less for its wares. Of course, this cheapness has come at a price. Complaints about the quality and safety of Temu’s products attracted the attention of Channel 4’s Dispatches, whose documentary aimed to tell The Truth About Temu. Predictably, the programme was too brief to give more than an outline of each problem, nor explain the wider context of how such companies fit with capitalism.

Reporter Ellie Flynn buys some items through Temu to check how they compare with the way they’re advertised. Some products come with false claims that they have been certified as safe by recognised organisations, and a baby walker harness purchased for £2.68 snaps within seconds when tested with a bag of sand. Flynn looks at news reports of people who have lived through tragedies after ordering items from Temu: a woman whose house burnt down due to a faulty Tablet and a girl who suffered burns from glue when applying fake fingernails. Flynn arranges for toxicology tests on some items she has bought, including a ‘gold’ necklace priced at £2.97 which is revealed to have twice the legal amount of lead and 27 times more cadmium than permitted. She also orders saw blades and BB guns without the website checking her age. Temu replies to these concerns with corporate-speak statements that it has withdrawn some products pending checks and that it maintains ‘rigorous quality controls’, although insufficient safeguards appear to be in place.

Hoping that low prices are enough of a distraction from risks isn’t the only approach used by Temu to manipulate us into buying. Its app is designed to entice us into spending more time, and therefore more money on the site. Flash sales, mini games, prizes and deals are jazzed up with colourful, cartoonish graphics. Emerging technology consultant Nina Jane Patel says that the app is ‘gamifying the shopping experience, but on steroids’. The aim is to make buying entertaining in a way closer to playing games and gambling than just swiping through a catalogue. Flynn arranges for her brain activity to be measured while using Temu’s app, and compares these results with what’s recorded while shopping from Amazon and playing a casino app. When using Temu, there were spikes of pleasure-related stimulation recorded, presumably when a particularly alluring bargain was found, a pattern with similarities to when the gambling app was being played.

This experiment shows how the capitalist system conditions our attitude to our possessions. In a society of scarcity and rationing through money, we’re likely to react with a buzz of satisfaction, even if it’s near-subliminal, when we acquire something, whether by shopping or gambling. Temu has exploited this learned response with lucrative results, but in a way which pushes at the boundaries of what’s considered acceptable practice, at least in the UK. Iain Duncan Smith, in his role as Vice Chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Gambling Related Harm has been investigating the implications of Temu being based on a gambling-like system, such as how this can lead to addictive behaviour.

In the documentary, Smith says that the personal data gathered when people buy through Temu has to be shared with the Chinese government under its National Security Law. This data would then be passed on to the state’s intelligence service to sift through for anything nefariously useful. Temu denies sending information to the Chinese government and says that its data policy is on its website, which Flynn can’t find.

How much notice will the Chinese state take of the UK’s regulations about the use of data? Similarly, the UK’s health and safety laws are difficult to enforce when products are coming in from overseas. While this demonstrates how national barriers add a layer of complications to how goods are distributed in capitalism, the issue isn’t only in China’s awkward relationship with Western countries. Although all the vendors selling through Temu are based in China, Temu itself isn’t wholly a Chinese business. Its parent company, PDD Holdings has its headquarters in South Korea and its ‘legal domicile’ is in Ireland. Despite any links to the Chinese state, Temu is not rooted in only one country, reminding us that its owners in the capitalist class sit above national borders.

And it’s the profit-hungry motives of the capitalist class which really drive Temu’s approach. Its products are sold as cheaply as possible to maximise the potential number of customers, lured in by marketing and held onto using gambling’s techniques. A profit margin can be maintained if costs are kept low by cutting corners during manufacturing and distribution. The quality or suitability of the end product isn’t an important consideration, nor is the waste of resources in shipping goods across continents, nor is the wellbeing of the staff involved. Temu represents some of the worst aspects of capitalist society, but this is what has made it a success, in capitalist terms: PDD Holdings is worth an estimated £170 billion to its owners and shareholders. To the rest of us, it’s an example of how capitalism turns what we need and want into shoddy commodities made to enrich the elite.

Mike Foster

Science and the British Association (1951)

From the October 1951 issue of the Socialist Standard

The limitations of a society which has outlived its usefulness is shown in every aspect of art, literature, religion and science. Man must live, and whether he be a scientist, factory worker, writer or artist, under Capitalism his labour power becomes a commodity. The factory worker produces things, not because he likes producing those things, but because he is paid for it.

To survive in Capitalism, the capitalist must be ever increasing the efficiency of his industry and for this purpose he demands specialised scientists and psychologists to tell him exactly how hard he can drive his workers. What these scientists produce is a commodity and their livelihood depends upon the demand for such knowledge by the capitalist class. Gone is the individual adventurer in the field of science; all are absorbed in the capitalist system, driven to produce what can be sold in order that they may continue to do so.

It is not surprising therefore, that the recent meeting of the British Association, reported in the Manchester Guardian (10.8.51). contains much that displays the myopic vision of science gone mad. Dr. Meiklejohn, lecturer in Industrial Health, sounded this warning: “The clamant demand is for more coal, and to this end there is more mechanisation. But pause to examine the situation. Are we quite certain that, in some mines, more coal cutters and conveyor belts are not diminishing output by the deleterious effect upon the miner.”

Notice the placing of his words. The danger is diminishing output. The reason is. “the deleterious effect upon the miner.” Thus the profit and interests of the capitalist class are put first and the health of the worker only incidental.

Dr. C. G. Gooding, the Scottish Coal Board's principal medical officer, when dealing with the effects of lighting upon miners' health, said that the amount of lighting concomitant with safety was so small until twenty-live years ago that the miner was unable to use the most efficient part of his vision. This caused miner’s nystagmus with its deleterious effect on vision and its neurotic symptoms. But this disease was physical, he claimed, and was not caused, as some psychologists had claimed, from a desire to escape the dangers of the pit. When he went on to say that there was not much evidence that the improved lighting had increased output, we were rather surprised that it had been introduced. But when he added that the most important possibility was that the increased comfort would work “revolutionary change in the psychological climate of the industry by converting mines into underground factories,” we began to see what he was getting at.

The effect of dust inhalation on miners was discussed by Dr. C. M. Fletcher. He mentioned the prevalence of pneumoconiosis among the South Wales miners and said that the low tubercular death rate seemed to derive from the fact that the presence of pneumoconiosis disguised the usual symptoms and caused death to be ascribed to chronic bronchitis. He said that with the new regulations, miners were queuing to get back to work although still suffering from this disease and he wondered whether this was medically justified or merely expedient in view of our need for more coal. We know, however, that every day expediency takes over another portion of humanity.

Finally, Dr. Meiklejohn came to the point once more and said that it was a question whether the increased mechanisation which sprang from the increased need for coal would not eventually diminish output by the deleterious effect on the miners.

Giving weight to the point. Sir Andrew Bryan, a member of the N.C.B., said, “ We are losing more manpower through pneumoconiosis than from any other cause.”

The cold way these capitalist whip-crackers and profit-watchers can deal with human lives as they deal with machines reflects the perversion that is the outcome of the last burst of a society past its usefulness.

One imagines the fanfare of trumpets greeting the arrival of the so-called psychology into the arena of capitalist apology. He went on to point out that the high incidence of pneumoconiosis in South Wales was related to the highest accident rate in any of the country’s coalfields. Analysis, he claimed, suggested a definite relation between the two. He did not commit himself to saying whether the physiological effects of the disease make men less alert or whether the fear of contracting it gave rise to a subconscious desire to be injured in order to get out of a unacceptable situation.

The final futility was left to Mr. C. A. Oakley who suggested that some people have accidents perhaps unconsciously to cover up some personal difficulty or to attract attention or even deliberately as a form of self punishment. One might give the same reasons for so-called scientists who make such futile statements as “some” people; it would be equally meaningless.

We in the Socialist Party of Great Britain have long known that in capitalist society profit comes before health and that health is regarded as a means of increasing profit. We recall the days when children of five years and onwards were working fourteen and fifteen hours per day in factories, and the employers who ridiculed the idea that they were overworked. They said that these hours agreed with the children wonderfully. Factory children, they urged, were healthier, more moral than others and more intelligent. Looks, they pleaded, were deceptive. “When long hours have to be worked,” said the manager of Mr. Gott’s mills, “the children are less tired than the adults.” For the children’s sake they deprecated shorter hours and it would be exceedingly prejudicial to their morals to let them out earlier. “ Nothing,” said one of these philanthropists who worked his children from 6 a.m. to 8 p.m., “ is more favourable to morals than habits of early subordination, industry and regularity.” (Evidence of Mr. G. A. Lee, cotton millowner—“The Town Labourer,” p. 163.)

We know the capitalist who tries to hide his thirst for profit behind morals, religion and philanthropy. And to-day, the capitalists whose mental outlook is more refined and subtle hide their profit motive behind a huge body of pseudo-scientists, industrial doctors and fact-finding bodies.

The capitalist system defiles everything it touches; all who support or accept it allow their brains to be twisted and perverted by the contradictions it brings. Only those who see the solution to its problems outside of capitalist society can see all within it in true perspective, in its relation to history.

To find the cause of social evils is in the interest of all.

It is in the interests of doctors who see that the conditions which produce such diseases as tuberculosis are inherent in the system itself, that tuberculosis is an occupational disease of the working class; it is in the interests of criminologists who see that crime is caused by the very nature of capitalist society; in the interests of psychologists who see that the environment of the class is governed by the economic system, that men feel insecure because they are insecure; in the interests of economists who cannot solve the periodic unemployment, the ever-present poverty and wars within the capitalist system; in the interests of atom scientists who are transformed from agents of the emancipation of man from nature into manufacturers of the death of millions; in the interests even of the capitalist class who cannot escape the indiscriminating power of the atom and hydrogen bomb; in the interests of the whole of the working class to study the scientific case of the Socialist Party of Great Britain in order that they may see the solution to the major problems of the world, and that they may achieve that solution.

P. J. McHale.

These Foolish Things: They call it efficiency (1996)

The Scavenger column from the October 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

They call it efficiency

Railtrack, the owner of the track the country's trains run on, is busily getting into the privatised spirit by closing 62 signal boxes and axing 217 jobs. The jobs will go through natural wastage, as if that does not really count. Naturally the company is anxious to assure travellers that the cuts will not affect safety, implying that the surplus boxes were merely ornaments among the trackside furniture. Having fewer signal boxes, we are told, will give signalmen ‘a broader picture of the traffic on their line’. Financial Mail on Sunday, 4 August.

We call it murder

The collision on Thursday killed one woman passenger and injured 68 others . . . Despite concerns among senior staff, neither BR nor the network’s current owner, Railtrack, attempted to deal with the risk at the track junction on the line between London and Milton Keynes . . . Despite concerns, the potential risk was increased when the signalling was updated to a more sophisticated computer- controlled system four years ago .. . The enquiry into the Clapham rail disaster in December 1988, which killed 35, recommended the [Automatic Train Protection] device be installed all trains. But the scheme was shelved on cost grounds. Mail on Sunday, 11 August.

You pays your money . . .

One in eight buses and coaches examined by the Vehicle Inspectorate in roadside checks over the past year were defective. Some were so dangerous they were impounded, while in other cases the operators were given deadlines for repairs. Figures released by the Vehicle Inspectorate reveal an increase of 600 faulty buses and coaches over the year, bringing the annual nation-wide total to 4,338. Mail on Sunday, 4 August.

Real education!

Such is the importance of taking responsibility for one’s own financial future that the [Weinberg Committee) report is asking the government to consider making personal finance a core subject on the National Curriculum. Besides the stock market, Sir Mark envisages teaching in the use of credit cards, handling debt and using a bank account. This, the committee argues, is the only way of educating youngsters to cope with the steady whittling away of the welfare state.

Lacking education?

Jailing fine defaulters:

• Unpaid fines [in Britain) total £200 million, £31 million is written off each year.
• In 1994, 22,469 men and 1,454 women were jailed for non-payment—the highest number for ten years and accounting for more than a quarter of all new prison receptions. Each was inside for an average of seven days.
• Three quarters are unemployed and half had other outstanding debts, usually electricity, gas, telephone or council, tax. Two thirds had been in prison before.
• Most men had been convicted of motoring offences. A third of the women had been convicted of prostitution. Guardian, 11 July.

That’s the spirit!

“As managing director at Tarmac during the 1980s I used to dream about doing my competitors in. And as MD of British Telecom I dreamed of doing Bryan Carlsberg in. I will not describe the methods used.” Graeme Odgers, Chairman of Monopolies and Mergers Commission.

The Scavenger

A Third-Class Report (1973)

From the October 1973 issue of the Socialist Standard

Have you noticed how often reformers are behind the times ? They want to make public transport free when the majority of people no longer use it; or to protect ancient buildings after most of them have been pulled down; or ban some deleterious sport such as hunting or prizefighting at the stage when it is nearly extinct anyway, the realistic time for the campaigns ought to be in the heyday of whatever-it-is. And that is precisely the time in most cases when the reformers are saying nothing about it.

The Observer and other papers have made headlines recently of the discovery that some public swimming baths are dirty, and the demand for a clean-up. The reporters must have been diligent — and young. If they were not young, and could recall Third-Class Night at the municipal baths before 1939, they would not have been so horrified. They would know also that a few coppers in the income structure saved from or condemned to it. Gentle reader, if you are squeamish don’t read on. I was there.

The Baths were in the High Street. They were also the municipal wash-house, and the back windows billowed steam over a railed-in and litter-strewn dirt patch which was called (what joys!) the Recreation Ground. The swimming bath could be floored-over with rough wood blocks and was used in winter for free concerts, cheap dances, and political meetings.

The principle of Third-Class Night was that the water was changed once a week. On Mondays and Tuesdays the swimming was First Class: that is, the water was clean. Ladies’ session and gentlemen’s session at sevenpence a time, and the local Grammar School had time reserved. Wednesday, Thursday and Friday were Second Class, for fourpence — ladies’, gents’, and mixed, and the broth thickening inexorably.

And Saturday . . . Saturday was Third-Class Night, mixed: twopence. They used to say “Tread water”. No problem; you could have done handstands on it. The story of Christ walking on the water probably originated on Third-Class Night in the baths at Jerusalem. You could stay in as long as you liked, so everyone peed while swimming about as the need arose. There was a joke about a conscientious girl who always gave the attendant a penny before she left. Every male over thirty spat frequently as well, because every male over thirty did that everywhere.

Shampooing and shirt-changing did not happen frequently, either, if you were in the Saturday class. Most men slept in their shirts, and a good many in their socks too. For a lot of the Third-Class-Nighters the twopenny swim was a combination of business and pleasure; you got a wash, of sorts, all over. Of course a lot of the basic muck came from the Second and First Class, but it was probably thought an honour for us to swim in their secretions. Like Madame Tussaud’s: Mingle With the Mighty.

There we floundered in our scores, doing breast strokes and side strokes and colliding with one another in yellow-grey water you couldn’t see the bottom through and with cigarette ends and spit and bits of paper floating all round. We wiped and dried ourselves with the scraggy municipal towels. And when we had gone they emptied the soup away and filled the bath with nice clean water for the First Class again on Monday.

So the Observer won’t scare me with its pale account of a grubby swimming bath somewhere: what it describes is mere Second-Class stuff. But I cannot remember any reporter coming to our Baths on Saturday night and going away to Shock the Nation with his findings. Surely that would have been a much better time? However, it would have been a complicated investigation. It would have led to discovering that our problem was not dirt but poverty and inequality; and to get to the bottom of it they would have to go into the economics of capitalism. You can’t expect newspapers and reformers to start that kind of thing.

Robert Barltrop

Burned out and six feet under (1992)

From issue 8 of the World Socialist Review

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

The building industry (1984)

From the August 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

Capitalism ignores human needs. In the name of efficiency it wastes energies and stops or restricts production; in the name of market freedom it erects a barrier to free consumption; in the name of economic rationality it produces the most irrational contradictions. Food is dumped in the sea: people starve to death. Sick, inhumane, and historically outdated, the capitalist system goes on creating its disgusting social contradictions—and will continue to do so until workers decide to reorganise society on the basis of production for use instead of profit.

Consider the construction of housing. The skill and technology to provide every human being with decent accommodation has existed for decades; no person need live in the street or in a slum or, indeed, in the modern slums, designed by architects who have been instructed to design homes consistent with the poverty of their future inhabitants. Every man. woman and child could live in decent accommodation, but the facts of capitalism are far from allowing that to happen. Let us take a good look at these facts:

• In England and Wales alone there are 1,207,000 occupied dwellings which, according to the Department of the Environment, are unfit for human habitation.
• There arc 994.000 homes in England and Wales which lack one or more of the basic sanitary amenities.
• According to the government, 800,000 families are living in overcrowded dwellings.
• The fact of officially homeless families runs into tens of thousands. These families are often broken up, placed in hostels or left to find room in the overcrowded homes of relatives.
• Every night many thousands of workers live in the street, often with no more than a cardboard box to protect them from the cold. These street-dwellers are not “eccentric tramps", but unemployed youngsters who had come to urban areas in search of jobs, impoverished men who cannot afford rented accommodation and women who lack jobs or family support.

These are facts which the government produces; the Socialist Party merely reports them. Read the most recent report of the Building Research Establishment or the government-compiled House Condition Survey. As facts, they not only demonstrate that we are living in a society of serious deprivation, but that there are no workers who can even be secure from such threat as long as homes are built for sale or rent rather than solely for use. A worker who lives in “decent" rented accommodation today could lose his or her job tomorrow and be forced to live in slum housing or, if money runs out. on the street. But not only the unemployed live in poor housing: faced with the choice between running a car, taking a pleasant holiday or having to pay the mortgage on a decent home, many an apparently affluent worker has to accept inferior housing.

Even those workers happy with their homes are ever insecure. In the recession, with self-styled members of the "middle class” falling deeper into financial hardship, mortgage payments to the Building Societies are not always kept up and so more than 5,000 homes were repossessed in 1983 as a result of mortgage payment arrears. The recent rise of 2.25 per cent in mortgage rates was the second biggest increase ever. As unemployment rises, particularly within the professional and managerial sector of the working class, so will the number of “home-owners” (mortgage- payers, in fact) who will have to seek inferior dwellings. Others will struggle to pay off the mortgage at the expense of the upkeep of their homes, thus paying for the privilege of living in a pleasantly situated slum. None of this need be so: unfit dwellings. insanitary conditions, overcrowding, vagrancy, choosing between pleasant shelter or a holiday, repossession of homes— these are all features of a system which does not build houses to live in (that would be too simple for the wise minds of the economists), but to sell on the market with a view to profit. It is only because shelter is a commodity rather than an entitlement that the housing problem exists. Indeed, there is no housing problem in our society—there is a social problem arising from the capitalist system, which is not to do with bricks, cement and labour, but with rent, interest and profit.

Never before has the construction industry been able to use such advanced techniques as are available in the mid-1980s. Ask any building worker and he will tell you that, technically, it has never been easier to build decent structures. New materials, mechanised tools and computer design methods make it possible to provide really pleasant dwellings in the time it used to take to produce only shoddy products. In short, the productive forces present no problem to the construction industry. So, are we producing more homes than ever? No. Is what is being produced better than ever? In the vast majority of cases, no. Are efforts being made to intensify the rate of construction of homes so that the conditions outlined above can be eradicated? As an answer, let us examine a few more facts:

• Approximately half a million workers in the construction industry are on the dole: they are not "needed" to build houses.
• Housebuilding annually has fallen to its lowest level since the early 1930s. There is no "demand" for houses.
• There is currently a brick surplus: they have produced more than they can sell. There are more unoccupied homes in London—where thousands are homeless—than there are families needing homes. The homeless cannot afford to pay for the use of the unoccupied shelter.

These are perverse contradictions. As need intensifies, so the construction industry contracts. This does not happen because the owners of the construction companies are wicked people who like ignoring needs. (No doubt some of them are disturbed by the squalor and deprivation caused by their economic decisions.) But those making decisions in the construction industry are not employed to consider the needs of the consumer or the producer, but those of the investor. Those who invest money in the construction industry are not looking for moral dividends, but material gain in the form of profit. So, if it is more profitable to build offices than homes—or squalid dwellings rather than attractive ones—or to cease production altogether rather than satisfy existing needs, those are the decisions which are taken. It is the capitalist system, with its concern for profit before human need, which forces those in control of production to behave in ways which create ludicrous social contradictions.

Accounting for deaths

To those who want to know how it can be rational for nearly half a million building workers, most of whom are skilled, to be thrown on to the scrapheap of the unemployed, the simple answer is that they have been sacrificed to the god of profit. In order to maintain (or increase) profits the construction companies had to employ less workers to do as much (or more) work. For example, in 1981 John Laing (the third biggest contractor in Britain) reduced its workforce by 16.7 per cent, and Wimpey (the biggest) threw out 15.3 per cent of their workers. In addition to laying off workers, the construction firms have made profitable use of the so-called youth training schemes, which are no more than means to provide cheap labour power to the capitalists at a time when young workers have little choice of job. The capitalists who own the construction industry have also used the recession to go as far as they can to destroy the trade unions in their industry. Many firms—particularly sub-contractors who have for years made fortunes out of treating their workers like dirt—will not consider an applicant for a job if he possesses a union card. The increasing tendency to use non-unionised labour has meant that there are wider discrepancies than ever between workers doing the same jobs on different sites. The trade unions, for their part, have been forced virtually to suspend their campaign against lump labour: these days even some of the most militant building workers of past years are often forced by economic circumstances to accept jobs at below the union rate. UCATT officials admit that as long as there is mass unemployment in the construction industry their power to organise is severely limited. One consequence of this is that construction workers are often employed in highly unsafe conditions. Indeed. it is another irony of this mad system that at a time when there is more legislation than ever on the statute book defending safety conditions for building workers and when the technology of construction is safer than ever, the number of accidents in the industry is increasing faster than it was a decade ago. This is happening because of the need to complete jobs quickly and without care, because non-unionised workers are forced to accept dangerous hazards at work, because many of the young wage slaves being brought into the industry have not done apprenticeships and make mistakes, and because it is often cheaper for an employer to run the risk of paying compensation than to go in for expensive safety measures. In short, the cost of a life is a price which the accountants can afford to allow for without letting profits suffer. That is why. according to UCATT, there were more workers killed in the construction industry last year than were killed in the entire Falklands war.

Before the First World War Robert Tressell wrote what is still the finest account in English of working-class life in the building industry: The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. All these years later it is still a favourite among construction workers—and the tragedy is that after decades of what the lying capitalists call “progress" the conditions are still very similar. One condition which is strikingly the same as ever is the constant concern of capitalists to produce shoddy (and therefore cheap) buildings where they can get away with it. Capitalism is a system which sticks art (pictures of old Dukes wearing blond wigs and tights) in the galleries and claims to revere creativity, but when it comes to useful production shows contempt for craftsmanship and enterprise. It is very easy for idlers like the Prince of Wales to make pious noises about the ugliness of modern buildings while he roams around from palace to palace, but the socialist concern with architecture is not to have more attractive showpieces in central London (the opinionated Prince was sounding off recently about the new extension to the National Gallery), but to have pleasant structures where it really matters: in places where the majority of people live and work. Of course, it would be utopian to imagine that capitalism could allow beauty to take priority over profit: it is not likely that the architects will be called in (by Royal command) to design pleasant working conditions for the workers on the line at Ford or to replace the squalid council estates with homes fit for humans. The majority of workers can only afford to rent or buy relatively dull and badly designed accommodation. Under this system you get what you pay for. That's why those who build the mansions spend their wages on the rent of second-rate homes while the parasites who own the construction companies live in mansions—usually with a spare cottage in the country for weekends.

What will a socialist society do to the construction industry? Firstly, the purpose of the new social order will be to produce for need and not for profit. So, there will be no concern in the minds of those involved in construction work other than to build what people need. No person need ever again be homeless; no person need live in a dwelling which is unsanitary. Secondly, socialism will end wage slavery, where the labour power of the producers is a commodity to be bought by the highest bidder: builders will produce according to their ability, without receiving wages, in the confident knowledge that they, like all men and women, will have free access to all of the goods and services which humanity can create. Thirdly, there will be no need to produce inferior buildings for "inferior" people to live in. Socialism, which will be a classless society of common ownership and democratic control, will produce the best for everyone. As a matter of fact, it often involves more effort to produce inferior buildings than it would to produce decent ones: one of the perverse features of capitalism is that hours and days are wasted by “experts" working out ways to create rubbish when it is easier (but costlier) to create a decent product. Fourthly, socialism will not allow men and women to endure intolerable hazards for the sake of productivity. That is not to say that there will not be accidents, in a society of production for use. but—and this is the opportunity which socialism offers—there need never be another builder killed because construction is organised on a purposely unsafe basis. Finally, socialism will offer the builder the respect which he (and she, let us not forget) deserves as an artist. In a capitalist society the artist is respected for the useless products of his creation— the more ornamental and useless the more “artistic” the creation must be. In socialism we can start taking pride in useful creations: homes, offices, factories, ships, hospitals. Even today you will often meet workers who take pride in saying that they helped to build that housing estate—but they had no control over its design, they were forced to make it a second-rate product, or if it is worth taking pride in you can bet your Jubilee Mug that they cannot afford to live in it. So, instead of a society of palaces for parasites, why not let us build a society of the best for all? Why not, in other words, join the biggest construction industry ever seen: the movement for world socialism? 

Steve Coleman