Violence at work (1992)

From the May 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

If Prince Charles falls off his horse or the Queen Mother gets a fish bone stuck in her throat we are invited to grieve over such matters by newspaper headlines and bulletin announcements to the accompaniment of Big Ben's chimes. When 500 workers are killed at work every year, however, this is not regarded as dramatic news. It is often looked at as something pretty much beyond human control. To describe these deaths as “accidents”, however, can be seen as perverse because although they are not intended by employers, neither are they chance, unpredictable incidents. They are, in most documented cases, plainly foreseeable.

In November 1991, Tony Linehan, the government's chief factory inspector, announced that industrial injury claims have doubled since 1985. On average two people a day are killed at work and 3,500 are injured. Almost half-a-million people each year suffer as a result of their working environments.

The violence of commerce

First let us consider the extent of the problem. Employment is violent. In 1989- 90 426 people, a third of them in the construction industry, died in violent incidents at their work. They were burnt, drowned, asphyxiated, electrocuted, crushed and impaled. In the same year over 21,000 suffered “non-fatal serious injuries"—amputations, for instance—and 160,000 suffered “serious injuries".

In addition, it is estimated that each year as many as 10,000 workers or more die a slow and painful death from the effects of industrial disease.

Most of these deaths are unnecessary and easily preventable. According to the Health and Safety Executive over 70 percent of workplace deaths are the fault of management and their failure to provide proper equipment or training or supervision.

Examining the same problem in the USA. one writer has given the issue a particularly striking perspective. He estimates that in 1972 the number of people in the USA dying from occupational hazards (diseases and accidents) was 114,000, whereas only 20,600 died as victims of personal homicide. Represented on a time clock, for murder there would be one personal killing every 26 minutes but:

If a similar clock for industrial deaths were constructed . . .  and recalling that this clock ticks only for that half of the population that is the labour force—this clock would show an industrial death about every four and a half minutes! In other words in the time it takes for one murder on the time clock, six workers have died just trying to make a living! (J. Reman, The Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Prison. 1979 p.75).

Blackspot Construction is a Health and Safety Executive (HSE) report which analyses the circumstances of 739 deaths in the construction industry between 1981 and 1985. Referring to these deaths, John Rimmington, the Director-General of the HSE, said "they represent a very saddening loss of life, particularly because most of the deaths could have been prevented" (Emphasis added). The report shows that the immediate reasons for most deaths were lack of supervision, inadequate training and lack of attention to detail:

   The figures in this report clearly show that the basis causes of the deaths of 739 people from 1981-1985 have not changed over the last ten years. There were, on average, two deaths every week on construction sites. Ninety per cent of these could have been prevented. In 70 per cent of cases, positive action by management could have saved lives. (Emphasis added). (HMSO, 1988, p.4).
   In another report, Agricultural blackspot (1986), a study of 296 deaths between 1981 and 1984 the HSE concluded that in 62 percent of cases "responsibility rested with management”. Again, in Deadly Maintenance (1985), a study into deaths at work in a range of industries, the HSE concluded that "management were primarily responsible in 54 percent of cases".

There is some evidence, as you might expect. that the toll on workers gets worse during an economic recession. Serious injuries, for example, suffered by young people on the government's Youth Training Scheme increased by 86 percent between 1986 and 1990.

In fact, the Health and Safety Commission published research last December indicating that the number of accidents at work is six times higher than the official figure.

Consider the social system in which these deaths and injuries occur. We live in a class-divided society. One economic class of men and women between them own and therefore control the means by which we all live. They own the factories, offices, transport and communication systems and so forth: in short the means of producing and distributing wealth. The empty and fraudulent rhetoric of people like Margaret Thatcher and John Major speaks of a "property-owning democracy" and “classless society”, and the nationalistic nonsense of John Putnam, Neil Kinnock and the Labour Party tries to fool people into thinking that everyone beneath the Union Jack has a common interest.These are shibboleths which are entirely refuted by the economic facts.

As the Inland Revenue, a body not known as an avid supporter of the Socialist Party, reported in January in Inland Revenue Statistics 1991, the richest one percent of the population today own more marketable wealth the poorest 50 percent of the population. In fact, the top one percent owns three times more than the poorest half of the population.

In this system wealth is produced not directly to satisfy human needs but to produce a profit for the owners of the means of production. If something is not profitable it will not be produced. In the cutthroat economic rivalry between companies to win contracts or keep their customers, costs are cut to a minimum wherever that is possible. Employers do not get rich in capitalism by being kind or charitable. Safety is often an expensive matter to a company. It involves paying for training, equipment and, perhaps, using methods which take longer than those which are unsafe.

The reports of the HSE are replete with how the cost-benefit principle of capitalism operates to cause death and injury but two vivid examples from other sources demonstrate what often happens when profits and safety are counterpoised.

On 13 September 1978, Ford Motor Company was indicted in Indiana, USA, for reckless homicide. A Grand Jury decided after three days of deliberation that Ford was to be tried as a responsible party for the deaths of three teenagers, who were burnt to death when their Ford Pinto burst into flames following a low-speed, rear-end collision. Many people had died in similar incidents all over the USA. One writer on the issue has stated that “by conservative estimates Pinto crashes have caused more than 500 deaths”. (M. Dowie, in Injury and Death for Profit, 1987, cd. S. Hills). The actual trial resulted in the company being acquitted but evidence was produced in the case which demonstrated that Ford was aware of the danger posed by the Pinto but had used a cost-benefit calculation to decide that the cars should be left unaltered with their owners. It would have cost less that 11 dollars per car to remedy the defect but calculations had shown that subsequent insurance claims resulting from the number of people predicted to be killed and injured would not exceed the $137 million that it would cost to recall and alter all the Pintos it had sold.

This sort of cost-benefit analysis, which relegates human life below the considerations of profit, is not peculiar to Ford Motor, Company or to recent developments. It is a feature endemic to the system of commerce. Max Weber commented on this issue in relation to its implications for capitalism in American cities. In 1904 he observed that:

After their work, . . . [Chicago] workers often have to travel for hours in order to reach their homes.The tramway company has been bankrupt for years. As usual, a receiver who has no interest in speeding up the liquidation manages its affairs: therefore, new tramcars are not purchased. The old cars constantly break down, and about four hundred people a year are thus killed or crippled. According to the law, each death costs the company about $5,000 which is paid to the widow or heirs, and each cripple costs $10,000, paid to the casualty himself. These compensations are due so long as the company does not introduce certain precautionary measures. But they have calculated that the four hundred casualties a year cost less than would the necessary precautions. The company therefore does not introduce them. (Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, 1958, H. Gerth, C. Wright Mills, p.16).

It is this sort of thing that may have been in the mind of John Cullen, the Chairman of the HSE, when he said in 1989 that:

The enterprise culture, the opening up of markets, and the need to survive competition place businesses under unprecedented pressure . . . the scale and pace of technological change means that increasing numbers of people—the public as well as employees—are potentially at risk. (Guardian, 4 May 1989).

Within capitalism, economic imperatives will always prevail. In a contest between principles of profit, morality and religion, profit will always triumph.The Chairman of British Steel will not keep Ravenscraig steel works open this year because it is morally better that 1200 people should not lose their jobs. The government will not make Sainsbury and Tesco shut on Sundays because various vicars and priests implore commerce to respect religion, neither will they be shut to protect the economic interests of shop workers.

The economic mechanisms of capitalism mean that workers will be killed and injured on the sacrificial altar of profit whenever the pressures are strong enough.

Anyone in any doubt about this can consider the position of workers as a result of health and safety legislation. The annual pattern of death and injury has been no different under Labour governments than it has under Tory governments, and there is no significant change as the result of the introduction of legislation like the Health and Safety at Work Act, 1974. The annual profile of deaths at work has remained the same every year for the last 17 years since the coming into force of the Act.

Even now there are people clamouring, often with the best intentions, to bring in new legislation to amend the rules of capitalism. They seek to raise the fines paid by companies who kill or maim workers; to make the police investigate all construction site deaths and to make coroners call directors as witnesses so as to incriminate them.

These proposals, however, even if implemented exactly in accordance with the wishes of the reformers, cannot really deal with the problem because they leave intact the system of commerce and the paramountcy of companies. As Marx observed, within capitalism large employers have an interest in supporting safety legislation. By supporting legislation like the Factory Act of 1867, many capitalists were able to improve their positions by, on the one hand, having a hand in making sure the law was not going to adversely affect them and, on the other, making sure that it did impose conditions which could not be met by their less prosperous rival firms who would be put out of business by the costs involved in meeting the new safety requirements.

Only by transforming the basis of the production of wealth can we eradicate the violence of work and make safety its number one priority. In those circumstances it may even be safe enough to allow walking disaster areas like the royals to have a go at some useful work.

Gary Jay

Materialism and ideas (1985)

From the July 1985 issue of the Socialist Standard

Historical Materialism is the reasonable view that new methods of production and forms of economic organisation arise, with appropriate ideas, as classes in communities seek to further their interests and satisfy their needs in given social situations. A contrary view was argued by Max Weber in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Weber denies the strong claim of Marx that social existence determines consciousness by illustrating how the ethos of capitalism predated capitalist society. He proceeds by focussing on certain religious communities in reformation Europe and particularly on Calvinists, as their doctrines were readily cast in the form of maxims governing daily activity.

The Calvinist maxims are varied, but two are crucial for Weber's thesis: that you should work hard and adopt an ascetic mode of life. Thus hard work and frugality as maxims led the early Calvinists to set up as entrepreneurs, exploiting the small force of free labourers, reinvesting most of their profits because their religion forbade them to dissipate wealth in personal consumption.

The general conclusion to be drawn from Weber is that an adequate account of the rise of capitalism must allow ideas to have a dynamic of their own, in conjunction with material factors. Weber is an eclectic compromise between materialism and idealism, favoured by liberal historians and sociologists.

Commercial divines 
Weber's position is that consciousness determined social existence — but only in the case of some Calvinists. The first difficulty is to explain why some Calvinists became employers and some did not. A general theory which holds that some people's actions are determined by their ideas and some are not, is clearly vacuous. Even if we allow the potency of ideas in a few special cases, there is still a contradiction at the heart of Weber's analysis; for those few whose actions were most determined by their ideas, were also those few who set aside their previous ideas to invent or accept Calvinist doctrines. So those whose actions were most strongly determined by their ideas were, paradoxically. those who were  not. Innovative ideas and cultural change are permanent puzzles on Weber's account.

The strong part of Weber's case is the interesting claim that ascetic protestantism and the Calvinist maxims of hard work and frugality helped to build up an ethos that lubricated the passage to capitalist production relations in several areas traditionally governed by guilds of craftsmen. If you ask modern capitalists for the source of their wealth they may say hard work and frugality and deny that they exploit workers. Weber argues not that this is now true, but that it was once, for a few divinely inspired commercial Calvinists of the seventeenth century

Religious revolutionaries
Unfortunately for Weber, Calvinists had maxims for conduct other than frugality and hard work and some of them do nothing to foster capitalism, or they have the opposite effect. Prime among Calvinist notions is the idea that believers must submit to the clerical authority of the democratic council of elders, who in the early days ruled that usury should be abolished. Moreover the history of two key tenets of early Calvinism is fatal to Weber's argument. The first is the idea of predestination: Calvinists were, at birth, already allocated their places in heaven or hell and their subsequent worldly activity (good deeds) were irrelevant as far as their final destination was concerned. Neither of these ideas remained unchanged as Calvinism and capitalism developed. This is the key to an understanding of the relationship between Calvinist ideas and rise of capitalism.

The early Calvinists were reacting against the luxury of the papal and royal courts, the great wealth of landowners and the monopoly power of trading centres like Venice. They drew up a code of life where all were levelled down to basic condition of uncertainty as to whether, in the eyes of god, they were of the elect of not. The rich were further levelled down to the poor by the injunction to work hard and live frugally, while the irrelevance of worldly activity meant that the rich could not buy places in heaven with their charity; the abolition of usury was a direct attempt to level differences between rich and poor. Round this off with the democratic election of the council of elders by all member of the church and a picture emerges of a small popular movement in revolt against feudalism, catholicism and the counter-reformation. The speeches of Calvin back up this interpretation, for he couched his theory in terms of revolution against the old order and was often wildly cheered in the reformed churches where he preached.

So the ground of the Calvinist church was one of the areas of consciousness in which people could identify their interests and fight for a society that would realise what they wanted. Explained in this way, the strong part of Weber's thesis collapses into the theory of Marx and historical materialism, while the subsequent history of Calvinism is even more illuminating.

The unknown power
The doctrine of the irrelevance of worldly activity to the predestination of the individual Calvinist was the first to undergo change. In the course of a century the faithful came to look on success in world activity as a sign that they were of the elect. As Calvinism and capitalism evolved there was great concern with the acquisition of wealth on the part of those whose ascetic moral code did not permit them to dissipate that wealth in consumption. Thus, if Weber's account were unmodified, the conditions which fostered the most rapid accumulation of capital during the rise of capitalism (wholesale enclosures, lengthening of the working day, speeding up of production -  and the enforced degradation of people into labourers dependent on employers) would be an unlooked-for consequence of a church which came into existence with the intention of democratising religion.

So, even if Calvinist ideas did promote the growth of capitalism, they could only be said to do so quite opposite to the way intended. For the early Calvinist father would have been appalled by the rampant exploitation in the early years of the industrial revolution. Yet Weber asserts that capitalism is the accidental consequence of those who cherished Calvinist maxims. A much more plausible interpretation of this whole business is possible of religious ideas are relegated to their proper place.

Calvin's original doctrine of predestination, having become theologically insignificant, was corrupted through the desire of the faithful to give cosmological significance to what they were already doing. The wealth they were busily acquiring was given a religious rationalisation and made into a sign that they were of the elect. But feeble though this rationalisation is, much can be done with it if it is stood on its feet in the ground where it emerged.

In the uncertain conditions of early capitalism, before market patterns became established, traders were bewildered by events. At one time they threw piles of commodities onto the market, saw the lot purchased and made handsome profits; at other times nothing was saleable. So the Calvinists among them reasoned the social situation into their religion. The following quotation expresses the relationship between the ideas of ascetic protestantism and capitalism more clearly than Max Weber ever did:

Calvin's creed was one fit for the boldest bourgeoisie of this time. His predestination doctrine was the religious expression of the fact that in the commercial world of competition success or failure does not depend upon a man's activity or cleverness, but upon circumstances uncontrollable by him. It is not of him that willeth or of him that runneth, but of the mercy of unknown superior economic powers . . .

(Marx and Engels, Selected Works, vol.3, p.104, Moscow, 1973)

The history of Calvinism illustrates how those who now advocate the reform of religious, political or social institutions should beware. The most sophisticated reforms may be turned against their advocates by the operation of an incorrigible social system.

Calvinists may have helped bring capitalism into being; we have to bring it to an end.

B. K. McNeeney