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[Previous entry: "In memoriam"] [Main Index] [Next entry: "The .50-calibre question"] 22 September 2003: "Occupational hazards"Via normblog, I came upon a piece by Julie Burchill in the Guardian. Burchill discusses the deaths caused by asbestos, touching on deaths caused by hazardous working conditions in general, and remarks: [T]hey always tell you at school how many people communism and fascism killed, but never ever how many people capitalism killed, because a) they wouldn't know where to start and b) it would never end.I think the flaw in this comparison is rather obvious. After all, injury, disability, disfigurement and death due to unsafe working conditions are not unique to capitalism. True, the death tolls of fascism (I'll assume Burchill includes Nazism under this header) and communism do incorporate some deaths as a result of hazardous working conditions, but these pertain mainly to slave labour. Examples include the many Soviet citizens hauled off to Germany by the Nazis, there to work in the mines and factories, thus freeing up German males for service in the armed forces; political detainees shipped off to the Gulag under Stalin, or the estimated 100,000 Romanian prisoners, many of them political detainees, who died constructing the Danube-Black Sea Canal between 1949 and 1953. But these are by no means the only victims of unsafe working conditions. For every capitalist Bhopal (death toll estimated between 3,000 and 6,000, plus tens of thousands permanently afflicted), there is a communist Chernobyl (estimated death toll 30,000, plus seven million people permanently afflicted). Communism in particular has in practice shown a blatant disregard for what the oil industry calls HSE; Health, Safety and Environment. Many Soviet-built armoured fighting vehicles were never fitted with heaters, so the only way their crews could keep warm in winter was by leaving open the hatch between the crew and engine compartments. Since this let not only the engine heat, but also the engine noise into the crew compartment, and a Soviet conscript's length of service lasted two years, hundreds of thousands of Soviet men were left with severe hearing loss by the age of 20. And speaking of the oil industry, the environmental damage and trampling of aboriginal rights associated with the production of oil and gas by western firms pales next to the damage inflicted by Soviet state-owned industry. The Information Centre of Finno-Ugric Peoples has a page on the Nenets, which includes a paragraph on Danger Signs: There are obvious danger signs in both the physical and the national and cultural existence of the Nenets people. Government industrial and military officials determine which settlement areas, positions, rights and privileges are available to them. Nuclear experiments have been carried out unobstructed in Novaya Zemlya. The Arctic nuclear fleet is stationed at Severomorsk, at Severodvinsk there is the experimental nuclear base, the military city of Plesetsk (Mirnyj) has a launching site for spacecraft and an experimental nuclear base. The Norilsknikel concern alone has polluted 5 million hectares of Nenets grazing-lands and almost 1 million hectares of forests. The pollution of heavy metals has been transferred to the humans through mosses and reindeer meat. The average life expectancy of Nenets is 45-50 years, the suicide rate is unusually high. Only 41% of Nenets are employed and usually in jobs which require low qualification.Much as Pine Ridge Reservation may suck, there are worse places. And this really isn't limited to the Soviet Union, or even to the Warsaw Pact. Take Tito's Yugoslavia, which espoused the concept of "worker self-management," in which, say, a factory, should be owned by a co-operative of its workers. Clearly, in such a system, it should be impossible for workers to be, as Burchill puts it, "literally done to death by bosses [...] in the name of profit." One such factory would have been the coke factory in Lukavac, Bosnia-Herzegovina. In 1994-95, this factory, by then abandoned, was being used as the base for 1 UN (NL/BE) Logistics and Transport Battalion, a Dutch-Belgian unit which was part of UNPROFOR. In 1997, following reports of health complaints from troops who had been stationed there, the Dutch ministry of defence asked the statutory research organisation TNO to investigate. In 1999, TNO's advisory committee reported that the complaints were real, and that there was a link with conditions at Lukavac. I wasn't surprised; the troops had been referring to the place as "Stoflongoord," which translates as "Black Lung Town," as early as 1994. Now, bear in mind that the Dutch troops in question each spent less than six months in this factory; the Bosnian workers who would have manned it when it was still in operation presumably spent years there. We can only imagine the effects on their health. But hey, it wasn't "in the name of profit" so That's All Right Then. I'm not even going to go into the airfield at Prizren, Kosovo, where a Dutch engineer battalion (part of KFOR) set up camp in mid-1999, only to discover the entire field was saturated with blue asbestos at levels of 3.5 times those permitted under Dutch law. Asbestos is a problem, but it wasn't one created purely for the hell of it. The silicate fibres collectively known as asbestos occur naturally, and they were taken into use because they exhibit certain very desirable qualities, such as high tensile strength, incombustibilty,thermal stability, resistance to biodegradation, chemical inertia toward most chemicals, and low electrical conductivity. In other words, they made brilliant material for insulation and protective clothing, except that—as it turned out—the fibres could cause various nasty pulmonary diseases. In the absence of mens rea, calling the industrial use of asbestos [cue The International] a "marathon massacre," indeed, a "genocide" visited solely by the forces of capitalism on the unsuspecting workers of the world is, to put it mildly, hyperbole. I will remark that asbestos, like other work-related hazards, is one of the reasons why I favour the existence of trade unions, but hey, trade unions are really a phenomenon only found in capitalist societies. |
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