Life under Capitalism – Page 15

Polish builders are human too: FT columnist angered

Published on October 1, 2007

It looks like Sarah Sands’ breezy little interlude in her FT column (found through the Yorkshire Ranter)…

So, my Polish builder first worked on my house only a year ago. Seven days a week, 14 hours a day with his crack team. Barely spoke a word in English. Refused tea or coffee, just smoked and consumed Coca-Cola and chocolate biscuits. I was so swelled up with pride at my good fortune that, last December, I recommended him to a liberally inclined film director. I waited for grateful e-mails but none came. I grew a little uneasy.

Then a few months ago, I commissioned my Pole to do a bathroom. He returned without his team. Where were they? He was a little vague; they had disbanded/gone back to Poland/were busy elsewhere, but I should not worry about that.

I didn’t, until it became clear that he was arriving at 10 and knocking off at five. The driven gang was gone. Now he had a baby-faced apprentice who spilt his fizzy drinks on the carpets and broke the window. Every couple of hours they would down amateurish tools for a break. Finally my tight-lipped resentment spilt over.

“What on earth has happened to you?” I cried. “Why don’t you work any more?”

…perfectly encapsulates the attitude behind the changes described in this article (found through The Sideshow):

Dautel’s decision to backtrack now puts him in good company. Many thousands of German companies joined the march to Eastern Europe and China during the past 15 years, hoping to reduce production costs there. But recently many have been returning, disillusioned. Smaller companies in particular are finding they overestimated the apparent advantages of low labor costs or more advantageous tax laws.

When businesses make dubious decisions to outsource or offshore production because it’s supposed to be faster and cheaper while maintaining the same quality, it’s always easy for them to hide their internal reasoning on why to do this behind the usual m.b.a. claptrap, but with people like Sarah Sands it’s easier to see the real motivations. For Sarah, her Polish builders were not people in their own right, with their own economic motivations, but a magical panacea that would get her a cheap, good quality bathroom fast with none of the downsides of hiring English builders. It’s presented as a crime against nature when that turns out not to be the case. It’s as if the natural order should be that there are those who should get paid well for their work (Sarah, those German firms) and there are those that need to work hard for little (Polish workers, countries you outsource to).

There’s a large dose of racism and classicism involved in this. What Sarah left unspoken is that “her” Polish builders started to act like English ones, when they were supposed to remain forever cheap and hardworking. A lot of talk about migrant workers and outsourcing deals in this sort of cliches, in which the domestic, English or German worker is contrasted unfavourably with the hardworking for a penny a day Indian or Polish worker and how the former better learn how to be more like the latter or they will take all their jobs. There’s a great deal of middle class resentment build into this propaganda when it’s aimed at obviously working class professions like builders, as if these are finally receiving their comeuppance after years of unfairly demanding an actual living wage for their work and childish insistance on taking breaks and not working overtime to finish some media type’s kitchen.

I bet the same sort of attitude, only less articulated, is also present behind many decisions to outsource to countries like India. What such decisions fail to take into account is that workers in Indian aren’t working cheaper and harder by choice, but because they have to and once they no longer have to, they will stop, just like workers here. Smart companies realise that, which is why they both try and make sure workers here also have to work hard and cheap by dismantling social safetynets and are always looking for countries where workers still are fast and cheap. That a lot of this also means sacrifising quality is alright, as long as the market can be persuaded to be content with cheap crap…

Companies that cannot afford to lose quality however are out of luck; they should’ve known not to outsource vital processes.

Apple’s disgusting use of Rosa Parks

Published on October 27, 2005Leave a comment

The famous picture of Rosa Parks in a bus with the Apple logo attached

Disgusting. Barely a day dead and Apple thinks it has the right to use her name in ad to shift more bloody ipods. Think different! As if there’s any comparison between selling computers and, you know, fighting for the right to be treated as a normal human being.

I knew capitalism tends to co-opt revolution, but who thought it could be this blatant about it?

Picture found at Michel Vuijlsteke’s excellent blog (in Flemish).

Bijlmerramp

Published on October 4, 2005

On October 4th, 1992, at 18:35 in the evening, an El Al Boeing 747 freight plane landed on two flat buildings in Amsterdam South East, in the Bijlmer district. At least 43 people died in this disaster. It was a disaster that struck hard in the poor, close knit Bijlmer community, with many people losing nnot just a friend, family member or co-worker, but also their homes. A horrible tragedy, but nothing special: aircraft accidents do happen after all. However, there’s more to it than that…

Some months after the accident, rumours leaked out and were published in the newspapers about men in moonsuits having been on the accident site. Though later research would officially state that these rumours were just confused eyewitness reports about rescue workers, doubt kept existing about these sightings.

After the accident, the Amsterdam health care organisations arranged aftercare for the survivors of the disaster and the people living nearby. They started noticing that a lot of people came to them with strange physical complaints: sleeping disorders, chronical pulmonary infections, impotence, bowel and stomach pains. At around the same time, it became known that the Boeing carried depleted uranium as counterbalance weights; not unknown in airplanes but not very reassuring to the people suffering from those complains. Official reactions to questions about this stressed that no toxic, dangerous or radioactive cargo had been on board of the plane. However, what kind of cargo the plane carried exactly was still unclear. Officially it was all harmless stuff: fruit, perfume and “machine parts”, but there were other rumours.

Especially when it turned out that much of the cargo had not been checked, with not even the
documentation spot checked. Rumours that this cargo did contain dangerous elements therefore kept appearing. And then it became clear that the depleted uranium probably did release harmful toxins during the crash and resulting fire, with medical research done on survivors in march of 1998 showed they had higher levels of uranium in their bodies then was normal.

So what was El Al hiding and why did the Dutch government seem to support them in trying to cover
this up?

Well, we still don’t really know, though we do now know that the plane’s cargo was not as innocent as it first seemed. It’s only in 1999, seven years after the disaster that the whole truth becomes known. It turns out that there was some 6,5000 kilogram of dangerous substances on board, mostly flammable substances of one kind or another, as well as some toxic substances. Alos on board are two shipments of military cargo destined for the Israeli army. This cargo would largely consist of spare parts for DC3 cargo planes. More interestingly, the cargo also contained dimethyl methylphosphonate, a precursor chemical for the production of Sarin nerve gas… No wonder El Al tried to hide this.

All of this finally came to light during the parliamentary inquiry held in 1998-1999 (PDF report in Dutch here), after more and more had been reported or rumoured in the press and earlier inquiries. But is was only due to the consistent badgering by survivors and their supporters in the press and parliament (with my own party, the Dutch Socialist Party playing its part) that the inquiries came so far. If it had been for the then governments, El-Al and the aerospace establishment, all this would still be hidden.

Because that’s the default for the powers that be. With almost any disaster there will be hidden sides to the story, things They don’t want us, the public to know: because they fucked up, because of corruption or powerful commercial interests doing the wrong thing, deliberately or not. Politics will always play a role and if the victims are poor, they will be screwed over…

Planet of Slums

Published on May 15, 2004

Mike Davis, in The New Left Review writes about the urbanisation of the third world (as also touched upon in an earlier post):

Urbanists also speculate about the processes weaving together Third World cities into extraordinary new networks, corridors and hierarchies. For example, the Pearl River (Hong Kong-Guangzhou) and the Yangtze River (Shanghai) deltas, along with the Beijing-Tianjin corridor, are rapidly developing into urban-industrial megalopolises comparable to Tokyo-Osaka, the lower Rhine, or New York-Philadelphia. But this may only be the first stage in the emergence of an even larger structure: ‘a continuous urban corridor stretching from Japan/North Korea to West Java.’ [13] Shanghai, almost certainly, will then join Tokyo, New York and London as one of the ‘world cities’ controlling the global web of capital and information flows.

[…]

But slums, however deadly and insecure, have a brilliant future. The countryside will for a short period still contain the majority of the world’s poor, but that doubtful title will pass to urban slums by 2035. [49] At least half of the coming Third World urban population explosion will be credited to the account of informal communities. Two billion slum dwellers by 2030 or 2040 is a monstrous, almost incomprehensible prospect, but urban poverty overlaps and exceeds the slums perse.

A very frightening article, reminiscent, as Ken MacLeod also noted of science fiction novels like John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar.

Blame mother

Published on October 21, 2003

Mitch Wagner has a post up about mothers being indicted for “neglecting” their children when they come to harm. He mentions two cases. In the first, a mother was arrested and now faces 16 years in prison because when she left her children aged 1 and 9 at home to go to work at McDonalds, an arsonist burned her appartement down and killed them. Both children suffered from sickle cell anemia, which is only mentioned in the context of why the mother is supposedly guilty of neglect. Me, I wonder why there was no support to help her cope with two handicapped children.

In the second case, the mother of a 12 year old bully victim who committed suicide was actually convicted on one felony count of having put her child at risk by creating a home environment that was unhealthy and unsafe. It seems their home was filthy and disgusting: “witnesses during the trial testified that the conditions inside the house were a nightmare of dirty clothes, dishes and debris.” Which may be because the mother worked two jobs to make ends meet and the kid’s father was in prison. The kid frequently soiled himself to have an excuse to not go to school and escape the bullying and slept in a closet surrounded by knives to create a sense of safeness. Nobody but his mother was there for him, nobody cared else cared if he lived or died and yet, after the mother sued the school over the death of her son, she was the one arrested. It’s a fucking disgrace.

Mitch wonders why it’s only the mother who is blamed for these incidents, when in both cases the primary guilt for the childrens death lies with others. Where for example was the father of the first two children? Why did the school in the second case not stop the bullying? What is going on here?

Something that goes beyond just lousy luck, goes beyond being in a singular bad situation. Both these cases are just symptoms, logical outcomes of a rotten system. Dad’s away or in jail, mother has to work two jobs to make a living and has not support whatsoever to help her raise her children, because there are no support systems for her in place. She must work to feed her children but we also expect her to be “a good mother”. In the meantime, the socalled professionals in the school and social services systems neglect their duty, to the point of not just allowing but actually encouraging bullying in the case of the boy who committed suicide.

These women, like millions of other working class mothers in America actually have no choice. They do not have the luxury of childcare available to them and they certainly cannot afford to put their children above their jobs: if they did, they wouldn’t have a job anymore.

What you got here is an interlocking tangle of class, race and gender issues, all excaberating the situation these women got themselves in. First, despite several decades of emancipation, there’s still the default assumption that a mother is solely responsible for her children and the only one to blame if something goes wrong with them, a convenient scapegoat that lets others of the hook. Whatever choice these women made, it would’ve been wrong. If they don’t work they and their children don’t eat, if they do work they’re not taking care of their children.

Second, there is the class issue. If they’d been nice middle class women they would’ve had so many more options, so much more support systems to fall back upon and more importantly, they’d also had had the education to make use of them. It’s an automatic assumption in this sort of discussion that everybody knows how to claim their rights, deal with the city council/school system and make themselves heard. This is not the case. Quite often to claim even the minimum support you’re entitled to you have to make a nuisance of yourself, be persistent and know who to speak to. It helps if you also have a nice middle class accent, as I found out in my partner’s (who does have a nice middle class accent) dealings with the English social security system.

Finally, at least in the arson case there’s race. In spite of the happy “coulour blindness” of those who never have to worry about racism themselves, this does still play a role in how you are treated. Like your class, your race is either an automatic handicap or a unearned advantage. Especially when dealing with state bureaucracy.

All of which isn’t helped by cynical politicians making hay of family values, while refusing to actual help those families and in fact punish those single mothers who put their children above work. Welfare mothers being the lowest of the low, after all. What also doesn’t help is not educating people, especially not educating people about birth control.

This is not an easy problem to solve, partially so because there are large vested interests who don’t want an answer to this problem. The US economy and increasingly every other western economy needs a large, docile working class of disposable workers. Keeping single mothers working long weeks just to survive fits in nicely with this. After all, paying them enough to survive on just a regular job would cut too much into shareholders’ profits… Worse, an educated working class with some job security may turn out awfully militant.

It’s easy for me to say what needs to be doing. There needs to be money and resources available for single mothers so that they don’t have to make the choice between taking care of their children and working. Everybody should be able to earn a living wage for themselves and their children and not have to work eighty hours a week just to pay the rent. Everybody should be taught the skills to be able to deal with government bureaucracy, to survive in a modern society. Birth control should be freely available.

Easy to say, less easy to put into practise. But it can be done. There is no western society that doesn’t have the resources to put this into practise, if it wants to, But first it needs to want it. If you feel about this the same way as I do, get involved. Fight for a living wage, a decent social safety net and education. It’s worth it.