Life under Capitalism

Kettle chips: not as wholesome as you think

Published on October 2, 2007

It’s an old story. A supposedly wholesome company which takes good care of its workers and which takes pride in presenting a benign image to its customers, is less than happy when its workers want to unionise. This time it’s the people behind Kettle chips who object:

It says it has had to seek advice from “a number of sources” to fight what it considers are union experts in organising recognition campaigns. It did not comment directly on employing Omega Training, part of the Burke Group. The company does not want to recognise a union. It said: “We are very proud of our workforce and continue to believe passionately that direct engagement with employees in the spirit of mutuality is in the best interests of our employees and shareholders.”

A spokesman added: “All our employees enjoy a secure salary (the lowest of which is 25% above the minimum wage); we have a 38-hour week with 25 days’ paid holiday per annum increasing with service, and we offer a blue-chip benefits package that includes 100% sick pay … and a profit-sharing bonus that is open to all employees. We’re not sure what Unite the union wish to do for our employees.”

The union is baffled why the company is so determined to block recognition. Miles Hubbard, Unite’s eastern region organiser, said: “They are a good company with a decent record so we cannot understand why they are being so aggressive about union activity. We were called in by the workers when they did not receive annualised payments for overtime.”

What both sides in this dispute talk around is the simple fact that with an union, the workers at Kettle chips no longer have to depend on the company’s goodwill to be treated right, but have a powerful weapon to force management to do the right thing. At the moment, “direct engagement with employees in the spirit of mutuality” may be “in the best interests of our employees and shareholders”, but what if the interest of employees and shareholders clash? Without an union, the workers at Kettle chips would be at the mercy of the company. Unions are like insurance: you may not need them now, but it pays to have it for when you do need it.

If Kettle chips or its parent company were really as benign as they say they are, they would not be threatened by this unionising attempt. But like many a patriarchal company before them(Remember Whole Foods?), they want to be generous to their employees on their terms, on bended knees and dependent on the company.

Hattip: Avedon

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.