In 1917 a group of young working women were hired by US Radium Corporation to dial pads for watches and other military equipment. The equipment needed to glow in the dark and the radioactive decay from radium was strong enough to keep the phosphor glowing, but also not strong enough to endanger the military personell. The formula was patented by US Radium Corporation, The Radium Dial Company and a couple of others to profit from this mixture called “Undark”. The girls hired to paint watches with “Undark” were specifically instructed to point the brush with their lips. The instructions were “dip” “point” “paint” about 6 times for every watch. This was known internally to be dangerous. Radium is safe when contained in a watch, but when ingested, it becomes extremely poisonous, leading to bone decay, cancer and a very painful death.
At first they reported mild symptoms like aching teeth and fatigue internally, but the company was constantly downplaying them. They were accused to have bad teeth, hysteria and even syphillis. One of the girls only noticed her health became much worse when she switched jobs. Her teeth started falling off and eventually the girls developed what is known as “radium jaw” – when the whole jaw atrophies leaving the person looking like what can only be called a zombie.
The allegations proved too much to deny after a media scandal and because radium was known for its toxicity since at least 1913. But the corporation continued to deny it, even after it settled before the trail to pay reparations.
“We unfortunately gave work to a great many people who were physically unfit to procure employment in other lines of industry. Cripples and persons similarly incapacitated were engaged. What was then considered an act of kindness on our part has since been turned against us.”
As the story was developing, another company called Radium Dial Company was doing the exact same thing. It was instructing its workers to point their brushes with their lips and to neglect their symptoms and the stories they heard from US Radium Corporation. They were told their substance is not hazardous and that the workers in the news had a viral infection. After the worker’s health deteriorated significantly, the company was sued and forced to pay similar damages. Most checks were never collected as the women were too demoralized and sick to come to trial.
Both companies continued operations after the scandals and denied any wrongdoing publicly. The taxpayers had to eventually pay in the 1970s for all the toxic waste that was left after their operations.
While major labor victories make something like the radium girls unimaginable today – at least in a western country – the basic criminal logic stays the same. The decision of whether or not to impose endless misery or suffering on the working people is not seen through the lense of humanity but rather through the likelihood of litigation, worker strike or immediate profits being affected. The likelihood of the state to do something about the criminal injustice is based on the likelihood of this injustice to be in the media. And whether the mainstream media will pick up a case of injustice against workers depends on how sensational it is. If the supression is well hidden, the media will quietly praise the entrepreneurial genius of the owners and the CEOs involved, the state will remain in the pockets of corporate elite, while big business will continue to disguise its assault on people’s livelihoods and dignity as being “pragmatic”, “pro-market” and somehow better for workers’ freedom.
Today, when the ability of our system to coerce people into hard work is much weaker, the corporate world champions the “nobility of hard-work” since the pressures to expand their profits are just as high, while the legal and economic whip to force workers into the hamster wheel are weaker. But hard work is a very dubious virtue.
Consider a case from our more civilized times. A worker in an UK Amazon warehouse had a heart attack and was laying on the floor for 20 minutes before someone from another department called 911. Nobody either from the supervisors watching the cameras or the coworkers noticed or heard him immediately. Amazon is notorious for its surveillance system. If a worker makes a mistake, an automated alert will go to a supervisor who will come to talk to you about it. The same worker who died of a heart attack was reportedly approached 2 minutes later after placing the wrong product in the wrong box by a supervisor a couple of days before he died. According to his brother “he told the medical staff a week prior about experiencing chest pains and headaches. He was told he was dehydrated and was sent back to work”. Amazon denied that the death happened in their workhouse:
“The passing of the employee did not occur at the facility. The employee experienced a personal medical issue (heart attack) and lost consciousness. Several trained team members quickly responded and administered CPR and AED until local emergency responders arrived, within minutes, and took over. The employee was then transported to a local hospital for further treatment, where he was later pronounced deceased,”
After the incident everybody was told to “go back to work”. The internal documentation about these kinds of abuses is abundant despite amazon’s every attempt to keep it a secret. This kind of insanity is paraded as “heroic hard work” by the people who own the information system. Same as before, the state and the media only react when the stories are too grotesque to ignore. Amazon will get a slap on the wrist while the robbing of the working people will continue largely unchallenged. There is clearly nothing heroic about having to pee in a bottle, having no time for your friends and family, becoming physically ill or neurotic as a result of fast paced, repetitive work. All so that someone may get his shoes the same day. But the system is run by wealthy men who have all the reason for people to take pride in how “hard they work”. The harder the people work, the more grotesque the wealth inequality and the less likely people are to have time to think about who is robbing them. They are more likely to blame the immigrants or “socialism” for all of their misery.
Since the 1960s the average worker’s productivity almost doubled. His share of the overall economic pie has also nearly halved. In the meantime, the divide between the rich and the poor has reached some of the highest levels in history. The economic propaganda has been very misleading about this. It’s supposed to work like this:
- The worker-class people and the entrepreneurial-class are working together to increase the economic pie
- The risk-taking entrepreneur is taking the bigger slice of the pie because he is taking the risks
- The relationship still makes sense because even though the pie is distributed unequally, the pie always gets bigger – so your real income will always grow proportionally to the pie
Nothing about this picture was true except for one thing – the pie did grow bigger. Rich people started sitting on fail-proof or too big to fail lines of businesses since the government turned its back on the working people. Any crisis in the economy will disproportionally affect the poor, while the rich will get bailed out. The real share of the pie between working people and the “heroic entrepreneurs” has changed significantly in favor of the capital owners. Working people get less and less out of the economy despite working harder. The divide gets even sharper when we consider that CEOs technically count as working people too in these inequality charts. In 1960s the pay ration between the average worker and a CEO used to be around 10:1 in Europe and 20:1 in the US. Today it’s somewhere between 100:1 and 3000:1 in the worst cases. What this means is – not only does the working person get a smaller share of the overall economic pie. Of the pie that is supposed to be shared amongst working people he is also giving a very generous cut to the CEOs and other high level executives. Since Saubermacher is primarily a collector and treater of waste, this means that the people in Produktion and the LKW-Fahrer have been consistently bringing the most profits to the company. Nothing could ever get done without them. The people who own this company are sitting in a recession proof industry. A so-called natural monopoly. Unlike Iphones which people may not need tomorrow, trash will always exist. This means that the real economic risk for someone in this industry is extremely low compared to other industries. Especially since most costs are put on the shoulders of the public sector anyway. The run the costly incinerators, build the ASZs and offer lucrative long-term contracts. A person with the right kind of connections can be making money in this industry forever. Which is smart enterpreneurship, but also a big departure from this idea of the “risk taking entrepreneur”. In some ways, there is no more caricature picture of capitalism than the private waste industry. People who produce the profits work in some of the most dangerous, stressful and insecure economic conditions. The owners and high payed salaried executives enjoy bigger and bigger profits every year, because capitalism produces a lot of trash and it will not stop any time soon. The “innovation” in chemical recycling and composting come from the Universities, the electric and climate friendly trucks will be paid for by the taxpayer, the cost of waste disposal will continue to climb for citizens who live in the neoliberal cities, while the owners will continue to pocket the difference.
Saubermacher employees will continue to be preached the virtue of hard work and told how “times are hard” every time they ask for a raise, despite the company’s rapid growth and expansion.
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