Destructive technology

This booklet contains the main points of two papers presented at the SERA Conference held in September, 1975 and attended by representatives from Trades Councils, trade union branches, Constituency Labour Parties, the Communist Party, the Coop, B.S.S.R.S., and Friends of the Earth. The Chairman was Bill Jones of the Institute of Workers’ Control.

The first paper ‘The Right to Work and Live in a Safe, Healthy Environment’, presented by Patrick Kinnersley, points out just how high is the toll of “occupational injuries and disease” among the working men and women of this country. “It is probable,” he writes,

“that 3,000 people die every year as a result of accidents and recognised industrial diseases. It is likely that thousands more die from cancer, bronchitis and other conditions, without the occupational causes being identified . . . More than 200,000 workers are now receiving industrial injuries widows’ benefit. More than 100,000 have been disabled by deafness caused by noise at work. There are 40,000 miners with coal workers’ pneumoconiosis—‘the dust’; one in five cotton workers with byssinosis. By the age of 65, 10 per cent of workers have already retired through ill health. One in three workers over 60 has bronchitis. And so on. The list is endless.”

Kinnersely also points out how little is being done to reduce the hazards involved. Standards for exposure to different pollutants tend to be set, not to eliminate adverse effects on health, but to the lowest level compatible with the maintenance of economic stability. For example, small mines, which would have difficulty in meeting the new ‘dust’ standards, are not covered in the regulations. The ‘acceptable’ level set for vinyl chloride monomer (VCM), a potent liver carcinogen used in PVC manufacture, was only reduced as industry’s controls improved and is still higher here than in the U.S.

Inadequate penalties are another absurdly unrealistic measure designed to enforce standards in factories.

“The average fine for a Factories Act offence is now £50; the average factory can expect to be inspected once every four years (compared to the recommendation of the ILO of once a year); there are only 500 inspectors in the field, although under the new Health and Safety at Work Act they have inherited responsibility for an extra five million workers.”

One has to agree with Kinnersely that the problem is economic. I cannot agree, however, that the problem could be solved simply by spending enough money on safety measures as is suggested by the Chief Alkali Inspector. One must take into account that a) many industrial enterprises could no longer make a profit if this were the case and would have to close down (this is probably true of the asbestos industry); b) many pollutants such as DDT and radio-active waste cannot be controlled except by not having nuclear power stations and not using chemical pesticides; and c) sabotage and accidents are unavoidable, and so long as we have large-scale industrial enterprises, we will have Flixboroughs (accidents can only be tolerable if we have smaller plants which make less use of toxic substances).

The inescapable conclusion seems to be that the only way to “work and live in a safe and healthy environment” is by developing a society which does not depend for its sustenance on today’s highly destructive technology.

In the second paper ‘The Right to Work and Produce Socially Useful Products’, Mike Cooley (of Lucas Aerospace, Willesden) points out just how irrelevant are some of the products of our industrial system. “We can produce Concorde, but not enough heaters for all the old-age pensioners who die of cold every year.” Shop stewards, who once fought for more Concordes, have now changed their stand and are working out a new programme of alternative, socially useful products, which can be made to replace traditional ones whose sale is becoming increasingly difficult.

Over 150 new products, some of them very ingenious, have been dreamed up which take environmental problems well into account by reducing pollution and resource damage. In particular, a large-scale windmill is being proposed, where the rotor will run at a constant speed whether you get a high or low velocity wind, the speed being governed by varying the load on it.

It nevertheless appears that many of their products are designed for the capital-intensive society in which we live. It does not seem to have occurred to them that the society of the future will require much smaller enterprises where things are done on a much smaller scale. ‘Producing for need rather than for profit’ is a largely meaningless theme as needs vary according to the society we live in. People who live in Los Angeles, the city designed around the motor car (drive-in shops, drive-in banks, drive-in churches), need motor cars, and to produce them is to satisfy very definite ‘needs’, but ‘needs’ which only manifest themselves among people living in this very aberrant type of society. What Mr. Cooley should be militating for is a very different sort of society in which people do not need so many material goods which, as everybody must now have realised, will be increasingly difficult to provide. This is a far more radical message, one which socialists should begin to examine more seriously.

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