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From Survey, International Socialism (1st series), No.52, July-September 1972, pp.7-8.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
The widespread extension of productivity dealing lay at the very heart of the last Labour Government’s strategy for improving the performance of British industry. The implications for workers of the new two and three shift systems which often accompany such deals are already beginning to be known. These include difficulties in eating and sleeping, an increased propensity to develop ulcers and new and heightened tensions in social relationships.
But the grim fruits of so-called rationalisation are more extensive yet. Important evidence on the body-safety implications of speed up is contained in a new study from the Science Policy Research Unit at Sussex University. The study correlates output increases per worker with risk increases. It shows that while output per worker in UK manufacturing industry rose just under 20 per cent between 1958 and 1967, output per accident has declined by 21 per cent over the same period, a savage increase in risk. More up to date figures – when they get researched – are certain to show an even worse situation. For the productivity dealing has since spread further still.
Figures so far released by the Sussex unit do not include statistical portraits of individual industries. And it is these which are necessary to get at the really devastating implications of the drive to higher productivity.
The massive retooling and reorganisation of the mining industry from the mid fifties on, speedily produced a 60 per cent increase in the accidents per shift rate between 1959 and 1966. Whole new categories of risk were introduced by new machine hazards which were simply ignored in the drive to design and commission supposedly high output machinery. It is only over the past couple of years that the maiming ratio has begun to drop again.
But the key aspect of the relationship between speed up and accidents cannot be grasped by considering statistical increases in risk levels alone. For productivity deals are designed to eat away at shop floor control over production. They therefore drain organised workers’ powers to enforce safe working practices. (They do however function to put the issue on more direct foundations by ending ‘health bargaining’ – dirty money and the like.)
The consequences of this diminution of shop stewards’ control can very readily be seen in the electrical contracting and large industrial plant construction industries. Both are in the process of wholesale reorganisation in an attempt to double output without employing any more workers. Both are covered by agreements negotiated without any consultation with the people who actually work in the industry.
On the massive BP Baglan Bay petrochemical project for example, a productivity agreement was signed and sealed between the employers and the national unions long before any man walked on site. The deal very tightly circumscribes the power of the shop steward, and makes impromptu bargaining and action on safety an offence. (There is of course no other way to deal with safety except on the spot.)
On the project itself, the whole working pattern has been stabilised. Workers are forced to reach uniform output levels throughout the whole day for example. This means that their pace of work during the dangerous twilight hours is higher than it was formerly. Accident rates are consequently very much increased, 50 incidents in the first two hours of every winter morning on a site that employed about 3,000 men.
The loss of so-called restrictive practices (working with a mate) also lead to new dangers since the vital factor of having someone to help in a crisis situation has been removed.
Baglan Bay is one of the few sites (or for that matter factories) where information has leaked on the accident rates. This was due to heightened rank and file activity on the safety issue following two successive deaths on the job. But anywhere some variation of the Baglan theme can be specified, despite management thoroughness in keeping statistical information secret.
The worsening industrial safety situation has another important aspect. New working methods are not confined to changed ways of manipulating human beings. They involve the widespread – if not totally uncontrolled – introduction of new chemicals.
The human toll in this field is much more difficult to measure since it only shows some ten or twenty years after the event. Nonetheless manufacturing industry has managed over recent years to develop new industrial asthmas and other chest diseases along with its many new, improved products.
In the field as a whole, the world is presently awaiting the report of the Robens Committee on industrial health and safety. Set up by the last Labour Government with a view to healing the breach with the trade union bureaucracy over In Place of Strife, the committee is under the overall direction of a very appropriate man. Robens could safely be entrusted with the potential political dynamite of a serious inquiry into the terrible social implications of capitalist production. His record in the mines made for excellent references.
But in all probability, his committee’s report will not just be for shelving. There is every indication that it will lead to a recasting of the miserable regulations and duties which now exist for the employer. And there is no danger of this being in the worker’s favour. Already there is much talk of worker safety being taken as far as possible away from the sphere of legal regulation. In effect this would only be a theoretical recognition of what already exists in practice. Every new fact that comes to light about the techniques of factory and pollution inspection indicates that the system is near total collapse.
But such a change would have a tangible benefit for the big employers. They could then get down to doing cost benefit studies to establish and implement an optimum rate of death for their particular purposes.
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