En Passant

The CFMEU shut down this site yesterday. Worksafe allowed it to continue today. Now, the whole thing has collapsed, nearly hitting a lady walking by with her pram, and spewing asbestos dust into the area.

Allegations of bribery have long plagued FIFA, especially since its controversial decision to grant Qatar the 2022 World Cup. But much worse is the plight of South Asian migrant workers brought in to build the stadium infrastructure there: Since 2010, more than 1,200 migrant workers have died in Qatar under hazardous working conditions, and a 2013 Guardian investigation found that at least 4,000 total are projected to die before the 2022 World Cup even starts.

Why the difference in the treatment of the death of Phillip Hughes and that of building workers? In a word, profit. Safety on building sites threatens the bosses’ profit. Cricket on the other hand, as a business, reinforces the profit system, and makes its protagonists well known and loved. Let’s fight for a world in which everyone is safe at work. That means at its most basic more power to our unions, not less.

There are no police with guns arresting the owners of companies whose workers are killed on the job. There are no cries of workplace terrorism when another worker dies at work because profit is more important than people. Terrorism at work is acceptable. That is the bloody logic of capitalism. The time has come to end the terrorism in our workplaces. Giving unions work safety inspection and enforcement rights can make workplaces much safer.

Perhaps the difference in treatment in death is that police protect the profit system, whereas workers don’t. We workers make the profit for the bosses. We are expendable and our deaths at work are nothing to them compared to the death of a police officer.

By their eulogies shall ye know the bosses and their system.

Even in death the bourgeoisie honours its own and those who serve them directly or indirectly. They die for capitalism. The system dishonours those who die because of capitalism. It consigns them to the coffin of history. Lest we forget.