Culture and Life

by Rob Gowland

Divide and rule at work

In July, a worker in an aircraft parts factory in Mississippi shot dead 
six of his fellow workers and then killed himself. He was white; five of 
his victims were black.

The shootings took place in a Lockheed Martin plant that makes stabilisers 
for fighter planes. Without knowing the proportion of white to black 
workers in the plant it is impossible to say whether the victims were 
racially or randomly selected.

The county sheriff's office said that there was no indication the killings 
were "racially motivated". But Mississippi has always been a racist state. 
The Klan operates openly there.

It suits the bosses to pit white workers against black. It keeps workers 
from uniting against the boss, makes union organising more difficult, and 
keeps wages low.

Average wages in Mississippi are about 40 percent lower than in New York. 
Not surprisingly, Mississippi is a "no minimum wage" state.

Lockheed Martin, a company grown fat on supplying the wants of the US 
military, could well afford to pay its workers top wages. Instead, it 
chooses to locate its plants in low wage states to maximise its profits.

Workers like Doug Williams, working in a highly profitable industry but 
being paid paltry wages are going to get angry. They can see that they are 
being blatantly exploited.

They could turn that anger towards organising through their union (in 
Williams' case, the Machinists' union). But in Mississippi the bosses use 
the prevailing culture of subtle and not so subtle racism to channel the 
anger of white workers like Doug Williams against their fellow black 
workers.

Using arguments popularised in this country by electoral fraudster Pauline 
Hanson, they insinuate that black workers get privileges in employment, 
housing, social security, that are denied white Americans. Anti-
discrimination laws are denounced as "unfairly advantaging" black people.

It's a winning tactic for the boss class: in Mississippi, less than six 
percent of the industrial work force is unionised.

Doug Williams worked at Lockheed Martin for 19 years. According to 
Associated Press, he was angry that he had been passed over for promotion. 
Not surprisingly, he believed "Black people had a leg up in society".

So he seethed inside with frustration and disgruntlement, and tried to 
assuage his feelings of inadequacy and failure by espousing the macho 
patriotism of a racist, white "Amerika" and embracing the gun culture that 
goes with it.

If guns were as controlled in the US as they are here (and they are too 
readily available here, let's face it), then when his anger and frustration 
finally exploded he would have had to run amok with a baseball bat or some 
other relatively non-lethal weapon.

Instead, the press reported that he went to work on the day of the killings 
with his 12-gauge shotgun, his 22 magnum Derringer, his mini-14 .223 semi-
automatic rifle, his .45 Ruger pistol, and his .22 rifle with a scope. He 
also took a lot of ammunition.

The death toll could have been enormous. As it was, with seven dead, it was 
the worst workplace shooting in the US so far this year.

Of course, workers in the US are not just angry and frustrated. They are 
also fearful. At any moment they could be arbitrarily laid off or put on 
short time; their plant might simply close and move to a low-wage country 
like Mexico or Haiti or Indonesia.

They fear illness or accident because the cost of health care can be 
crippling. They are taught to fear foreigners ("terrorists"), people of 
colour, immigrants, people with a different religion, people who dress 
"differently".

They are justified in fearing for the future of their family. The pension 
funds, into which a portion of their wages has been paid by their employer 
in order to fund their retirement, are increasingly proving to be empty.

Enterprising bosses have "borrowed" the pension fund money to speculate on 
the stock market or the futures market or the money market. If they make a 
profit, they repay the "borrowed" money and pocket the surplus (they 
certainly don't add it to their employees' pension fund!).

If they lose, well that's too bad for the employees, isn't it? And, 
frequently, they just take the pension fund money and use it to finance 
company expansion, takeovers or modernisation.

Supposedly, this will make the company more competitive, its market share 
will grow and employer and employees will all prosper. Funny how it never 
actually works out like that, isn't it?

In reality, the company spends its employees' pension funds and then looks 
for excuses why it should not have to give any of it back.

To the boss class, pension funds consist of money "stolen" from the 
employers. It "rightfully" belongs to the company, not to the lowly 
workers, who'll only waste it on liquor and gambling and sending their kids 
to college.

The US Government body that insures pension funds against being nicked or 
otherwise lost by employers is the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation 
(PBGC). The PBGC estimated in 1999 that pension funds were already short of 
the money they were supposed to have in them to the tune of US$23 billion.

By last year, that shortfall had grown to US$300 billion! That's an awful 
lot of money that's been looted from US workers' pockets (and from their 
kids' mouths).

No wonder the future looks bleak.