Old sailors’ tales
John Lewis considers the role of economic factors in improving working conditions
Howard Wright’s article (‘Talking Point’, 14 January) has carried me far away. There used to be a plaque in the docks in Calcutta that recorded an extraordinary feat: the loading of 10,000 tons of coal in twenty-four hours, during world war two, in 1943. The plaque did not explain that this herculean effort was accomplished by about 1,500 men and women, equipped only with baskets on their heads. I doubt if their motivation was patriotism; more likely it was the desperate need to earn money with which to feed their children.
By the time I was at sea, eleven years later, the trampship on which I served my apprenticeship was loading cargo in remote ports by more mechanised methods; even so, at the tiny settlement of Thevenard in South Australia, I was happy to receive extra pay loading hundredweight (112 lbs or about 50 kg) bags of wheat by hand, or rather, on my back. Who would carry hundredweight bags for eight hours a day in 2011?
My fellow workers in that remote spot were mostly aboriginals. They were picked up from their encampments in the surrounding country by the foreman with his truck. At the end of the day they were paid in cash. Most did not want to be dropped back at their camp; instead, they asked to be dropped off at the village store. At the store they bought buns. Yes, buns, as in cream buns. (Alcohol was forbidden for aborigines in those days and their diet in the rough was often deficient.)
Sailors, as we all know, can talk all day and all night, but I will stop the stories here. Instead, I will try to draw lessons from my career. Two emerged: first, it is really not possible for me to usefully judge my own behaviour in 1954 by the standards I aspire to as I nod off at the back of the Meeting in 2011. The same applies to others: a young native Australian today might be astonished and puzzled by the above anecdote. And employers fifty-seven years ago can reasonably expect to be judged by the standards of their time.
The second principle is an uncomfortable idea to many Friends who aspire to a plain life, to simplicity, and who yearn for past times. The reason why poor Indians no longer load ships with coal via baskets on their heads, and apprentices or aborigines no longer carry hundredweight bags of grain on their backs, is that it is cheaper and more efficient to use machinery. Standards of living have risen, wages have risen and it has become economically worthwhile to invent machinery that makes sweated brutal labour unnecessary.
We are grateful for the technical advances that have saved life and health at work. Some of the advances have, of course, come from statute. Samuel Plimsoll tried appealing to the goodwill of shipowners, but the acts of parliament in the mid-nineteenth century really made changes. As the crews’ wages increased, hard economic pressure reduced the numbers of the crew, and every chore aboard was mechanised so the ship can still work. Today, huge ships load at Felixstowe as fast as they do in Mumbai and with identical container cranes.
Sadly, I do not see any philanthropy in this. Everyone is happy that ships are no longer loaded with coal in baskets on the heads of low paid workers; but the result was brought about by economics and advanced mechanical engineering, not by humanity.
This analysis, if true, leaves me feeling rather uncomfortable. If advances in the care and safety of the human race are driven by economic self-interest and commerce, it is not an idea any of us can be comfortable with.
Comments
Unfortunately it is not only the concern for the humans that has been neglected, but also the amount of energy put into mechanisation to substitute for them. This remains one of the key outstanding issues we need to address if we are serious about bringing our lives into balance with the capacities of the planet. I don’t advocate a return to the myriad of inhuman labour practices of past centuries, but, with John Woolman, would wish to share worthwhile work but eliminate the ‘vain’ fripperies that pushed so much potentially rewarding real work over the boundary into sweated labour.
By Susan M on 29th January 2011 - 12:21
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