After reading the moving account of the closure of the Sydney Steel Plant
in the Halifax Daily News with its implicit condemnation of capitalism, I
was listening to an account of slavery on BBC Radio 4 News over here.
Twenty-seven million people in the world are estimated to be enslaved.
Just one example: in communist North Korea, when the factories are running
short of labour, men, women and children are rounded up in the countryside
on one pretext or another and drafted into the factories. In one rubber
factory, the workers are naked and covered in dirt so completely that only
their eyes and teeth are discernible in the darkness. They have to place
rubber slugs under high-speed rollers. They are permanently tired and if
they are not quick enough then they can easily lose an arm. Sometimes their
entire bodies are drawn into the machinery. Then, of course, the factory
has to send out for more "workers" to help this praiseworthy national
enterprise.
The nastiest periods of capitalism in the whole course of the Industrial
Revolution cannot compare with this.
Keith Hudson
At 05:44 22/08/01 -0700, you wrote:
>Futurework past...
>
>M
>----- Original Message -----
>From: "Parker Donham" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>To: "List" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>Sent: Wednesday, August 22, 2001 4:13 AM
>Subject: [Parker-L] [PBD 8-22-01] A Funeral for Sysco
>
>
>> 23 August 2001
>> Halifax Daily News
>> Parker Barss Donham
>>
>> A faded billboard just inside the Sydney Steel Plant records the days
>> since the last lost-time accident struck each of the defunct mill's
>> departments. When counting stopped sometime last year, Shops and
>> Services had the best record with 255 accident-free days.
>>
>> Just below the tally board, large letters spell out the words:
>> "Caring for yourself. Caring for your buddy. Caring for Sysco."
>>
>> The accident-free record at the steelmaking shop, where the
>> multi-million-dollar electric arc furnace lies cold and still, is
>> obscured by a plastic poster taped over top: "TRANS-CANADA
>> LIQUIDATIONS -- An Asset Management Group."
>>
>> All day Monday, redundant steelworkers shuffled past for one more day
>> of caring about Sysco. They trudged along a slag-cobbled roadway
>> toward a decrepit wood frame building lately converted to auction
>> central.
>>
>> In vacant lots to either side, wild yarrow flowers and purple asters
>> fluttered in the breeze. Here and there, mountain ash saplings fought
>> to reclaim ground nature had ceded a century ago to steelmaking.
>> Clusters of ripening berries caused their young branches to droop.
>>
>> Former steelworkers were everywhere: in the crisp black uniforms of
>> the private security firm hired to keep watch over the sale; among the
>> clutch of protesters at the plant gate, passing out leaflets decrying
>> John Hamm's forsaken promise of retraining for the plant's
>> dispossessed; filing into the auction office to remit $5 for the
>> two-volume catalogue of items for sale. Old friends greeted each other
>> with that mixture of pleasure and sorrow that usually reserved for
>> funeral reunions.
>>
>> Toronto-based Trans-Canada Liquidations, a crisply professional crew
>> in navy blue jerseys bearing an understated corporate logo, had
>> divided the flotsam and jetsam into eight clusters, each with its own
>> building or section of the yard.
>>
>> Office equipment -- a sorry collection ratty metal desks, dented file
>> cabinets, and dated computers, each bearing a yellow TCL lot tag --
>> filled the auction headquarters. One laid-off steelworker hoped to
>> pick up a computer for his daughter, but the smart money said he'd do
>> better in the <I> Bargain Hunter. <N>
>>
>> If anyone ever cared about Sysco, you wouldn't know it from the
>> derelict vehicles scattered about the yard. Beside the Electrical Shop
>> stood a quintet of 22-ton Euclid, Terex, and Scott dump trucks,
>> encrusted in soot and rust. A would-be buyer tried to start them up,
>> but the only one with a battery didn't even flicker when the key was
>> turned.
>>
>> A 3/4-ton Chevy cube van minus its left-rear wheel tilted helplessly
>> toward the missing running gear. Next in line, lot 3304, a blue,
>> one-ton Chevy flatbed of undetermined vintage, lay beaten and bruised.
>> A prankster had supplied the missing letter to its dented Nova Scotia
>> licence plate: FUC 849. A back hoe in seemingly reasonable shape was
>> rumoured to have a seized engine, but who knew for sure?
>>
>> Stepping into the Machine Shop, auction area three, was like entering
>> an industrial museum. Lathes, huge and ancient, stood bolted to the
>> concrete floor. The largest of these, lot 342, a
>> direct-current-powered Stamets, capable of turning a cylinder of hard
>> steel 15 feet long and 56 inches in diameter, would sell the next day
>> for $550.
>>
>> "Isn't this a sin," said Bob Bartlett of Leitches Creek, who spent 34
>> years winding armatures in the Electrical Shop.
>>
>> With his friend Joe Elsworth, a veteran of the Devco Railway,
>> Bartlett surveyed a massive, 70-inch boring mill manufactured by the
>> King Machine Tool Company. The name was permanently cast into its
>> elegant antique frame.
>>
>> "That goes back to the days of Forman Waye," said Elsworth, invoking
>> the name of a legendary union leader and working class politician from
>> the 1930s and '40s.
>>
>> At back of the Machine Shop, spanners, box-end wrenches, and sockets
>> -- most far too big to interest home hobbyists -- lay alongside grease
>> guns, oil cans, pry bars, and drifts. At the Steel Fabrication Shop, a
>> sea of arc welders filled half the floor. Fifty mammoth electric
>> motors gathered dust in the Electrical Shop.
>>
>> Vices. Anvils. Boxes of half-moon keys that keep gears fixed to
>> spinning shafts. Micrometers. Strain gauges. Jacks capable of lifting
>> houses. Foul weather gear.
>>
>> In the Warehouse, shelf upon shelf of equipment never deployed: coils
>> of shiny new wire, cable, and chain; brooms; shovels; wheel barrows;
>> step ladders; bolts; bearings; electric motor fields; pumps; seals;
>> couplings.
>>
>> "You know what this is worth!" cried auctioneer Norman Jacobs as he
>> came upon lot 328, a massive Wadkin wood planer. The machine's
>> 550-volt power requirement would render it useless to most buyers.
>>
>> A generation of steelworkers and taxpayers, contemplating an infinity
>> of accident-free days stretching into the future, silently nodded
>> their heads.
>>
>> <I> Copyright (C) 2001 by Parker Barss Donham ([EMAIL PROTECTED]). All
>> rights reserved. <N>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Parker Barss Donham
>> 8190 Kempt Head Road, Kempt Head, Nova Scotia, B1X-1R8
>> Phone: (902) 674-2953; Halifax: (902) 423-7714
>> _______________________________________________
>> Parker-l mailing list
>> [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>> http://mix.twistedpair.ca/mailman/listinfo/parker-l
>>
>
>
>
>
___________________________________________________________________
Keith Hudson, General Editor, Calus <http://www.calus.org>
6 Upper Camden Place, Bath BA1 5HX, England
Tel: +44 1225 312622; Fax: +44 1225 447727;
mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
________________________________________________________________________
