http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2002/07/06/1025667073364.html
Abbott: a boon to the dark satanic mills
By Terry Lane
July 7 2002
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2002/07/06/1025667073364.html
Is it possible that Mr Tony Abbott MHR is a time
traveller? Could he really belong in another era and place but has
somehow slipped through a warp and has found himself wandering
bewildered in the 21st century?
One asks the question because one is determined to
understand his quaintly archaic philosophy of human relations. You know
his statement: "Most of us would accept that a bad boss is a little like
a bad father or a bad husband.
Notwithstanding all of his faults you find that he tends to do more good
than harm. He might be a bad boss, but at least he's employing someone ..."
Here's my proof for my time-traveller theory.
Once upon a time I visited a "dark satanic mill"
on the outskirts of Manchester. The British National Trust has spruced
the place up and Disneyfied it to within an inch of its life, but you
can still get an inkling of what went on there in the early days of the
industrial revolution.
This particular DSM manufactured cotton goods,
spinning the yarn and weaving it on huge looms. These looms were so
noisy that we take it for
granted that industrial deafness was the norm for everyone. The air was
filled with flying cotton fibre, so we must also assume that the
workers' bronchials were taking a hammering. But there is something that
makes this particular DSM special, even among the taken-for-granted
horrors of the pre-trade union industrial revolution.
There was an orphanage attached to the mill. The
owner had the bright idea of buying up an asylum for parentless children
in metropolitan Manchester and transporting the contents to his mill.
Lots of little kids, given board and lodging and forced to work in the factory.
At the mill today, stuck up around the walls, are
extracts from Hansard of a parliamentary inquiry into child labour.
Little children were well-suited to work in the weaving room. They
scuttled around under the moving looms clearing out the cotton fluff.
Every now and then one would get squashed and killed by the fast-moving
loom. This would bring the entire factory to a standstill while
the little corpse was extracted from the works. Other workers directed
their hatred at the dead child because they lost wages, such as they
were, while the plant was idle.
Many children developed rickets due to
malnutrition and the unnatural strains placed on young bodies by the
demands of the job. Nevertheless, the owner of the DSM argued before the
parliamentary inquiry that, although he might be a bad boss, he was
better than no boss at all. There were many who believed him. Good
people tut-tutted about the rigours of child labour, but it was better
than having the little blighters running wild in the streets with the
arse out of their pants. Others reckoned that 10 hours toil six days a
week, followed by four hours in chapel on the Lord's day, would do them
the world of good. The mill owner saw himself - and was seen by others
of his class - as a regular philanthropist.
Karl Marx blew away the spurious argument that
bosses do the proletariat a favour when they give them jobs. Capitalists
can only be capitalists if they are in a position to command the surplus
value created by workers' labour, so if anyone should be grateful it is
the owner of the mill. Mind you, when boss and
worker are bound together in mutual loyalty and respect it is a
beneficial symbiosis.
Marx foresaw the day when, under the self-serving
dogmas of globalisation and free trade, the owners of capital would be
able to draw on such a vast global reservoir of unemployed people for
their labour that any poor sod lucky
enough to get a job would be so pathetically grateful he would forget
his dignity. Mr Abbott reckons that that is the way God intended it to
be. He is from another age. QED.
