Contrary to the headlines, this is no standoff between ‘capital’ on the one side and ‘the state’ on the other. And although residual anti-British prejudices that may have surprised some on this side of the Atlantic have certainly been exploited, neither is it a case of US nationalism. Both government and corporate interests are more closely linked than they appear.

Obama faced a public baying for corporate blood in a part of the country where his vote is weak. This explains the rumour, rife in the industry for a short time, that Obama was intending to ‘nationalise’ BP. The incredible $20 billion compensation deal negotiated in the White House was probably necessary for the survival of both the company and the president.

How they did it is significant. The White House deal effectively smashed the $75 million liability limit normally guaranteed to polluting oil firms by the US Oil Pollution Act. Now the act – a key 1990s ‘corporate welfare’ reform – has been torn to shreds as if it never existed. This shows us that the combination of liability protections for companies, what lawyers call the ‘corporate veil’, is not impermeable.

And even in the knowledge that Obama had little option, the macho hype surrounding his promise to ‘kick some butt’ is significant. The challenge to BP has shown us that no corporation is invincible.

On the face of things, this is an historic moment. Indeed, it is a moment that, in shaking the foundations of one of the world’s largest organisations, dwarfs anything that counter-hegemonic anti-capitalist movements have achieved.

The question, then, is: how should we, the multitude who are wholly disconnected from the ‘big politics’ of BP and the White House, respond?

An industrial disaster

The first thing we need to do is to recover the description of the incident as an industrial disaster, with 11 workers dead and 19 injured. If you missed the news coverage on 20 April, the day of the disaster, it is entirely possible that you wouldn’t know that anybody had actually been harmed.

After a week or so it had become an environmental disaster, something different, and, judging by the news coverage, infinitely more serious. In the coverage of the compensation deal, questions about the compensation to the deceased and injured workers were not even on the agenda.

This is reflected closely in the movement of BP’s share price following the explosion. A week into the disaster, with 11 dead, the share price remained higher than it had been the week before. The collapse started on 26 April, as traders feared that BP’s environmental crimes could trigger huge liabilities and expose it to major loss of earnings suits from other businesses. It was commercial life that mattered to Wall Street, not human life.

The left too often upholds Wall Street’s conceptual segregation of workers’ safety and environmental protection. The author and journalist Naomi Klein’s otherwise forensic response was hampered by this artificial segregation.

In presenting the root of the problem as a folly of industrial hubris (arguing that humans will never tame nature), she is ultimately right, but this grand analysis obscures the crucial detail. Maybe Mother Nature is shedding her blood, but why is that a separate issue from the undeniably real human blood already shed?

In the oil industry, the seeds of environmental destruction and of workers’ deaths are both found in an oligarchic structure that controls the industry from drilling to sale on the forecourt. The power of the oligarchy is found not just in the size of those companies, but in their ability to control the supply of oil and its primary products at every stage.

The industry has a virulently anti-trade union culture. The summary dismissal of trade unionists and safety activists is a feature that permeates its activities across the globe.

It was a key causal factor in the Piper Alpha disaster in the North Sea in 1988. On BP’s Atlantis platform, whistleblower Kenneth Abbot was sacked in 2009 for raising problems similar to those that have been established as causal in Deepwater Horizon.

In the Niger Delta, as John Vidal has noted, the super-majors combine to produce a Gulf of Mexico every year, destroying livelihoods and water supplies on an incomparable scale. In the Amazon, spills and pollution by companies including ChevronTexaco have removed whole tribes from the forest, resulting in cultural genocide.

In each case precisely the same features are at play: managerial despotism, lax regulation, reckless production and transportation, and a vacuum of accountability and liability for spills and routine pollution. Yet the industrial structure allows responsibility to be passed down the chain, very often to the individual that ’caused’ an explosion.

The quickest way to guard against environmental catastrophe is to ensure that those who work in hazardous conditions have some measure of control over this work. More than ever before, we need to mobilise around the natural solidarity between worker protection and environmental protection.

This is not to deny that big environmental threats such as global warming will require more than workplace organisation. But when we begin to look for the most radical transformative solutions, we find this solidarity irresistible.

Thirty years ago the Lucas Aerospace workers drew up their ‘alternative corporate plan’, to convert military production to clean and socially useful activity. This is a model that is often invoked (see Red Pepper, Oct/Nov 2009).

In the current climate, transformative initiatives that propose ‘green jobs’ are not particularly politically challenging – not least given the overtures to the value of the ‘green economy’ on both sides of the Atlantic. The work of the Blue-Green Alliance, an alliance between US trade unions and environmental NGOs, is gaining some momentum. (It remains baffling why there have been no such major trade union-led initiatives on green industrial transformation in the UK in 30 years.)

Moratorium

Beyond the demand for industrial transformation, Deepwater Horizon will surely give impetus to the politics of moratorium. The Yasuní-ITT initiative proposes to leave oil in the ground under the Amazonian rainforest in an area that

claims the highest biodiversity in the world.

The Ecuadorian government has requested around $3.5 billion over the next 10 or so years from the international community to safeguard the forest. Last September the German government pledged EUR50 million over 13 years, and Spain was considering a similar plan to pledge EUR18 million.

In April, as the Deepwater disaster was unfolding, 30,000 people representing indigenous peoples’ movements from all over the world met in Bolivia, at the invitation of President Evo Morales. The World Peoples’ Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth set out a radical vision of environmental justice and issued a ‘Peoples’ Agreement’. Its demands included ‘a review, or if the case warrants, a moratorium, [of] every polluting activity that affects Mother Earth, and the withdrawal of multinational corporations and megaprojects from indigenous territories’.

From the perspective of the peoples of South America, care for the Earth and the dignity of human beings cannot be artificially separated. It is in the necessary reconnection of ‘life’, ‘work’ and ‘environment’ that once again we find a new solidarity.

New ways of collaborating and thinking are always connected to the withering of old ones. It seems undeniable now that the dismantling of the corporation is necessary to allow us to recover our dignity and our humanity. All of the key structural features of corporations ensure that they act destructively, and always against the grain of human values of mutual support and the sustainability of life.

Rather than offering alternatives to a world dominated by the ‘pathological’ killer corporations, it is sometimes suggested that recalcitrant corporations should be dealt with on an individual basis, by revoking their charters. In adopting this approach, corporations are pathologised – treated as deviants in an economic system that is otherwise basically okay.

This has been Obama’s approach to BP.

But the actions of one reckless company, no matter how reckless and destructive, are only part of the issue. We are at a decisive point in the history of the planet, one that is too important to be left to remote and increasingly out-of-control corporate hierarchies.

Dismantling corporate power structures is the most pressing task of our time. The revolutionary significance of working towards this should not be underestimated.

The modern corporation is the principle institutional form of capital. To break this institutional structure is to break the legal and institutional basis of private property ownership.

So we are left in a familiar quandary: in order to move towards a more just society, we need to break that which is held most sacred. But this is not an all-or-nothing quandary.

Working for small changes in the structure of the oil industry can give impetus to a new solidarity between ‘work’ and ‘environment’ and to demand real change.

Obama has shown how limited liability protections for one company can be discarded unilaterally by government intervention.

The quickest way to dismantle corporate power structures would be to abolish the privilege of limited liability – for all companies. This is the possibility that Deepwater Horizon has opened up for us.

Sitting in the former managing director’s office, now used as a reception area for visitors, is David Taylor, who has worked on and off at the factory for 15 years. He recalls the problems with the management of the company formerly known as Prisme. ‘There was no structure and no professionalism or pride in what we did. God knows how we got the contracts that we did. There were no work sheets, no keeping track of what was coming in and going out the door… it was an absolute shambles.’

In March 2009, all 12 workers at the factory were told without warning that their employers were going out of business with no funds to pay redundancy. A director they had never met arrived to evict them from the building. They refused to leave – or to allow any machinery to be moved – until a settlement was reached.

‘During the first few weeks we had no plans to set up a business,’ says Taylor, ‘but we still felt an obligation to our customers, so we fulfilled orders using material that was still in house.’ This work, along with donations from as far afield as Brazil, South Africa and Australia, sustained the occupation.

After about a month the workers decided to try to take over the factory permanently: ‘We felt that we always ran the company anyway. The directors were never here, the MD was always golfing. We were effectively running his business.’

‘I’ve always wanted to work for myself,’ Taylor continues. ‘When I had a manager that wasn’t as hard working or didn’t have the same vision as me, I hated it. I’ve been with managing directors on so many occasions and I’ve thought to myself: “How can that man run a business? He’s got nothing about him.”‘

So they decided to approach funders, contacting Scottish Enterprise Business Gateway, the Dundee Development Fund and several banks. They were refused, but were bailed out at a decisive stage in the occupation by a lone private investor. The investor put up enough capital to cover start-up costs, rental and down payments on machinery in exchange for a 50 per cent share.

Partly because of their reliance upon this capital, the ownership model is complex. However, Discovery is run on co-operative principles. No dividends are paid to shareholders; all profits are ploughed back into the company. Within the factory, shareholders work alongside a minority who are not shareholders. The wage structure is also complex, but is based on a policy of parity across jobs.

Insofar as Discovery’s origins lie in the expropriation of the firm from its owners, comparisons with Argentina’s Sin Patron movement are irresistible. There was no stand-off with the police and no protracted battle with the law here, as there was in Argentina, but without the initial occupation the workplace would never have been successfully ‘recovered’ from the former owners.

The model of work organisation also has its similarities with the Argentinean movement. People have to work unusually long shifts to ensure the firm’s survival. They have also learned each other’s jobs. But rather than being a deliberate means of eradicating hierarchies, as in Argentina, here it is an entirely practical tactic, enabling workers to maximise production.

Even so, the Scottish workers say the same things about
their work as their counterparts in recovered factories in Argentina. They have an immense pride in what they do. Working without a boss has restored an autonomy and dignity that comes from working for each other rather than for over-paid, absentee owners.

As David Taylor points out, this creates an entirely different way of thinking about working: ‘When we worked for the previous company, I used to hate coming into work. Now I don’t see this as coming in to work. This is coming in to something that is dead hard, but I love doing.’

In Studs Terkel’s classic book Working, he uncovers in his interviews with American workers a common search for ‘daily meaning as well as daily bread, for recognition as well as for cash.’ With no boss to get in the way, this is exactly what the workers at Discovery are finding for themselves.

The reason that it is a killer industry is not that it is intrinsically dangerous. Most accidents are caused by easily preventable incidents such as falling through roofs or from ladders and scaffolds. What makes construction so dangerous is that workers are organised in a way that makes it very difficult for them to fight for improved safety.

Eighty-five per cent of the work in construction is done by subcontractors. The industry has a highly mobile workforce, with workers often moving from project to project on a short-term basis. This means that injuries often go unreported. Workers are commonly employed ‘cash in hand’, both as a means of reducing costs and as a way of driving down labour conditions in general on a site or a job. This is what the Shrewsbury pickets came out against. In total it is estimated that between £4.5 billion and £10 billion worth of construction work across the country is undertaken cash in hand.

Casualisation costs lives. Health and Safety Executive figures show that the annual injury rate for workers with short job tenure is 5.7 times that for workers whose job tenure is at least five years, while over one in five of all reportable injuries are sustained by workers who have been with an employer for less than a year.

The answer is the same as it was in 1972: construction workers must have real rights and be organised in strong trade unions that don’t get involved in sweetheart deals with employers (see Red Pepper, April 2004). The Hazards Campaign and the trade unions have long argued for a system of ‘roving’ safety reps that would be able to move from site to site, to provide inspections and represent building workers on issues of safety and to stop the job when there is an imminent risk of death or injury.

Extracted from Safety Crimes by Steve Tombs and Dave Whyte, forthcoming from Willan Publishing in June. For information on roving safety reps, see: www.hazards.org/ safetyreps/safetyreps.htm

Useful websites

The Centre for Corporate Accountability

The Simon Jones Memorial Campaign

Families Against Corporate Killing

Defendant Chris Osmond said: “We know that Caterpillar bulldozers are being used to build the [separation] wall in the West Bank. And [the Israelis] used the same machines to destroy the Palestinian village of Nazlat Issa& Thousands of homes have been flattened and thousands of Palestinians have been forced into destitution. It is barbaric and illegal.”

Anti-social behaviour legislation is normally used in an attempt to control neighbourhood nuisance and youths causing annoyance. This shift towards using it against protesters represents a deepening of New Labour’s assault against civil liberties, and could have profound implications for groups protesting against corporations.

The Caterpillar protest is typical of a growing number of cases in which individuals are being prosecuted merely for drawing attention to the much more serious and deadly crimes committed by corporations. But academics have argued that anti-social behaviour orders (Asbos) could be put to better use against the corporations.

Hazel Croall and Jenifer Ross, both corporate crime experts at the University of Strathclyde’s Law School, said: “The Asbo is very well suited to being used against anti-social business, probably more so than against the individual, since the behaviour covered by Asbos is more concerned with the harm caused than the intention of individuals.”

In June the first “white-collar” Asbo was brought by Camden Borough Council against executives of Sony. The corporation was responsible for mass fly-posting advertisements in the north London borough. The local authority is currently investigating another 60 cases of corporate anti-social behaviour.

Last April a dozen qualified electricians working on the Piccadilly Gardens site suspected that they were about to be replaced with unskilled labourers. The electricians were employed by sub-contractor Daf Electrical. The next month they were suddenly removed from the pay system. All 12 walked out in response. They were then sacked, apparently with the approval of a representative from the manufacturing, technical and skilled person’s union Amicus.

The electricians immediately set up a picket that between 30 and 40 workers from Manchester, Liverpool and Wigan refused to cross. Many other workers didn’t even get as far as the picket line and refused to turn up at the site again. The picket has been maintained for a year now; when One Piccadilly Gardens was completed, it was moved across the city centre to Spinningfields, where Daf is providing labour for another Carillion project, this time to build a new court building. So far, 35,000 members of the public have signed a petition in support of the electricians.

As expected, unskilled labourers were used to replace the electricians early on in the dispute. They were immediately put to work on complex and safety-critical tasks, were often unsupervised and were paid no more than £6.50 an hour in contravention of all national standards. The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) has consistently refused to get involved, disingenuously arguing that the use of unqualified electricians is not illegal. In any case, the HSE refuses to intervene in industrial disputes, even when they are over safety. The fact that there were no major casualties at Piccadilly Gardens is entirely down to good luck.

Yet the HSE’s own figures highlight the risks of “de-skilling’ electrical work in the construction industry. In 2001/02, for example, 12 per cent of all fatalities in the industry occurred as a result of the electrical finishing process. And it seems that deaths caused by electrical incidents are on the rise: 14 building workers have been killed in the past two years after contact with electricity.

Economists have a special word for the human and environmental costs of doing business: deaths and injuries at work, ill health and greenhouse gases caused by pollution are known as “externalities’; business does not pay for the physical damage it causes so long as it remains “external’ to the profit/loss balance sheet.

This is standard accounting practice. Accountants still do not have a clue about how to measure the true human cost of business activities – even when deaths and injuries are officially recorded.

Neither do the statisticians have much of a clue about the full extent of injuries caused by work. The Health and Safety Commission estimates that only 42 per cent of non-fatal injuries at work are ever reported: the sub-contracting chain ensures that most injuries never see the light of day. “Self-employed workers’ report less that 5 per cent of non-fatal injuries.

The lower down the chain a contractor is, the more likely it is that they will be blamed for safety problems. But if injuries can be covered up, no one will get blamed at all. And in industries where sub-contracting is widespread, a good safety record is highly prized by employers keen to demonstrate their good conduct to government and the public. The command to keep safety records clean is passed down the line. For the agency worker, covering up for a workmate’s broken wrist or not bothering to report an electrical burn might be the difference between keeping and losing the next job.

Sub-contracting encourages companies to ignore their legal responsibilities. Lord Cullen’s official inquiry into the Paddington rail disaster in 1999 referred to the rail industry’s own research that found 40 per cent of Railtrack contractors failing or refusing to comply with safety law. Sub-contracting caused a “cascading effect’ of non-compliance, with the responsibility for monitoring safety passed down to the companies carrying out the work.

Squeezing the workforce

The aim of sub-contracting is to produce a multi-layered false economy. As the number of participants in the market increases, so the opportunities for squeezing workforce costs are enhanced. Wages are forced down, and the responsibility for paying for training, holiday and sick leave and pension rights is displaced down the sub-contracting chain onto the workers themselves.

The currently fashionable mantra in human-resource management is that sub-contracting and competitive tendering allow for skills and specialisms to be targeted and concentrated where they are needed most. In fact, because this false economy forces cost savings to be made at every layer, and because it is now deemed too expensive to train workers on the job, it actually has the opposite effect. Sub-contracting encourages de-skilling, which in turn increases the risk of death and injury at work. The current shortage of experienced engineers and track workers in the railways is the direct result of privatisation and the creation of a multi-layered labour market.

In February four workers were killed on the railway in Cumbria while working on a maintenance contract also held by Carillion: they were hit by a 1.5-tonne wagon that had careered out of control. Perhaps the most shocking aspect of the Cumbria tragedy is the fact that Carillion was in charge when an almost identical incident occurred just 20 miles away in January 2003. The company can hardly not have been aware of its legal obligation to protect its workforce from runaway wagons.

It is unlikely that Carillion will be made to pay a heavy price for the Cumbria deaths, however. The operating profits of fellow rail maintenance contractor Jarvis rose by 20 per cent to £29m in the year that it was blamed for the maintenance problems that caused the Potters Bar rail crash. Last year two Balfour Beatty executives were charged with corporate manslaughter in connection with the Hatfield disaster of 2000; in the year that the disaster took place Balfour Beatty posted record profits of £86m – up 68 per cent on the previous year. In 2002 Carillion’s own profits rose by 100 per cent – largely because of the number of public-sector contracts it managed to acquire. In the same year, three people were killed in Carillion workplaces and the company was prosecuted six times for health and safety crimes. Yet in September 2002 Carillion was handed a rail industry award for “best maintenance contractor in the UK’. Days later it was back in the dock for electrocuting track workers in two separate incidents. And when fines are imposed by the courts they are derisory: the average in 2002/03 was £29,564 per death. So, the message couldn’t be clearer: not only can contractors kill and maim with impunity; they’ll probably pick up an award in the process.

Appalling health and safety standards certainly won’t harm your business. Even after accounting for Network Rail’s reclamation of track contracts, the portfolios of Carillion, Jarvis and Balfour Beatty are likely to be stuffed with publicly funded projects for the foreseeable future. Nowhere in government will you hear anyone raising the possibility that contractors like Carillion might actually owe us for their railway misadventures. Four years ago The News of the World published a leaked memo from Carillion’s rail maintenance subsidiary GT Railway Maintenance that showed management had instructed workers to ignore or downgrade track defects in order to save them the cost of making replacements. This was not only safety-critical work, but work that had already been paid for.

Where public money is being used to finance building projects, lines of public accountability still exist in some form. Local authorities insert provisions in contracts that are supposed to protect local labour. In Manchester the Daf electricians have claimed that provisions are being breached. But the council still refuses to act; its Labour leader Richard Leese says he raised the case with Carillion and the company told him that it does not use unqualified electricians. Dismissing the dispute as “inter-union’, Leese claims the council doesn’t have the authority to intervene.

It has been left to the striking workers themselves to ensure that casual labour is not being used. In one major victory they used a little-known clause in the Employment Agencies Act 1973 to get the Department of Trade and Industry to remove 12 agency workers from the court building site. The local branch of the civil service union the PCS is also considering a boycott of the building because of safety concerns.

Contrary to popular belief, local authorities still have a great deal of power to protect the public interest. Yet they continue to use privatisation and public-private partnerships as excuses to sub-contract out the democratic control of major public projects. The significance of the Manchester dispute is that it is bringing to light a corrosive human economy of sub-contracting that is underpinned by a decaying system of public-spending accountability. The Manchester electricians have refused to accept the golden rule of cowboy capitalism: that whenever they can, business managers will pass their responsibilities onto contractors and agencies further down the line. We must prevent our elected representatives from doing the same.

Unions and business – “partners’ or sweethearts?

Electricians in the construction industry are covered by an antiquated union-management deal between the Electrical Contractors Association (ECA) and the engineering trade union Amicus. Covering all electricians on construction sites, the Joint Industry Board (JIB) agreement is based upon a model New York “sweetheart deal’.

The JIB consecrates a unique dispute resolution system, which is aimed at bypassing normal industrial relations procedure; until two years ago it barred workers from the right to an employment tribunal. This central part of the agreement was abolished after it was deemed to be in breach of the European Convention on Human Rights.

Under the terms of the JIB, employers pay Amicus dues for each worker covered by the agreement. It is rumoured that this nets the union well over £1m a year. Membership of any other union is aggressively discouraged by contractors and union officials. Workers in the Manchester dispute have evidence that Amicus officials sanctioned their sacking in a bid to preserve good relations with management.

The electricians were locked out before they could hold a strike ballot, but the corrupt politics of demarcation in the industry may also help explain why their dispute has not been recognised as official – a status that would ensure full strike pay. Instead, workers have been given token payments from the hardship fund of their union the TGWU, and the union has promised them legal representation for their tribunal. Some TGWU national officials are unhappy with the dispute and the friction it might cause with Amicus, and this lack of national support has caused problems even with the hardship payments. They were mysteriously cut off for six weeks over Christmas.

Jumping before you’re buried

Jimmy Cullen is an electrician’s mate from Openshaw, Greater Manchester. He was employed as a labourer, on £6.50 an hour at the Carillion site at Piccadilly Gardens. Jimmy walked off the site before the dispute drew public attention to the safety conditions there.

“I left because they tried to get me to do the job a skilled electrician should be doing. They asked me to connect light fittings. I am not competent or qualified to do this. I was also told to work without any supervision, but even if I was supervised I shouldn’t be doing something as skilled as connecting light fittings and wiring up lights. It says in black and white in the national agreement that only a qualified electrician can do this work. It’s not safe.’

Jimmy, like so many construction workers, was not in a position to refuse to do the work. “Whoever you work for, you know they can push you around. Refuse to do anything and they’ll get rid of you. If you are with an agency there is no overtime rate during the week, no holiday pay, no sick pay. Weekend overtime is £1 extra per hour. It’s a joke, but often the only option you have. When the agency phones and asks you to work, you do it because you know they won’t ask you back otherwise.’