John Clarke, former organizer for the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP), posted this recently on Facebook:
Utterly monstrous.
The article above has to due with the elimination of a law which gave construction workers the right to a water break in some cities in Texas. Given the heat waves, such a situation is in effect a denial of humans as natural beings with biological needs.
Yes, it is monstruous–but in no way surprising.
From Void where Prohibited: Rest Breaks and the Right to Urinate on Company Time, by Ingrid Nygaard and Marc Linder (1998), pages 2-3:
The right to rest and void at work is not high on the list of social or political causes supported by professional or executive employees, who enjoy personal workplace liberties that millions of factory workers can only daydream about. White-collar employees who have the freedom to make personal telephone calls, leave the premises to run errands, or chat with colleagues almost at will can also excuse themselves whenever nature calls. Indeed, we ourselves had not focused on the restraints on other workers until patients and clients poignantly complained of them. While we were dismayed to discover that workers lacked an acknowledged legal right to void at work, the patients and clients were amazed by outsiders’ naive belief that their employers would permit them to perform this basic bodily function when necessary. Their plight crystallized for us in one afternoon when two women with very different kinds of jobs related how they dealt with their bladder’s call at work: a factory worker, not allowed a break for six-hour stretches, voided into pads worn inside her uniform (which, incidentally, cost her almost one-tenth of her weekly wages); and a kindergarten teacher in a school without aides had to take all twenty children with her to the bathroom and line them up outside the stall door while she voided.
That such examples are not extraordinary is borne out by many recent reports. In a startling account of harried workers in chicken processing plants— an industry in which it is not unheard-of for firms to enforce rules prohibiting employees from going to the bathroom more than once a week “on company time” 3 — the Wall Street Journal recorded the scene shortly before the end of the workday as a worker in vain sought permission to leave the line:
- A foreman with a stopwatch around his neck rushes up. “Come on now,” he bellows. “Pump it up!” Down the chain, a worker named Jose yells and waves wildly, like a drowning man. Bathroom trips are discouraged and require approval. But the foreman can’t hear because of the din, and Jose is left grimacing and crossing his legs. Finally, half an hour later, a weary cheer ripples along the line. “The last birds coming!” someone shouts. Jose sprints toward the bathroom — and right into the path of a cleanup crew hosing offal the entrails and internal organs of an animal used as food [into floor drains. Jose slips and then flops onto a sodden bank of fat and skin. “Gotta go,” he says, struggling up from the mire. “Gotta go.”4”
Marx’s money circuit of capital explains this situation–human beings have become means to the end of a process designed to obtain more money from the process (see The Money Circuit of Capital).
What does the radical left do about this situation? Not much, it seems–other than call for revolution. Alternatively, it often becomes the tail wagging the dog of social-reformists or social democrats and fails to raise issues that affect workers on a regular basis.
At the least, it should expose such situations and explain why they occur at every opportunity.
The Abolitionary 