The Navigators
Directed by Ken Loach
Written by Rob Dawber
Screening in most major cities from August 8
REVIEW BY JANET BURSTALL
Ken Loach's latest film, The Navigators, depicts the impact of privatisation on a group of former British Rail workers. The script was written by British Socialist Alliance and Workers' Liberty member Rob Dawber. The Navigators was voted the third most popular film at the Sydney Film Festival in June.
When Harpic, the manager, introduces a promotional film for the new rail track maintenance company, which until then had been part of state-owned British Rail, and reads the company's mission statement, he is greeted with derision by the workers.
The Navigators charts the journey from corporatisation to privatisation, with jibes, jokes and deadly seriousness. It is a story of the slow degradation of lives, a skilful telling of the big picture story through the small story of the workers at one railway yard in Sheffield.
Permanent jobs disappear as redundancies are offered, and taken to pay bills and debts. Once redundant, the railway workers take day work from an agency that withholds work from anyone who complains about safety.
The pressures which lead some of the workers to take these decisions are shown. One worker is having his pay docked by the child support agency. Another worker's wife is fed up with having him hanging around the house after he loses work for making a complaint about safety conditions. He is forced to return to the agency to beg for work, promising not to make trouble.
While the workers argue against managements' inexorable push to cut costs, the small acts of resistance that take place are designed to protest and impede rather than stop the whole project.
The Navigators is not about a successful fight against privatisation, because that would be a lie. The railways in Britain were privatised. The film is not even about organising to resist the privatisation and losing. If it had been, it could only have shown resistance as being doomed.
Loach's film is about the consequences of privatisation: poverty, damaged relationships, physical danger and, above all, moral decay and social disintegration. It is a story about the necessity of resistance.
The Sydney Morning Herald's review of The Navigators claimed that "the message that privatisation of public services has a human cost is undermined by its sledgehammer politics". But it is privatisation which has been the sledgehammer in Australia $85 billion worth of government assets were sold during the 1990s.
Even more jobs and services were placed under private control through out-sourcing or were subjected to the profit motive through corporatisation. There is a possible connection between Australia's relatively high level of working hours and the high level of privatisation. The spin-off from privatisation could well affect the entire labour force.
Australian railway workers face increased pressure since the national freight rail network was sold at the beginning of this year to a private consortium that includes Chris Corrigan's Lang Corporation. A union deal is reported to include a promise that there will be no forced redundancies for three years. But however quickly or slowly it comes, Corrigan and co will be out to increase exploitation and reduce labour costs.
Rob Dawber, the film's script writer, died of mesothelioma contracted from handling asbestos while he worked on the British railways (while they were still state owned). He fought his illness for more than two years, defying a prognosis of six months.
Dawber saw the fine cut of the film just before he died. His family accepted his BAFTA (British Film Industry) craft award for best new writer in 2001. Rob was a socialist, a member of Workers Liberty in Britain, and only weeks before he died he was nominated for pre-selection as a Socialist Alliance candidate.
Dawber's legacy is a powerful movie which shows us what workers face if they do not find the will and means to resist.
From Green Left Weekly, August 7, 2002.
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