Worker's control, not government control
Workers' control, not government control
NEWCASTLE — GEOFF PAYNE, a rigger at the BHP steelworks, is the Democratic Socialists' candidate for the state seat of Newcastle in the March 27 NSW election. He describes his feelings on the end of steel making in Newcastle.
It's the workers' lot under capitalism that, while you are still fit and healthy and profitable, you can sell your labour to the boss. I am still relatively young, fit and re-trainable, so I am confident I will survive retrenchment. I am not sure that goes for many of my 2500 fellow steelworkers.
The federal Coalition government has made things more difficult by changing the rules so that retrenched workers won't be able to get social security until their retrenchment pay is gone — not that we are talking about much money!
Obviously, most steelworkers would prefer to keep their jobs but BHP is not in the business of producing steel — it is in the business of making profits.
It is keeping the most profitable sections of the plant open. The Bar Mill and the Rod Mill will continue to roll Newcastle's traditional products — the angle iron and reinforcing bar used in the building industry. From September 30, these mills will be fed by steel billets produced in Whyalla, rather than Newcastle. BHP is already stockpiling billets in preparation for the changeover. When that happens, the coke ovens, sinter plant, blast furnace, bloomcaster and all the ancillary support sections will be switched off.
Working-class icons
This will not just mean the loss of jobs. It also means the dispersal of a highly specialised work force with great technical knowledge, expertise and capacity to train and educate others. It will be a sad occasion when the switch is pulled. The steelworks and steelworkers are, in a sense, working-class icons and they will be gone forever. It has been a unique experience working with people from so many different nationalities, backgrounds and ages these past 20 years.
Maybe I could get a job pulling the plant down! It would be strange helping to destroy something I helped create, but I don't think so. They will simply use the giant metal cutters to cut it up and then knock it down. There won't be much rigging work there.
It's ironic that heritage activists want to preserve part of the BHP site as an industrial museum. Steelworkers have joked for years that the place is a museum. The place is held together by rivets that were used to hold steel structures together before electric arc welding was invented!
BHP could have made much a greater effort to keep the machinery and technology up to date, and install clean technology which would have drastically reduced the emissions and spared the health of steelworkers and residents in the surrounding working-class suburbs like Carrington, Mayfield and Tighes Hill.
BHP just want to rip the whole place down. They certainly don't want any ghosts from the old steelworks getting in the way of their plans to put a container terminal on the site.
A superstitious person might say that this is why BHP went cold at the suggestion that a memorial be erected to commemorate the 900 workers killed at the steelworks during its 83-year history. The first recorded fatality occurred in 1914, during the construction of the works, when Stanley Hart, a boilermaker's mate, fell from a scaffold.
The steelworks doesn't have to end like this. Workers built BHP. Workers, and I include white-collar workers, can and should run our industries. We know more about running industry than the bean-counters and money-bags who sit on the BHP board of directors. The bosses recognise this. That's why they try to involve workers in work groups to find ways to "reduce costs", i.e. cut jobs.
History is full of examples of workers running industries by themselves: during the Spanish Civil War, in the Nymboida coalmine in northern NSW during the 1970s, and in Cuba and Nicaragua, as well as the experience of workers' control in the early years of the Russian Revolution. While often imperfect, they are examples of how to create outposts of working-class control in a capitalist society.
However, the pro-ALP union officials rejected the call I made at a mass meeting of the union for a struggle to force the nationalisation of BHP. They squandered the opportunity which massive public sympathy for steelworkers offered. They diverted the attention of workers and the public into all sorts of mirages — a new steelworks, a worker-friendly new investor, a workers' buy out, an "eco-industry park" and that old favourite, "elect a Labor government". The union leaders always supported the notion that it was best to leave industries like BHP in the hands of the boss.
Nationalisation
A campaign could still be kicked off to bring steel production and other vital national resources under community control. The leaders of the labour movement, if they had the will and the guts, could go on the offensive. Politicians like Bob Carr and Kerry Chikarovski would soon shut up about electricity privatisation! Have no doubt about it, the bosses don't like talk of nationalisation.
Admittedly, in some circumstances, capitalists support nationalisation. Perhaps this is what lies behind Nick Southall's (Write-on, Green Left Weekly, March 3) questioning of why workers should support nationalisation. Nick says he prefers the term "socialisation", which the Labor Party has used.
In practice, the Labor Party supports the "socialisation" of losses and the privatisation of profits. We saw an example of this approach in Japan recently, when the government saved the banking system from collapse by "nationalising" the major banks that had gone bankrupt. When the banks return to profitability, no doubt they will be privatised.
What is needed is not government control of industry, but workers' control. A nationalised BHP could be controlled by a board, which includes representatives of workers, consumers and local communities.
Just imagine the public enthusiasm if production were oriented to producing steel for the construction of new hospitals, schools, public transport systems and other public infrastructure. Expertise could be drawn from representatives of young people to design and implement programs to train enough apprentices to meet the crying needs of our society.
Ecologists and environmental engineers could be involved in finding new ways to produce steel efficiently and cleanly.
Is this a dream? I remember a wonderful image conjured up in a poem by Denis Kevans about the expressions on the faces of the copper workers who smelted the first ingot of copper in the newly nationalised Chilean copper industry under the socialist government of Salvador Allende.
It's better to at least have a vision, a dream, of a socialist world than to accept that this nightmarish capitalist one is the best humans are capable of.
[Geoff Payne recently suffered a serious accident at work. Green Left Weekly wishes him a speedy recovery and release from hospital.]