In recent posts, we have been exploring the nature of industrialists. Our novel, Swirled All the Way to the Shrub, wrestles with the complex interplay between industrialism and the human beings who live in the world it shapes.
Industrialist: “A person who owns or is involved in the management of an industrial enterprise,” which essentially means designing, producing, selling and delivering products and services at scale.
Most industrialists share a common set of characteristics. Let us consider three of them.
(1) Industrialists are often willing to expend or use up human beings in the process of making products and services at scale.
Specific examples include:
*The tremendous death rate of slaves of African origin in the production of sugar in the Caribbean from the 1600s though the 1800s.
*The 146 dead in the 1911 New York City Triangle Shirtwaist fire, in which textile workers were locked into their factory during their shifts.
*The 1,134 dead and 2,500+ injured in the 2013 Savar Building Collapse in Bangladesh. (It is worth noting that this incident was essentially the same crime against humanity as Triangle Shirtwaist, but 102 years on into what should be our human culture progressing, and with an order of magnitude more dead.)
*The Radium Girls, who were hundreds of female factory workers who contracted radiation poisoning and cancer from painting watch dials with self-luminous radium paint. The industrialists who ran the U.S. Radium Corporation tried, and ultimately failed, to duck responsibility by claiming that the poisoned young women had contracted syphilis–pretty much the worst insult that could be hurled at a single young woman in an age of more rigid social mores than ours–and in an age before the invention of antibiotics. A hundred years ago, syphilis was always fatal as well as socially mortifying.
*In the days before the Westinghouse air brake linked all the cars on a train into one coordinated braking system, each car had a mechanical brake wheel at one end at roof level. The role of a railroad brakeman was to run from car to car and set these hand-cranked brakes, as fast as possible when the engineer called for a stop. Hard data on brakeman injuries and fatalities for the 1800s are hard to come by, but a notion of the danger involved in this job will be gained by this fact:
Between 1890 and 1917, there were 230,000 on-the-job deaths of railroad employees of all types in the United States.
And then we have the lead industry workers and the miners and the steelworkers and so many more … the list of industries that did not strive to care for and protect their human workers goes on seemingly without end.
We thus come to understand from the hard historical data that industrialists are often willing to expend or use up human resources–human beings–in the process of making products and services at scale.
(2) Industrialists see the world in terms of hierarchies.
A United Fruit manager serving in Honduras in, say, 1923 ranked higher in the hierarchy of the company than did an indigenous Honduran who labored in the fields. In the 1960s, a middle manager at Westinghouse or GM ranked higher than a worker on the factory floor, but lower than the senior level management, who themselves ranked lower than the Board members or the President of the company. In my profession of dentistry, the current corporate sector of dentistry in the U.S. views a dentist as a cog in a large-scale profit making enterprise, and a hygienist as a somewhat lesser cog, and a dental assistant as a yet lesser cog, and so on.
Further, and of critical importance, industrialists generally view the human beings who do the work as existing in rigidly fixed categories. In other words, it never occurs to an industrialist that a dental assistant might become a dentist, or that a frame welder at General Motors might rise to become Treasurer and Vice President of Investor Relations, General Motors Company.
If such a transformation within a hierarchy happens, an industrialist is usually not particularly surprised, but they never anticipate or encourage such transformations.
Hierarchies are actually necessary to the worldview of industrialists. If they viewed human potential through the lens of “all men are created equal,” it would upend their entire structure of how to create products and services at scale.
If everyone mattered the same, industrialists couldn’t use people up and discard them.
(3) Industrialists treat human beings as interchangeable, temporary and disposable.
What this means is, first, that anyone is as good as anyone else for the job, so long as they can meet the minimum requirements. So long as they can read the manual, keep their head down and follow the rules.
And second, that if human beings fail to perform to spec, or get damaged and used up in the work, they can readily be replaced with someone else.
Dr. Alice Hamilton writes about a lead worker:
“It sometimes seemed to me that industry was exploiting the finest and best in these men—their love of their children, their sense of family responsibility. I think of an enameler of bathtubs whom I traced to his squalid little cottage. He was a young Slav who used to be so strong he could run up the hill on which his cottage stood and spend all the evening digging in his garden. Now, he told me, he climbed up like an old man and sank exhausted in a chair, he was so weary, and if he tried to hoe or rake he had to give it up. His digestion had failed, he had a foul mouth, he couldn’t eat, he had lost much weight. He had had many attacks of colic and the doctor told him if he did not quit he would soon be a wreck. “Why did you keep on,” I asked, “when you knew the lead was getting you?” “Well, there were the payments on the house,” he said, “and the two kids.” The house was a bare, ugly, frame shack, the children were little, underfed things, badly in need of a handkerchief, but for them a man had sacrificed his health and his joy in life. When employers tell me they prefer married men, and encourage their men to have homes of their own, because it makes them so much steadier, I wonder if they have any idea of all that that implies.”
No good anymore? Dispose of them, and go get new ones.
There is nuance here, though, and complex trade-offs to be made. I don’t know about you, but I would not want to live in the world of a century ago. No antibiotics, no medical diagnostic tests, no automatic washing machines, no consumer electric refrigerators, no mass media. Iron hair straighteners that women heated over an open fire. Primitive toilet paper, barbaric dental care and no proper shampoo … Industrialists have, in fact, helped shape our modern world and it is a lot safer and more comfortable than the world of the past.
Industrialists have, if we are honest with ourselves, given us great gifts.
The essential question is: At what human and environmental cost? And could many of those costs have been mitigated or prevented entirely?
In our next episode we will examine the economic concept of Externalities. Meantime, if interested in further reading on some of the worst negative effects of the activities of industrialists in history, please have a look at our Historical References on the industrialists at General Motors and United Fruit. These are the two forces of industrialism that we chose to apply pressure on our characters in Shrub. And let us tell you … the rise of leaded gasoline and the offshore machinations of United Fruit were superb examples to choose.
http://www.swirledshrub.com/dr-alice-hamilton-a-remarkable-american-life/