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BLF - FRAMEWORK OF FLESH: BUILDERS' LABOURERS BATTLE FOR HEALTH AND SAFETY - Review - Thomas Klikauer |
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Framework
of Flesh: Builders’ Labourers Battle for Health & Safety Despite
a rather unexpected title, McQueen’s book is about a fight for better
working conditions, especially Occupational Health and Safety
(OH&S). It is about the role that industrial accidents, deaths, and
injuries play in capitalist economies driven by management, its ideology
of managerialism, profit-maximising imperatives, and the real bottom
line. McQueen’s book tells how employers, management, states and trade
unions deal with OH&S. Today,
the managerial prerogative remains a strong feature. The unwillingness
of employers to provide a safe working environment forced unions to
demand worker control. The Frontier of Control (Goodrich, 1920) became
the central issue of conflicts between employers and trade unions.
Meanwhile, trade unions also influenced politics and states to introduce
stronger OHS legislation protecting workers, resulting in several OHS
laws. During the 21st century, this became a contentious
issue for trade unions because increased state regulation in conjunction
with state inspectors sought to replace trade union’s own inspections
at building sites by moving such responsibilities onto state
bureaucracies. The
book interprets new re-regulated anti-labour and anti-OHS laws by
answering three questions. Could giving a freer hand to management
account of ‘killing no murder’, that is, the killing of a worker
that is not a crime? None of those in authority took the appropriation
of surplus value through the disciplining of labour-time as the pivot
for analysis. Instead, the pressure on lawyers to display a mastery of
case law enmeshes radicals in an ideology that they set out to unravel.
Nevertheless, some disparaging attempts were made to locate legal
processes within the dynamics of capital expansion as ‘economic
determinism’. In
sum, McQueen’s book is written by a journalist with a highly enjoyable
non-academic writing style. It has been written by a critical trade
unionist for trade unionists who dare to think beyond the confines of
the current legal structure on OHS. By linking industrial deaths and
injuries to the way capitalism operates, McQueen’s exquisite work
highlights the role OHS plays in a capitalist economy discussing the
core question of ‘why industrial deaths is not considered murder’
under a social-political and legal system that is operated by the
Servants of Power. Thomas
Klikauer, University of Western Sydney |