Transcript Death, Work and Consumerism

FIRST, CONSIDER THIS:
Our dependency on
fossil fuels means
that much of our
“economic life”
depends on death!
Is your job killing you?
Occupational Cancer
In China in 2007, more than 100,000
workers died in workplace accidents,
including on the roads and railways. China's
coal mines are the world's deadliest, with
fatal accidents taking place almost on a
daily basis as mine owners push productions
beyond safety limits to pursue profits.
THE STRATIFICATION OF THE
DIRTIEST & MOST LETHAL JOBS
Every civilization has a demand for dirty work and must find someone
to do it. Historically, richer societies tend to import their underclasses,
while the poorer make them out of their own elements.
Dalit worker cleaning the sewers in New Delhi
Credit: Pranjal Goswami
“The Powder Monkeys, Cape Horn, 1865” by Mian Situ. Chinese laborers were
hired for $28 per month to do the very dangerous work of blasting tunnels and
laying tracks. The Chinese, using techniques they learned at home, were lowered in
baskets by rope from the top of cliffs. They hand drilled holes into the granite and
packed them with black powder (and later nitroglycerine) to blast tunnels.
More than 104,000 Americans died digging
out coal between 1900 and 2005; twice as
many may have died from black lung. The
fatality rate in coal mining is almost 60
percent higher than it is in oil and gas
extraction.
--Corey S. Powell. “Black Cloud” (review of Jeff Goodell’s Big Coal). New York
Times (June 25, 2006)
Robert Frank, “Miners at Tea” (1951)
TRIANGLE WAIST COMPANY FIRE
March 26, 1911
146 died, mostly young, foreign-born women and girls. An
estimated 350,000 people turned out for the funeral procession.
Shortly after the 1979 disaster, ads appeared in the newspapers
of high unemployment areas for “nuclear sponges”
A New Twist on Graveyard Shifts
Three years ago, the International
Agency for Research on Cancer, the
cancer arm of the World Health
Organization, added overnight shift
work as a probable carcinogen.
--Maria Cheng. “Graveyard shift work linked to cancer.” AP (Nov. 29, 2007)
INDUSTRIALIZATION PRODUCED LETHAL
CLASHES BETWEEN LABOR & MANAGEMENT
The Haymarket Martyrs' Monument
"The day will come when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you are
throttling today." --A.Spies
Death & Capitalism
"The raising of wages leads to
overwork among the workers.
The more they want to earn,
the more they must sacrifice
their time and perform slave
labour in which their freedom
is totally alienated...In so doing
they shorten their lives …
Thus, even in the state of
society which is the most
favorable to the worker, the
inevitable result for the worker
is overwork and premature
death, reduction to a machine,
enslavement to capital."
Retirement:
A cultural consolation for death?
Jeannette Neumann, Michael Corkery, Marcus Walker. “Stressed States Are
Forcing Workers to Retire Later.” Wall Street Journal (Aug. 2, 2010)
Where did that magic age of
65 come from?
The first national social security
program was implemented in
1884 by German Chancellor Otto
von Bismarck, who established
that "magic age" of 65 at a time
when life expectancy at birth was
about 37 years. Bismarck's
motivations were not so much
humanitarian as they were
politically motivated: the masses
had to be weaned away from
socialism, just as was the case
sixty years later when FDR
penned the United States’
program into law.
So what age nowadays is
equivalent to age 65 in the 1880s?
1880-90
Expected remaining years of life at 30 36.13
… at 50
22.06
… at 65
12.27
2005-7
54.44
35.17
21.62
(Australian figures)
In 1900, 50% of a birth cohort would be dead at age 58; in 2006, at age 79
GETTING MORE MACRO:
DEATH, GLOBALIZATION, & MODERNITY
Taken in Karamoja district, Uganda in April 1980, the contrasting hands of
a starving boy and a missionary. The 1980 famine killed 21% of the
population (and 60% of the infants) and was one of the worst in history.
What is globalization?
 Increasingly unimpeded international
flows of information and capital
 Rising power of multinational
corporations
 Increasing economic growth—and
inequalities
Globalism is the ideology of "free trade." It aims to open up national economies so
that multinational companies, using modern transportation and communications,
can freely shift their capital, technology and products around the world so as to
maximise their profits by:
• Exploiting the cheapest labor costs, shifting operations to Asia where wage rates
are between 39¢ and $1.00/hr;
• Minimising their taxes (60 percent of multinationals in Australia pay no company
tax and 40 percent pay hardly any);
• Merging with and taking over competitors to reduce competition and increase
market share;
• Gaining larger markets in Asia, Latin America, Russia;
• Avoiding legal restraints, especially environmental and labor laws; and
• Shifting speculative capital around the world financial markets to exploit
currency, interest rate, bond rate and stockmarket changes.
--”Globalism—the theory and the reality,” News Weekly (Jan. 13, 2001)
Nowadays, developing countries become the site of toxic
trash disposal or salvaging, such as of computers.
Broken mercury thermometers and other toxic waste from the
thermometer-manufacturing plant in Kodaikanal, India.
Photos by Shailendra Yashwant
A man works on retrieving small parts from disused computers in a room
in New Delhi. India is fast becoming a dumping ground for electronic
waste, especially computers from the US, Singapore and South Korea,
environmental group Toxics Link warned.(AFP/HO)
Poor nations are littered with old PCs. Here waste from electronic
devices litter a Nigerian neighborhood. Computer monitors can
contain large amounts of toxic materials.
Lessons from Bhopal, India
EXPORTING DANGEROUS JOBS AND
POLLUTING WORKPLACES ABROAD
Union Carbide and Bhopal, India, where 42
tons of the deadly methyl isocyanate gas drifted
over the sleeping town, killing more than 5,000
over three days and injuring up to 200,000. At
least 20,000 have died as result of exposure.
 There have been no criminal verdicts issued
 Union Carbide settled with the Indian
government for $470 million in 1989
 90% of death settlements have been for $550
 Union Carbide abandoned the plant, never
cleaning up the polluted soil and water
Other Bhopal statistics
 as of 2010, the factory has
been leaking toxic
chemicals for 25 years
 an estimated 20,000
people have died there as
a result
 since criminal charges
were filed against him in
1991, Union Carbide's
former CEO has been in
hiding
--Source: Greenpeace International
(Washington)/Harper's Jan. 2003]
What is modernity?
 Society and social life is organized around secular
rather than religious beliefs and practices: science and
reason vs. supernatural forces and fate
 Life worlds shaped by urbanization and
cosmopolitanism
 Political realm based on democratic principles with
bureaucracies oriented around welfare and warfare
functions
 Economic realm characterized industrialization,
services, and capitalism
Let’s examine the declining Russian life
expectancies due to the economic shock
of mass privatization following the
collapse of the U.S.S.R.
The Lethal Byproducts of the
Workplace
Tomoko Uemura in her Bath – by W. Eugene Smith .
Victim of fetal mercury poisoning.
An open oil pit near La Joya de los Sachas, Ecuador .
A lethal legacy of Chevron.
LOVE CANAL, NY
This incomplete
trench, built in the
1890s, became a
chemical dumping
ground from the 1930s
through the 1950s.
Developers built
residential areas in
proximity to the dump
site.
In 25 days an adult in Los Angeles
breathes in more air pollution than
EPA guidelines recommend for a
lifetime.
--Harper’s Index, Dec. 2002
Between 1988 and 2008, medicalsupply companies dumped 421,500
tons of active pharmaceutical
ingredients into the environment.
--Harper’s Index, June 2009
According to a Congressional study, 1.4
billion tons of waste is generated by animals
on megafarms in more than 40 states—130
times the amount of waste annually produced
by the entire American population.
--Parade.com IntelligenceReport, Nov. 11, 2007
In the 2007 “Faroes Statement,” two hundred
scientists warned how early exposure to
common chemicals leaves babies more likely to
develop serious diseases later in life, including
diabetes, attention deficits, certain cancers,
thyroid disorders, and obesity. From the moment
of conception onward occurs “fetal
programming,” or epigenetics, affecting which
genes get turned on or off and what proteins are
manufactured, in what sequence and quantity.
PRODUCTS THAT KILL
Some industries
continue to produce
products knowing full
well that either the
product or the
production process
could be fatal.
People killed by Iraqi chemical weapons
in the six-year period preceding the
2003 U.S. War on Iraq: 0; People killed
by pesticides, as estimated by the World
Health Organization, during the same
six-year period: over 1,000,000.
According to a World Health
Organization report of Feb. 2008,
tobacco use killed 100 million people
worldwide in the 20th century and
could kill one billion people in the
21st unless governments act now to
dramatically reduce it.
The Kent cigarettes on the market
between 1952 and 1956 had an
unusually effective filter made from
pure asbestos.
--Devra Davis, The Secret History of the War on Cancer
DEATH AND CONSUMERISM
In July 2006, the New York Times observed how the skull has lost
virtually all of its fearsome meaning.
--David Colman. “The Heyday of the Dead.” New York Times (July 27, 2006)
“Black Friday” was particularly black in
2008. On the shopping day following
Thanksgiving, a crowd of 2,000 people
who had been lining up overnight broke
down the doors of a Wal-Mart in
suburban Long Island, NY. As they
stampeded through, a 34-year-old man
was knocked down and trampled to
death.
In India people are trampled
to death for religious
commitment, in America, it's
to buy a DVD player for $50.
DEATH THEMES IN ADVERTISING
USING DEATH + SEX TO SELL