On February 10th there was an article in the Chicago Tribune that talked about a man killed in a Connecticut power plant explosion. The man’s brother and fellow workers stated the substandard safety on the job site along with the pressure to complete the project very quickly. They claim that there was a lot of tension over the job and the laborers were working seven days a week for up to thirteen hours a day or eighty hours a week! The workers had a negative attitude towards the job overall and would not benefit personally from their intensive work. The safety plan and regulations are still being examined to try to determine the cause of the deadly explosion that stemmed from a gas line. The safety agencies are not ruling out the possibility of fatigue or negligence of the workers to be the cause of the explosion.
The moral issue here relates to Marx’ idea of estranged labor or a life activity that wrongly benefits someone else. It more directly relates to the film Harlan County USA with the thought of workers being commodities. If a laborer dies, it does not affect the company at all; they can just hire somebody else. Marx expresses that the life activity of a man should yield something that the man uses to benefit himself. In this case the power plant explosion, the labor of the man was not to benefit himself. This man’s life was taken while he was laboring to merely earn a wage as opposed to benefitting himself or his family. He was estranged from his labor just like all the other workers at the plant who are controlled by the capitalist. They do as they are told in order to make a wage to sustain their life even though it is impossible for them to move to a higher class.
Marx believes that a man’s labor should yield a product that will better his own life instead of laboring to make another man a profit. With this sad story, a man’s life was taken while working extreme hours on a project that he did not believe in only to earn a wage to sustain his life.
Link to the Article: www.chicagotribune.com/business/sns-ap-us-power-plant-explosion,0,4223586.story
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Good post, JK! It's a typical case in Capital world. For the company, the worker (labor power) is merely a machinery being operating for the capitalist class who grab the surplus value from worker class. A worker died from power plant explosion, so the complany simply go find the other one and take it for granted. All they care about is the worker (labor power) can be used. Sadly for the workers, even there's a huge potentil risk on their jobs, they still can't escape from the exploitation. Just as Marx said, workers can change jobs from one to another but still under control of capitalist class.
ReplyDeleteI really like how you related this article to the movie we watched, Harlan County, Usa. The movie was pretty sad, and this article relates to the movie and Marx really well. A worker died and the company did not do anything about it, as they see it, they are replaceable. Though Marx states that a man’s labor should yield a product that will better his own life instead of laboring to make another man a profit, but how is it bettering his life if the end result is death?
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