Arbeit macht frei

“The road to happiness and prosperity lies in an organized diminution of work.” – Bertrand Russell

Almost eight decades ago on the 28 January 1948 a Douglas Aircraft Corporation DC 3 chartered by the US Immigration and Naturalisation Service was cruising over the Diablo Range near Coalinga in California. A trail of white vapour emerged from its left engine and suddenly ignited. The left wing was ripped from its fuselage and a spectacular fireball erupted as the Gooney Bird plunged into the Los Gatos canyon. There were no survivors and the casualties included several flight crew, a US immigration official and 28 migrant farm labourers awaiting extradition following termination of their contracts under the intimidating US Bracero Program.

The aircraft was certified to carry only 26 passengers and its routine safety inspection was overdue. It exceeded its permitted weight allowance and several of the migrant labourers were casually dispersed amongst the aircraft luggage. Amidst the wreckage, bodies were scattered like dry leaves across the topsoil and the unidentified peons were eventually buried in a mass grave at Holy Cross cemetery near Fresno in California. Initial mainstream media reports identified the flight crew although the braceros were nonchalantly categorised as deportees or illegal immigrants.

The tragedy inspired a protest song from the late Woody Guthrie, which has since been covered by Bob Dylan, Paddy Reilly, Billy Bragg, Bruce Springsteen, Nanci Griffith and many other radical or activist musicians. Following a prolonged campaign with painstaking research an official memorial identified each of the victims. It was unveiled at the Holy Cross cemetery on Labor Day in September 2013.

Childers Palace

More than five decades after the Los Gatos tragedy, a fire at the Childers Palace backpackers hostel in Queensland Australia resulted in the deaths of 15 young tourists. Local agricultural and horticultural businesses used the Cannery Row flophouse as a recruitment hub. Many of its peripatetic residents were offered operose McJobs and subjugated via contingent labour hire arrangements.

Compensation typically consisted of parsimonious reimbursements with soiled banknotes without any payslips. The dirty money was then rapidly laundered and promptly evaporated on grog and poker machines at the closest watering hole or through the nags and then the dish lickers in the local TAB.

The ageing two-storey wooden structure was a tinderbox and many guests shared the lodgings using tiered sleeping arrangements. The upper dormitory accounted for ten of the victims. Access to its emergency exit was blocked by a bunkbed and the windows were fitted with steel security bars. Smoke detectors throughout the entire structure were never maintained and fire alarms had been disabled.

Many passports and other personal belongings were destroyed during the fire and identification of the deceased was exacerbated by rudimentary guest registration protocols. Following the coronial inquest no criminal charges were ever initiated against the hostel owners or its operators.

The Song Remains the Same

We’ve seen this movie numerous times and it is eerily reminiscent of itinerant hop pickers from George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London or impoverished farmers fleeing the Oklahoma dust bowl in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. Meanwhile, Tom Joad’s skeleton continues rattling in boardroom cupboards at the head of Australia’s despotic and coercive retail and consumer services supply chain.

Extensive lobbying by the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry under Peter Hendy and from Garry Brack at the NSW Employers Federation eventually triggered critical amendments to work health and safety legislation. This was accomplished through the Council of Australian Governments during the egregious leadership of a hubristic show pony.

The former NSW premier, Kristina Keneally described Kevin Rudd as a psychopathic narcissist. Other colleagues offered numerous terms of endearment such as a megalomaniac, a bully, a brat and a bastard. One former minister even proclaimed he would chew his own arm off rather than ever work him again.

The harmonisation process was a trojan horse. Its focus on national uniformity attenuated the absolute standard of duty of care and abolished its reverse onus of proof. It provided many transnational conglomerates with impunity and a freedom to harm and the current legislative framework still resembles a dog’s breakfast.

During the 2013 federal election campaign the Member for Warringah engaged in some classic Orwellian doublespeak. The fissilingual fecund mad monk proclaimed his party’s notorious WorkChoices industrial relations framework was dead, buried and cremated but categorically refused to exclude any amendments to legislation.

Following a landslide victory, the oppressive arrangement was promptly regurgitated and deceptively marketed as a fashionable accord. It was cunningly rebranded as the gig economy, which is no better than vassalage, peonage or serfdom. This obscured employer and employee relationships and involved extensive uberisation of the workforce. It obfuscated duty of care principles under common law and generated widespread exploitation of temporary migrants and working holiday makers or backpackers.

Many of the embellished McJobs from superficially accredited job service providers offered erratic and fluctuating incomes without any prospects of career development and invariably involved wage theft, underpayment, underemployment and even sexual servitude. The rampant exploitation is enabled by the federal government under its Pacific Australia Labour Mobility scheme, which is reminiscent of blackbirding and is antagonised by a chaotic immigration visa system.

Dickensian Working Conditions

The exploitation of itinerant workers and Dickensian working conditions across Queensland’s Wide Bay region using contingent labour hire is well documented. Most of the findings reflect and align with the ABC Four Corners investigation entitled Slaving Away, which was broadcast back in May 2015. It revealed the horrific plight of temporary migrants in a first world country under a banana republic bondage. The racketeering, organised spivvery and carnage is widespread throughout Australian gulags and is corroborated by extensive reports from several official inquiries.

The Forsyth Inquiry into the labour hire industry and insecure work across Victoria during 2015/6 received almost seven hundred written submissions. Many reports and testimonies claimed that contingent or casual labourers were often disparaged and categorised as inferior or substandard workers.

In 2021/2, a federal senate select committee under Senator Tony Sheldon and Matt Canavan, the Member for Palermo, reviewed job security across Australia. Many disturbing personal statements provided additional substantive and alarming evidence. Numerous written submissions revealed the magnitude of oppression and intimidation. More recently, the Be Our Guests report addresses modern slavery risks for temporary migrant workers in rural and regional New South Wales.

Gangster Capitalism

In an era of unfettered gangster capitalism Australia’s supermarket duopoly sits at the head of a brutal supply chain. Its mercenary and sociopathic senior executives have embarked on a prolonged race to the bottom, which is supported by a feudal system of indentured servitude or vassalage.

It is often juxtaposed in the shopping aisles of major retail outlets offering bargain sales with beguiling billboard iconography. This frequently features avuncular farmers alongside contented growers gleaming over bountiful handcarts or barrels of fresh organic produce. The reality is aesthetic displays or arrangements of genetically modified tasteless stodge from warehouses under controlled atmosphere storage.

This exerts relentless pressure to reduce overheads, which significantly increases the risk of significant injury or death, especially amongst vulnerable migrants at the bottom of the supply chain near the human-machine interface. Maybe the ubiquitous suprasurveillance cameras in retail outlets should target what is happening upstream in the supply chain before the produce reaches the supermarket shelves.

The recent reconfiguration of legislative requirements under the Australian Industrial Chemicals Introduction Scheme enables industry to classify certain chemicals, without any public disclosure or statutory notification. This includes many herbicides, pesticides and other agricultural or horticultural chemicals.

The revamp was sanctioned by the federal minister for disease amidst a neoliberal maelstrom that preferred corporate and state interests over public safety. Moreover, our federal government has yet to ratify several important International Labour Organization (ILO) conventions covering the use and handling of chemicals, which include C139 – Occupational Cancer Convention and C170 – Chemicals Convention.

Meanwhile, deification of the Friedman doctrine or shareholder theory slakes the ravenous maws of investors and generates accelerating inequality amongst a foreboding and escalating subculture of disenchanted precariats. Much of this is way beyond the gaze of mindless consumers shopping on credit for items that thrill for a minute and last for a moment, which they typically want but don’t really need.

The callous structure is reinforced by a brutal and relentless neoliberal war on welfare, which includes the notorious Work for the Dole program. In April 2016 at Toowoomba showgrounds west of Brisbane, a teenager participating in the scheme suffered fatal head injuries after falling from a flatbed trailer towed by a tractor.

Shouting is often inversely proportional to knowledge and several requests under freedom of information were repeatedly ignored by the former federal attorney-general and industrial relations minister. An official report into the fatality or details of any risk assessment pertaining to the activity were never publicly released by the Liberal National coalition government.

This coercive program was fortified by the sinister Centrelink Robodebt recovery scheme and social security legislation, which still imposes a reverse onus of proof upon welfare recipients. The ruthless campaign to reduce the federal government budget deficit generated yet another slogan from Australia’s sanctimonious mooncalf who proclaimed the best form of welfare is a job.

Arbeit macht frei

This reflects and aligns with the phrase Arbeit macht frei, which is idiomatically translated as work liberates or sets you free. The mantra was used throughout Germany during the 1930s to counteract the scourge of unemployment and eventually appeared above entrance gates at Auschwitz, Mauthausen-Gusen and many other Nazi concentration camps.

It originated from a novel by Lorenz Diefenbach and extolled the virtue of labour. The indoctrinating refrain promised liberation but the eventual outcome with its devastating humanitarian consequences was not the kind anyone wanted or envisaged. Never again indeed. Slogans are not solutions.

It is almost eight decades since the tragic Los Gatos canyon air disaster and cohorts of vulnerable migrants and working holiday makers or backpackers remain drudging and toiling across Australia’s killing fields throughout the horticultural and agricultural sectors.

Despite countless coronial inquests and numerous official inquiries the only substantial changes are the escalating cost and inferior quality of nutritious fresh fruit and vegetables. You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. Just follow the money. If you are searching for any skerrick of sympathy from corporatised federal or state governments, it lies somewhere between shit and syphilis in their glossary.

Amidst this gigantic festering Ponzi scheme with its increasing unfairness, the long and winding road to happiness and prosperity requires an organized diminution of work. It is a wicked problem and that traditional English nursery rhyme resonates:

Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St. Clement’s

You owe me five farthings, say the bells of St. Martin’s

When will you pay me? Say the bells at Old Bailey

When I grow rich, say the bells at Shoreditch

When will that be? Say the bells of Stepney

I do not know, says the great bell at Bow

Here comes a candle to light you to bed

And here comes a chopper to chop off your head!

Chip chop chip chop the last man is dead.