>From the Melbourne Age
(Toby Abbot is Minister for Workplace Relations in the Howard government)
Abbott: a boon to the dark satanic mills
Date: July 7 2002
By Terry Lane
Is it possible that Mr Tony Abbott MHR is a time traveller? Could he really belong in another era and place but has somehow slipped through a warp and has found himself wandering bewildered in the 21st century?
One asks the question because one is determined to understand his quaintly archaic philosophy of human relations. You know his statement: "Most of us would accept that a bad boss is a little like a bad father or a bad husband. Notwithstanding all of his faults you find that he tends to do more good than harm. He might be a bad boss, but at least he's employing someone ..."
Here's my proof for my time-traveller theory.
Once upon a time I visited a "dark satanic mill" on the outskirts of Manchester. The British National Trust has spruced the place up and Disneyfied it to within an inch of its life, but you can still get an inkling of what went on there in the early days of the industrial revolution.
This particular DSM manufactured cotton goods, spinning the yarn and weaving it on huge looms. These looms were so noisy that we take it for granted that industrial deafness was the norm for everyone. The air was filled with flying cotton fibre, so we must also assume that the workers' bronchials were taking a hammering. But there is something that makes this particular DSM special, even among the taken-for-granted horrors of the pre-trade union industrial revolution.
There was an orphanage attached to the mill. The owner had the bright idea of buying up an asylum for parentless children in metropolitan Manchester and transporting the contents to his mill. Lots of little kids, given board and lodging and forced to work in the factory.
At the mill today, stuck up around the walls, are extracts from Hansard of a parliamentary inquiry into child labour. Little children were well-suited to work in the weaving room. They scuttled around under the moving looms clearing out the cotton fluff. Every now and then one would get squashed and killed by the fast-moving loom. This would bring the entire factory to a standstill while the little corpse was extracted from the works. Other workers directed their hatred at the dead child because they lost wages, such as they were, while the plant was idle.
Many children developed rickets due to malnutrition and the unnatural strains placed on young bodies by the demands of the job. Nevertheless, the owner of the DSM argued before the parliamentary inquiry that, although he might be a bad boss, he was better than no boss at all. There were many who believed him. Good people tut-tutted about the rigours of child labour, but it was better than having the little blighters running wild in the streets with the arse out of their pants. Others reckoned that 10 hours toil six days a week, followed by four hours in chapel on the Lord's day, would do them the world of good. The mill owner saw himself - and was seen by others of his class - as a regular philanthropist.
Karl Marx blew away the spurious argument that bosses do the proletariat a favour when they give them jobs. Capitalists can only be capitalists if they are in a position to command the surplus value created by workers' labour, so if anyone should be grateful it is the owner of the mill. Mind you, when boss and worker are bound together in mutual loyalty and respect it is a beneficial symbiosis.
Marx foresaw the day when, under the self-serving dogmas of globalisation and free trade, the owners of capital would be able to draw on such a vast global reservoir of unemployed people for their labour that any poor sod lucky enough to get a job would be so pathetically grateful he would forget his dignity. Mr Abbott reckons that that is the way God intended it to be. He is from another age. QED.