The exact cause of the deadly crash of a 34-year-old United Parcel Service cargo plane in Louisville, Kentucky, Nov. 4 hasn’t yet been determined. But the deaths of 14 people were not “accidents.” Nor are the hundreds of other lives lost in factories, construction and transportation every year. The Boeing MD-11 plane has the second-worst safety record of any active commercial aircraft, with over 60 still in service.
All work can be organized to be done safely. But under the profit-driven workings of capitalism, cutthroat competition drives the bosses to cut corners with no regard to workers’ lives and limbs. They manufacture shoddy and unsafe goods they know will break down, and impose back-breaking speedup and ever-longer schedules. In doing so they contaminate the soil, air and oceans with no concern for conserving the earth’s resources for future generations.
Mineowners’ drive for profit, which includes keeping unions out, is behind the rise in black lung disease among coal miners. Black lung is caused by exposure to coal and silica dust. It had been virtually eradicated when the union was stronger.
The government’s refusal to maintain and upgrade infrastructure and the shipowners’ drive to use ever-larger cargo vessels lay behind the death of six construction workers when a fully loaded container ship lost power and hit the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore last year, bringing it down.
The working class is the only force with an interest in assuring work is done safely. Safety cannot be enforced by looking to government regulatory agencies, which are set up to protect the bosses.
Using union power is the only road to prevent more disasters. In the late 1960s and ’70s coal miners organized a campaign of strikes and protests that won union control over mine safety, including the right to shut down production if dust levels were too high. They fought for and won the establishment of clinics across the coalfields.
Days after leading workers and farmers to conquer power in 1917, the new Bolshevik-led government in Russia issued a decree establishing control of production “by all workers and office employees of an enterprise.” Workers’ representatives were given access to all company books and facilities. The decisions of their representatives were made “binding on the owners of enterprises.”
The decree was the first step on the road to overturning capitalist exploitation and putting the entire economy under the direction of working people. Like the other conquests of the Russian Revolution it was later reversed in a counterrevolution led by Joseph Stalin.
The example of what was achieved under V.I. Lenin and the Bolsheviks shows what’s possible. Similar steps were taken in Cuba after workers and peasants there, led by Fidel Castro and the July 26 Movement, made a revolution in 1959. They demonstrated that workers are capable of conquering power, taking control over production and planning, and reorganizing society to meet the needs of all. That is the road to ensuring no worker has to die on the job.