Green Swipe

‘WORK WILL MAKE YOU FREE’

PART TWO – SLAVE LABOUR

“I wish that you were here,” be Idsy’s thoughts on this postcard from the workhouse.

Iain Duncan Smith admires Britain’s traditional use of forced labour, which was customary both at home and abroad, and he wants to recreate similar working conditions.  He hopes his magnum opus, Universal Credit, will earn him the satisfaction, fulfilment, and  recognition which he himself withholds from millions of other people.

The history of slavery in Britain is checkered.  Various kinds of slavery or serfdom existed in Britain before and during the Roman occupation, and it existed during and after the Norman Conquest.  The four countries of the British Isles remained divided by geography, politics, and religion, but the slave-trade never respected any boundaries.  Wales joined England in 1536.  Scotland joined England and Wales to form The United Kingdom of Great Britain in 1707, though Mel Gibson had cried ‘freedom’ in 1305.  Ireland joined Great Britain in 1800, though English law had been introduced in the 13^th century following various Anglo-Norman intrusions.

Slavery in Britain was supposed to have ended in the 16^th century during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, but various forms of forced labour continued legally until the 19^th century.  Poor men were still pressed into the Royal Navy, and their wives and children were still used in the mines and the factories.  Destitute people could apply to the workhouses.  Those were the only welfare institutions, and their conditions were kept unattractive, abject and brutal.  Family members were separated and corporal punishment was used to discipline them.  Debtors were sent to prison.  They could ‘work off’ their debts by participating in profitable labour schemes, which were organised both inside and outside prisons by governors and private contractors.

Tory and Liberal governments, which ruled during the 19^th century, were eventually shamed into reforming the employment laws and the prison laws, but workhouses remained open for business until the middle of the 20^th century.

Britain contributed to the international slave trade between the 16^th and 19^th centuries.  It helped to transport forcibly millions of Africans to the Americas.  Its involvement in that oppression ended in 1838 after the slave trade as a line of business became less profitable.  The British colonies in North America had rebelled and they had declared independence in 1776.  The British colonies in the West Indies had become less manageable after slaves had rebelled successfully in the French colony of Haiti; they had declared independence from France in 1804.

Britain helped to deport thousands of European ‘settlers’ and convicts to North America and to penal colonies between the 16^th and 19^th centuries.  Many of those settlers were debt-slaves.  The State prosecuted people who could not pay their bills.  It convicted them of theft and it sold some of them, as though they were chattels, to merchants.  The merchants transported their chattels overseas and then sold them to unscrupulous business-folk, who posed as creditors.  Those creditors wanted cheap labour and they were eager to sign-up desperate settlers, who hoped for freedom and salvation.

The contracts were called Indentures and they usually lasted for several years; they bound debt-slaves to their new masters until their debts were cleared and their masters’ overheads were recovered.  Overheads accumulated and included original debts plus the costs of passage, plus the costs of housing, clothing, and feeding plus anything else that could be added.  It was obviously a racket and it was enforced by intimidation.  The settlers likely worked for nothing.

The official buying and selling of indenture contracts formalised the debt-slave-trade, and made it seem respectable.  The usage of various misnomers for ‘master’ and ‘debt-slave’ made the business seem impersonal; the traders were not ‘masters’ and they were not trafficking people; they were swapping indentures.

Debt-slaves were called Indentured Servants, who knew no difference between slavery and involuntary servitude; they were not owned by their creditors but they were obliged to work for them just the same.  Indentured Servants, who were also known as peons, were actually treated worse than owned-slaves.  Creditors did not take care of them; they wanted to exploit their ‘investments’ as much as possible before their relatively short contracts expired. 

In 1957 the International Labour Organisation adopted a resolution that condemned the use of forced labour throughout the world. The convention was ratified by 91 member nations.

Modern British history began in 1945.  The British working class enjoyed rising standards of living and full employment during the 1950s, but the ruling class were already plotting to return society to the status quo ante.  Other European countries and the rest of the world were automating their factories, but post-war British capitalists did not want to invest in Britain; buying ten spades for ten men was cheaper than buying one bulldozer.  Britain resorted to people trafficking.

Flooding the country with ‘blackleg’ labour from the British Commonwealth of Nations was the easiest way to divide the working class and to bypass the trade unions.  Cunning politicians and industry bosses fabricated the myth that immigrants would do the jobs that British natives would not want to do.  Employers would withdraw training opportunities, downgrade working conditions, and cut wages, and then offer the jobs to immigrants.  It was an awfully clever, capitalist stratagem; unemployment figures rose gradually to 8 million by the 1980s, and they were held at that level.

Consecutive Tory and Labour governments deliberately exacerbated the unemployment deluge by embroiling Britain in the European Union, which fostered creative-accounting and asset-stripping.  Much British property and many British utilities and companies were sold cheaply to foreigners, including the football clubs!  Politicians allowed bosses to decimate British industries; they called it ‘trouble-shooting’.  Bosses could export jobs and import workers to and from the continent.

Abstruse ‘positive discrimination’ laws, which segregated races, relegated British natives to second-class citizenship. Career jobs which offered higher pay and better conditions were reserved for foreign immigrants, but unskilled jobs which offered lower pay and worse conditions were handed to British natives.

Foreign competition battered Britain.  Farmland remained fallow.  Fishing fleets were wrecked.  Many docks, ship yards, and ports were abandoned.  Heavy industries like coal and steel were turned to dust and rust.  Textile mills were torn down.  Car manufacturing was crushed.  Britain became a nation of shopkeepers and shoplifters. 

Politicians encouraged industry bosses to create further unemployment by exporting British jobs to places like Eastern Europe and Asia.  Bosses closed hundreds more factories and they laid-off thousands more workers.  Bosses maximised their profits by opening ‘sweat-shops’ in developing third-world countries, whose workers endured virtually no rights, extremely low wages, and terribly unsafe working conditions.  Those bosses and some collaborative trade union leaders were awarded accolades and peerages; the British public was sold chintz.

British products were devalued, and their build quality deteriorated.  The once proudly boasted motto “Made in Britain” became the new epithet for “Made in Hong Kong”.  Job quality deteriorated while industries like injection moulding boomed.  Operatives were required to feed in lumps of plastic to ravenous machines which pumped out tawdry products.  Allegro music was broadcast over the factory Tannoys, and the speed of the machines was continually 'cranked up' to keep beat with the tempo.

That was the state of affairs in 2010 when the Tory-Liberal coalition formed the current British government.  The previous, conniving Labour government had mimicked American monetarist policies, which had bankrupted the exchequer; their tinkering prepared the economy for po-faced coalition politicians,who imposed ‘austerity measures’ on the working class.

Duncan Smith is just the latest ‘also-ran’ politician who has picked up the ‘slavery’ baton and has carried it one step farther toward the ‘genocidal’ finishing line.  He and his lackeys, who lurk in the DWP, are collaborating with firms to make the lives of ordinary people completely miserable.  Their policies, which seem to have been copied off children’s games, depend on chance, isolation, disorientation, and the law of diminishing returns.  Unfortunate job seekers who stray onto DWP territory, are lured deeper into a make-believe, ‘never-never’ land.  If they want benefits, they have to play daft games of ‘snakes-and-ladders’, ‘hide-and-seek’, ‘blind-man’s-buff’, and ‘musical chairs’.

Duncan Smith and his cronies think ‘carrying on’ like that is amusing and salutary.  Job seekers are expected to ‘actively participate’ and enjoy it, but they feel like they are being blindfolded, spun around, and hit on their heads.  Shame on the coalition government; it continues to fool and shame the voters again and again.

Some firms are replacing their personnel departments with sham-employment-agencies, which pretend to be independent of their parent companies.  They are able to circumvent existing agreements with trade unions, and they can rely on DWP support.  Job Centres aid-and-abet them by providing them with free office space, facilities, and advertising.

Sham-agencies pose as partners of the DWP.  They disguise themselves as quasi-governmental employment agencies that feign propriety to gain the approval and confidence of unwary job seekers.  They are, in fact, parasitic, money-grubbing, private businesses, whose seedy patronage is an affront to the trust and good-nature of honest people.

Sham-agencies contrive deceitful recruitment policies which create ‘two-tier’ and ‘three-tier’ inequality.  They employ their own ‘second-tier’, flexi-workers, who have to accept fewer rights and lower wages than their parent company’s ‘first-tier’ employees.  New starters are actually ‘third-tier’ employees, who rate fewer rights and earn less money; they have to serve probationary periods of time before they can be promoted to their ‘second-tier’ status.  Social differentiation is a feature of slavery.

Flexi-workers are treated like beasts-of-burden; they are expendable and their supply is inexhaustible.  Sham-agencies use any excuses to dismiss them; they sack those who take sick leave and they replace them with fresh probationers who are not sick.  Sham-agencies turn-over lots of workers so they can continue to pay ‘third-tier’ wages to most of them.

Probationers’ wages may vary from one week to another even though they continue to work the same hours.  Sham-agencies do not issue pay-slips, but they do deduct money from workers’ wages to recover the costs of things like uniforms.  Those uniforms are usually emblazoned with company brand-names and trade-marks, and wearers become walking sandwich-boards that advertise subjugation.

When people are converted into human resources that may be used as raw material or discarded like waste products, they become commodities.  That is a feature of slave-trading.

Look at this multi-agency racket that the DWP tries to pass off as an opportunity.  DWP officers hand out bogus job advertisements to job seekers, who think they are being directed towards jobs.  The job seekers meet sham-training-agency representatives, who enrol them onto sham-training courses.  They are told to attend venues, which are usually rented rooms in other towns.  Travelling expenses are not paid, but bread-and-water refreshments are ‘thrown-in’.  If job seekers complete their sham-courses, which may be scheduled to last four days, they are promised interviews but not jobs.

Some stalwarts are interviewed and they are offered probationary jobs, but others are rejected outrightly.  Those who succeed are handed glossy brochures which contain sham-agency terms and conditions of employment.  Those brochures are crammed with denials, disclaimers, ‘opt-outs’, repudiations, and reservations, which can be summarised as: ‘the employer has every right but the employee has no right’.

Sham-courses have titles like ‘Pre-Employment Training/Induction Programme’, and they contain sham-topics like Health & Safety, Manual Handling, First Aid Awareness, and Fire Safety.  Sham-lessons are pitched at elementary level but they are padded-out with banter and general knowledge quizzes.  Sham-courses deliver bits of useful information, but those bits could be printed cheaply in booklets. 

Sham-courses are schemed-up by associated sham-agencies, which purport to recruit and train unemployed people.  They are, in fact, just groups of assorted cads and bounders who act like brokers.  Sham-courses are accredited by local colleges of education, and they are funded generously by the government and by the EU.

Duncan Smith’s campaign against the lower classes continues unopposed.  The DWP has trapped the job seekers in a ‘pincer movement’ between its mean sanctions and sham-employment-agencies.  Job Centre bulletin-boards are peppered with dead-end job adverts which offer zero-hours contracts and minimum wages in exchange for temporary or part-time work.   Most adverts lead to supermarkets, warehouses, fast-food restaurants, and factory floors via the confidence trickery of sham-employment-agencies.

Dissidents get blacklisted.  They are put on the job-seekers’ treadmill: a life-time sentence which condemns them to pointless and unproductive job searching.  After years of rejections, some unemployed people turn to begging, others commit crime, while others commit suicide.

Duncan Smith wants unemployed people to work for their benefit money.  That will be a kind of involuntary servitude.  Sham-agencies are already devising profitable sham-work-experience and sham-community-service schemes.  He wants to privatise job centres.  Disreputable firms like slapstick, security outfit G4S, creepy, outsourcing syndicate SERCO, and murderous, health-consultants ATOS will compete to handle the lucrative trade in 'job seekers'.

The Green Party must remind British people about their post-war life in the 1950s when they had ‘never had it so good’. The GP must explain how British people can relive those good times by renationalizing essential industries and services.

The Green Party must explain why American social and economic theories do not apply to Britain; neither Multiculturalism nor Monetarism works in Britain.  It needs to tell people to trust their own eyes and ears and to ignore career politicians and puppet media.

The Green Party must argue in favour of reducing Britain’s population to 30 million.  Britain must stop all immigration and must start to repatriate all immigrants who settled in Britain since WWII and their descendents.  Fewer workers would force manufacturers to automate and to down-scale.  Full employment would be achieved and everyone’s job quality and job satisfaction would be improved.

Britainmust leave the European Economic Community, which is just a front for international big-business and people-trafficking, and it must set-up an alternative Green World Economic Community, which would exist everywhere for the benefit of ordinary people.

British manufacturers must be discouraged from moving their factories abroad. Bosses who close their factories in Britain and who open them abroad deserve to be publicly disgraced and shunned. They must not be allowed to discard skilled British workers and to exploit vulnerable foreign workers.

The Green party must must unite with the trade unions to fight for workers' rights.

The Green party must outlaw the abusage of people as collateral for debt or for 'credit'.

The DWP needs to manage Job Centres economically.  They need to be purged of parasitic sham-agencies: no more free accommodation for them!  Sham-agencies must be charged a commercial rate for their usage of public office space and facilities, and they must be charged for advertising their sham-jobs on government web-sites.

Public money must not be wasted on sham-training courses for the unemployed.  Government run Skill Centres need to be set-up in all towns and cities to provide real training in all kinds of trades for unemployed people.  Skill Centres performed very well in the past and they would perform very well in the future.

British people are being punished for daring to ask for more after they fought and won WWII.  They must reject all forms of slave-labour; it is not necessary and neither is mass unemployment.  If British governments want everyone to work, they could give a piece of farm land to every unemployed person.  People could grow their own food, and then they too could earn satisfaction, fulfilment, and recognition.

‘peace man’ÿ☮
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DON’T MISS PART THREE – ‘EUTHANASIA’