No politician wants to be associated with the James Hardie scandal. Who can blame them? Australia has the world's highest per capita incidence of mesothelioma, one of the painful forms of cancer caused by exposure to asbestos fibres. By 2020, 18,000 Australians are expected to have died from meso. Most of those who die will be victims of James Hardie, having been exposed to the company's asbestos products either in their workplaces or during home renovations.
Further, according to an ACTU briefing on the James Hardie scandal, "for each diagnosed case of mesothelioma there are as many cases of lung cancer and non-malignant asbestos related disease". Yet James Hardie is still doing its best to avoid providing adequate compensation to its victims.
On September 1, a NSW special commission of inquiry into the Medical Research and Compensation Foundation (MRCF) — the under-funded body set up by James Hardie to take over liability for compensating the corporation's victims — released a report critical of the corporation. James Hardie responded by claiming that it would "work with all relevant stakeholders in developing a satisfactory compensation solution for asbestos claimants against its former subsidiaries which it could put to shareholders for approval".
But on November 25, the MRCF announced that it had filed for liquidation because of a lack of funds. The MRCF was forced to reject a $31.5 million fund transfer offer from a James Hardie agent, because, it said, the company is making its topping-up of the fund contingent on limiting the right of the MRCF and victims to sue James Hardie.
On December 2, liquidation of the MRCF was put on hold after a former Hardie subsidiary agreed to hand over $88 million to the fund, enabling compensation payouts to asbestos victims to continue at least in the short term.
The corporate murder and fraud committed by James Hardie isn't a relic of a bygone era — it's just a high-profile example of how corporations' drive for profits comes at the expense of workers' well-being, and, sometimes, their lives.
Australian bosses have a shocking record of negligence leading to workplace deaths. For example, in March, 12 workers at the Northern Territory's Ranger uranium mine were poisoned by water contaminated with 400 times the legal limit of uranium.
A bulletin produced by the Jackson MacDonald law firm in April 2002 reported that a Western Australian company director had just been fined $40,000 for the death of a worker, who was electrocuted. That fine, pathetic though it was, was the largest awarded against a company director in the state.
In late November, Prime Minister John Howard stated that "at the end of the day [James Hardie] has got to meet its obligations". "Everybody is sympathetic to the victims", he told ABC Radio's PM program on November 26.
But Howard is shedding only crocodile tears. His government has refused to take action against Hardie to force it to pay. Moreover, the Coalition's industrial relations agenda aims to make it easier for corporations to get away with Hardie-style workplace murder — by weakening workers' ability to organise against bosses and fight for safe workplaces. It's been thanks in part to the union-led campaign that James Hardie has been forced to at least pay lip-service to meeting its obligations to its long-suffering victims.
In 1881, the German-born socialist Frederick Engels described, in an article for the British Labour Standard, the "violent outbursts of the capitalist class" at the 1824 repeal of England's Combination Act, the law that had rendered trade unions illegal. "That class had always considered its long-established practice of grinding down the working class as a vested right and lawful privilege. That was now to be put a stop to."
Today, the Australian capitalists who bankroll the Coalition parties are setting up a similar clamour — "violent outbursts" calling on the federal government to roll-back the union movement's remaining rights to organise. The boss class wants to reclaim its "vested right" to unfettered exploitation of labour.
This agenda won't be stopped by appeals to the conscience of members of the Howard government — pro-capitalist politicians see right and wrong from the point of view of the class they serve — but by rebuilding a militant, fighting trade-union movement.
Today a key task has to be strengthening the campaign to free Craig Johnston, the militant Victorian union leader jailed for defending workers' jobs. If the bosses can get away with jailing unionists for defending the interests of their class, then Howard's vision of a future where the drive for profit at all costs isn't challenged by workers organising will be a big step closer.
From Green Left Weekly, December 8, 2004.
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