The Hoechst dispute as a paradigm shift in occupational health & safety
By Yossi Berger
Australian Workers' Union, Victoria Branch, 1991
$15 institutions, $10 individual, $2 AWU & MEWU members
Reviewed by Dennis McIntyre
The Hoechst Altona plant in Melbourne was a subject of considerable media attention from mid to late 1990. Victimisation, strikes, police violence, scab labour, failure to protect workers health and safety, the exposure of a dishonest and arrogant management were regular media fare.
Yossi Berger argues that "failure in maintaining proper H&S standards was and still is the result of a faulty and failing paradigm" which failed to protect workers. The dispute "helped to accelerate a paradigm shift. That shift is generating resentment and indignation from employers who are desperately attempting to reinterpret the Occupational Health & Safety Act to suit their old paradigm and familiar corporate world view."
Berger is a scientist active in the labour movement, has impressive credentials and credibility, and is currently industrial officer (health & safety) with the Australian Workers Union, Victoria Branch. A prolific author on a range of OH&S issues, he uses the philosophy of science to provide devastating analyses.
The term paradigm was used by Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) to describe "universally recognized scientific achievements that for a time provide model problems and solutions to a community of practitioners". According to Kuhn, "normal science" operates within the assumptions set by a paradigm. When an established theory fails to provide solutions to and/or explain away problems, it is likely that an alternative, if one is available, will replace it in a break with the past called a "scientific revolution".
Practitioners, in this case managers, were no longer able to explain away their failure to meet health and safety standards in parts of the plant — especially the parts where DCB, a known carcinogen, was literally handled with shovels — by rhetoric (we care for our workers health and safety, cost does not matter) and claims to a franchise on "expert" knowledge (it has not been scientifically demonstrated that ...).
Berger's writing is polemical — with a firecracker in every sentence: "As a kind of charm against evil such employers and their chains of bright-eyed positive-thinking managers, whose favourite phrase was, and still is 'worker attitude,' adopted the word 'education'. Whenever there was any questioning of the old paradigm or its effects at work they waved their arms in the air, almost in the shape of a cross and muttered piously 'education' ... No one seemed to question the concept nor what it meant in practical terms. Educate how? When? What about? How soon? Who will do it? Will it be effective in the way needed?"
The emerging paradigm enunciated by Berger contains notions that are heresy to many managers, including: "Employers must show effective ateship to their workers and abandon a foolish quest for a harsh and illusory rationalism at the cost of that which is most human — emotions, feelings, beliefs and perceptions."
The facts are, as the Hoechst workers have demonstrated, that workers are able to identify and provide solutions to problems in their industry. This fact is central to any notion of a paradigm shift. Workers as a group know what is going on in their work environment and for how long it has been going on. They also have first hand experience of how their participation in the labour process has impacted on their health, individually and collectively.
There are theoretical, ethical and methodological issues that Berger has not teased out, such as the nature of power relations in capitalist society, the non-neutrality of science and the relationship between science and the capitalist class. For a new paradigm to survive and become dominant, workers' questions must be addressed, their knowledge must be taken into account, and they, not management, must own the research. Berger has done all of this, but has not been explicit.
The Hoechst dispute is a slim volume of critical analysis, well worth 1-2 hours of the reader's time. I have no doubt that many readers will exclaim, "Yes, this is how management responds to OH&S issues in my workplace". Old paradigms don't fade away, they have to be exterminated.