Capitalism’s Trail of Blood: The Fight for Safety on the Job
Harry Holland and the early labour movement in Australia and New Zealand, Part 13 The defeat of the miners’ strike ended the forward momentum of the working class that had […]
Category Archives: job safety
The Sydney Rockchoppers and the health benefits of striking
On 4 October Holland arrived in Broken Hill; the same night he addressed a meeting of over 2,000 at the Hippodrome – in a town whose entire population was only […]
The coal lumpers’ strike and the rapid growth of revolutionary socialism
Harry Holland and the early labour movement in Australia and New Zealand – Part 8 Holland and the Socialist Federation immediately threw themselves into four key industrial battles which, over […]
Capitalism’s trail of blood and “exemptions”
On June 8 Murray Taylor became the fourth person this year to die while working in a quarry in New Zealand. The excavator Taylor was operating became buried under 1500 […]
The Condition of the Working Class in New Zealand in 1890
In 1842 Friedrich Engels, the 22-year-old son of a German textile manufacturer, was sent to Manchester, England, to work in the family business. Manchester was at the time the centre […]
Agricultural workers and gold miners in Burkina Faso
Notes from a visit to West Africa in January 2015. Fourth article in a series. In the savannah regions of northern Ghana, Togo, and Benin, and southern Burkina Faso, most of […]
Deaths in the coal mines and union-busting: 100 years ago in Huntly …and today
12 September marks the hundredth anniversary of the second-deadliest single mine disaster in New Zealand history. On that day in 1914, an explosion ripped through the Ralph coal mine in […]
“All Black” fatuousness and death in the forests
My first and best lesson in industrial safety happened in 1978, a few weeks after I started work on the production line at the Ford car assembly plant in Wellington […]
