Chernobyl, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and truth in fiction
A review of Chernobyl, written by Craig Mazin and directed by Johan Renck, a 2019 mini-series in five parts on HBO/Sky. In an early scene of Chernobyl, a young pregnant […]
Category Archives: job safety
The devil’s trade-off: public health or ‘the economy’
The virus and capitalist society, Part 3 As the capitalist rulers around the world move towards lifting the lockdown conditions imposed to halt the spread of Covid-19 disease, they are […]
Essential workers
The virus and capitalist society – Part 2 Of all the capitalist governments attempting to emulate the Wuhan model of lockdown to combat the Covid-19 virus, New Zealand has fared […]
The virus and capitalist society
Is anything good likely to come of this pandemic? I have seen reports of reduction in air pollution over China, and less-than-truthful pictures of clear water and dolphins in the […]
Climate change, climate hysteria, and the Sky City fire
Climate change is real, and so is climate hysteria. Anthropogenic climate change is generated by emissions of carbon dioxide (and some other gases) through human economic activity, mostly by the […]
“Half-caste Maori” strikebreakers at Waihi and Huntly (First of two parts)
(Note: In quoting historic documents, I have not attempted to modernise their Anglicised spelling and usage of Māori words, offensive as some of these things may seem today. The English […]
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 […]
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 […]
A worker at large 