Aberfan and the gulf between us.

Subject: Aberfan, and the gulf between us.

The Aberfan disaster which occurred 50 years ago when a spoilage tip, weakened by rain slid into and onto the Aberfan school killing 116 children. It was a disaster that need not have happened, and it was caused by the lack of foresight of the owners and management of the colliery.

Relations between owners and the pit workers had always been poor in an industry 'where above pit' and 'down the pit' were worlds apart. It resembled the age old schism between the classes. An intolerable conflict which eventually broke out in the miners strike and the efforts of Arthur  Scargill to take on the owners of an industry which typified the gulf between the workers and management.

If your workforce are "scumbags", a term I first heard when I returned to the UK in 1994 used by a chap I had known overseas in Johannesburg and who in a period had established a company which was to go on to be a leading player in the U.K. Telecoms Industry, seemed to me very sad and not a little unhealthy.  His use of the term revealed a deep resentment to people who were his workforce, they had become "them" whilst we were "us". 

Was it in his makeup, a result of his upbringing, that he distrusted his workforce to disparage them so. Is there a thread which runs through the gene pool that resorts to type when people are placed in a position of authority. Anyway I was having nothing to do with it and so we parted ways.

There are so many instances where 'industrial relations' in this country have been sour. Shipbuilding, car manufacture, the mines, are all situations where men, in great numbers are used to produce a product but where industrial relations are poor if and when the management is predominantly English. Give the ownership and implicit with that, the management control to a foreign company, the Japanese, then the production line and the whole process works a charm. Why.

Is it that the Japanese have understood the benefits in their own culture of individual respect, not least because of the overcrowded nature of their island and further they understood that if you can inculcate that sense of respect in your neighbours (workforce) and implicit in that they for you,  you have unity. Build on the sense of unity by enabling greater  participation in feed back and decision making and you have a winning proposition such as the Nissan factory in Sunderland.

It would be incomprehensible for the person who ran the company I worked for to believe his success came from anywhere other than himself. His hubris, his arrogance, his conceit got in the way and whilst he was successful, his success was shallow since whilst everyone feared him he had no friends within the company. Perhaps that didn't matter but as an example within the society, it exemplified to me the shaky nature of industrial and social relations within this country. 

Remember we spend so much of our lives at work. What a traumatic failure if in that most important aspect, human inter relationships, (the pleasure we can derive from supporting others around us), if we spend our lives in unhealthy competition.