Lowest of the Low Gunter Wallraff; translated by Martin
Chalmers, introduction
by A Sivanandan.
Methuen, 1988. £4.99.
Reviewed by
JANE KELLY
IN THE early nineteenth century
women and children worked in
intolerable conditions in coal
mines: later, legislation banned
the more barbaric practices of
British capitalism in its pursuit of
profit. In twentieth century
Germany foreign workers -
gastarbeiter - (mostly Turks, but
also Italians, Yugoslavs, Poles)
are performing dangerous, filthy
and exhausting jobs for a
pittance. The situation bears
comparison with the early
nineteenth century.
Gunter Wallraff's book and
film The Lowest of the Low'
documents the experience of
such workers by means of hidden
video cameras and recording
equipment. Assuming the
identity of a Turkish worker, Ali
Wallraff (his name now used as a
verb in Swedish meaning - to
investigate), he spent two years
experiencing first hand the life of
an immigrant contract worker
fulfilling jobs no German would
Page 30
R E V whale hunting has been a major enterprise for nearly two hundred years relatively little scientific knowledge of whales and their related species was garnered until after the second world war. They are still creatures of intriguing mystery in many ways but researchers have revealed them to be animals of possibly high intelligence (their brains appear to rival ours in relative size and complexity) with an array of subtle and often spectacular sexual and social rituals, a voice that not cannot only mimic human speech but may allow them to communicate with each other over a range of hundreds of' underwater miles and with a talent for altruism towards others of their species and even towards people.
In addition, baleen whales (those that feed by filtering seawater through the huge curtains of whalebone they have instead of teeth) play a major rôle in maintaining the balance of the oceans' ecosystem.
Whales have existed for about fifty million years but it has taken the whaling fleets of both
Working shifts of 10 or 12 hours and double shifts of up to 22 hours, he clears toxic metal dust from steel mills, and cleans coking plants and nuclear power plants - exposed in the process to carcinogenic waste and radiation. Such Turkish workers have no rights, little pay and no choice as to the hours they are forced to
Meanwhile the contractors
make fortunes by providing
internationally-known industrial
firms with workers who are
invisible. They are offered no
protective clothing despite
working in situations which are
lethal. Indeed on one occasion
Ali is forced to hand over his
own safety helmet to a German
worker who had forgotton to
bring his to work.
Exposed to swirling toxic
dust, sometimes so thick that he
couldn't see his own hands held
up to his face, in extremes of
intense heat and cold, long
arduous hours and constant racist
abuse, the immigrant workers,
not surprisingly, suffer from
severe bronchial and lung
problems, exhaustion and
depression.
Wallraff exposes a devestating
situation which he finally tests to
the limit. He sets up the
contractor - Adler - by getting
friends to impersonate safety
IE W S capitalist and workers' states little over tifty years to slaughter many species to the brink of extinction and although there is now supposed to be a moratorium on commercial whaling, hundreds are still being killed in the name of 'scientific research'.
The point of all this carnage was that most of the larger species of whales were swimming storehouses of fuel and raw materials for manufacturing industry. Except in Japan where whales and dolphin meat have long been eaten as delicacies, food for human consumption has never been the major goal of the whale hunter. Whale oil was the oil and petrol of the nineteenth century and whalebone the forerunner of modern piastics. But every part of a carcass was used to supply industries as diverse as button and bomb making, photography and pharmaceuticals, soaps and sausage skins and even today sperm oil is used as a lubricant in missiles and spacecraft.
This infamous history of ruthless exploitation and slaughter is the reason why saving the whale has long been a officers from a nearby nuclear plant looking for eight reliable workers to clean out a blocked pipe. The workers are to be exposed to radiation '30 times the allowable annual dose'. Adler agrees: he will provide human labour which he treats as completely expendable - plenty more where that came from. He further agrees to use men who must return immediately to Turkey. Any 'complications' such as radiation sickness must not be connected to the nuclear plant.
The film, shown on Channel 4 in October, uses coverage shot
secretly from a camera concealed
inside a bag. We see workers
trying to deal with the contractor
who constantly underpays and
swindles them; the horrifying
work itself; the racism endured
by the immigrants and finally the
nuclear deal agreed by Adler.
Combined with this secret
black and white footage
accompanied by recorded
conversations, are coloured
images of Wallraff/Ali as
commentator talking direct to the
camera, describing his
experiences and also images of
the daily lives of immigrants, for
example the tearful farewell as
one of them boards the coach to
return to Turkey.
What Wallraff/Ali exposes is
the underbelly, the hidden
exploitation which is part and
cause célèbre of the conservation and environmental movements. The whale has become a symbol as it is in William's clear, vivid and very accessible book, of the unexploitative against the continuing depredations of industry both capitalist and bureaucratic.
Williams might be overly romantic at times and he offers nothing in the way of a solution but it is the sad fact that one of the myriad failures of social democratic politics is that the labour movement cannot creditably claim to be the natural home, which it should be, for anyone seriously wanting to do something about environmental issues and even the revolutionary left has yet to show it is really concerned with these problems.
It would not be right to be catastrophic about the environment but it might be good to read Heathcote William's book and ponder the ominous aphorisms of the pre-war Viennese satirist Karl Kraus quoted by Williams elsewhere 'Progress is society's pyrrhic victory over nature'. parcel of the capitalist system. And racism, as Sivanandan correctly points out in the introduction, "keeps it from the light of day'. It is this racism that divides the Turks from the rest of the German working class. The Turks do work which few Germans would do, in conditions which few would accept, for wages which few could survive on. But these conditions and wages are used to drive down wages in general with contract labour often being introduced to replace full-time employees to avoid all those expensive rights like safety equipment, sick pay medical insurance and weekends off!
The book and film expose
such practices in Germany: but
we should not assume that such
things are confined to that
country. Nor should we be
complacent about the future here.
The Tory plan to increase the
profitability of capital by
increased flexibility at work, by
lowering safety standards and by
the introduction of Employment
Training, most likely to become
compulsory, along with their
ability to further divide the
working class by the propagation
of racism and sexism, means that
Thatcher's much vaunted 'return
to Victorian values' could also
mean a return to Victorian
working conditions here. SOCIALIST OUTLOOK no 10 November 1988
R V E We S SOCIALIST OUTLOOK no 10 November 1988 Page 31
"I only see them in the doctor's waiting room...'
Women's