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
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.
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SOCIALIST OUTLOOK no 10 November 1988
Page 31
"I only see them in the doctor's waiting room...'
Women's