Safety, Discipline and the Manager: Building a `Higher Class of Men'

Abstract

Most analyses of the connection of safety legislation to the capital/labour relation are organised around the question of the failure of safety legislation to prevent injury and death at work. However, these accounts are problematic in that they rely on a necessary relationship between the imperatives of capital and the actions of owners and managers. This paper uses a case study of the Queensland (Australia) coal mining industry to argue that a connection between safety legislation and the capital/labour relation can be found by starting, not from the question of failure, but from an exploration of the effects of the apparatus of safety. By approaching the question from this direction it allows a significant change within the mining labour process to be traced. The apparatus of safety operated both to differentiate the manager from the miners as labourers and to constitute the manager as the (partial) site of co-ordination and discipline. Thus the new category was aligned with capital and a prior condition for the real subsumption of labour was set in place. In this form of analysis the failure of safety legislation and the reforms which it engenders appear in a new light. They are no longer organising principles of analysis but parts of a strategy which was continually aiming at a shift towards a more capitalist labour process.

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