Housing – Marxist Takes
The end of the dream for the US Century
Edward Duncan
When US imperialism succeeded in overthrowing Socialism in the USSR, its pundits crowed that it was “the end of history”. There could be no further changes in the nature of society: capitalism was clearly the ultimate end of social development.
Alas for such rose-coloured fantasies: they lasted only long enough for history to blink. Then the struggle of the working people and the poor took over once again. The exploited will always fight for their rights regardless of what the pundits of capitalism declare.
A clearly baffled Gorbachev was roundly repudiated in Russian elections, the Russian people preferring former KGB officer, Putin, who at least seemed to know what he was doing. (Gorby’s co-conspirator Schevardnadze, who had dumped Gorby to become President of Georgia, was in turn dumped by the Georgians. Gorby is seldom heard of any more, Schevardnadze never. Capitalism will doubtless write touching but meaningless obituaries for both of them in due course.)
Meanwhile, the US capitalists’ dream of the 21st century being “the American Century” has steadily lost ground. We are not yet halfway through it and yet it is obvious that if it is anyone’s century it is China’s.
As Raûl Antonio Capote wrote in Granma as far back as last December, “It is no secret that the People’s Republic of China, with its booming economy, is on its way to becoming the world’s number one power by 2030, and Russia is not far behind.”
That is a prospect that must surely terrify the habitues of Donald Trump’s Oval Office. Almost equally alarming to rational folk, however, is the risk to the world’s people posed by the intemperate actions of a frightened nuclear super-power.
As Capote put it in December, “Now the empire is like a wild beast flailing around with its claws in the air. Its machinery of destruction and subversion is working overtime. Worse yet is that this machinery is directed by a group of troglodytes, dinosaurs anchored in the time of gunboat diplomacy, which they learned about in comics and television series – not history books.
“These powerful cavemen are profoundly ignorant, their vision of the world has been built in the closed environment of fundamentalist opinion; they don’t even know their own country.
And what of the Democrats’ futile attempt to impeach Trump, to remove him without causing too much disturbance to the status quo? Capote describes them as a “lesser evil” challenging the Trumpites, “not because they consider them a real danger to US interests, to the future of the empire.”
No, they bet on impeachment of the property tycoon President as a way to save themselves. “It is a desperate measure because they know the country has deep internal problems, in the economy and in its structure as a nation, and a crisis could lead to disaster.” This was written before the Covid 19 crisis.
South and Central America have seen recent moves by Washington’s agents to oust progressive governments in Venezuela, Brazil, Bolivia and more. Capote is unfased: “They are facing the people’s wrath, the history they have tried to erase with money and weapons.”
Waxing lyrical, he becomes poetic: “Returning are the immortal spirits of our liberating soldiers, the warriors of our original peoples, the ‘indians’ of the highlands, Sandino’s troops, Che’s men, who sit in their saddles and grease their rifles.
“They are Bolivars’ guards that are ready to weather the storm and triumph. Yes, now.”
Housing for the people
George Edwards
American author Laura Gottesdiener has posed a question that is at the heart of campaigns for public housing being waged in various countries today (including the USA) as banks buy up more and more housing stock: “Can a society truly be a democracy if housing is not considered a right?”
So-called “property developers” have been joined by equally predatory private equity “investment companies” all of whom see housing not as a right but as a guilt-edged opportunity to make profits, by trading on people’s need for a roof over their heads. In the process, they are buying up working class housing, expelling the former residents and “gentrifying” the area in order to attract middle-class people as either tenants paying higher rents or as purchasers able to pay profit-driven prices.
This is a phenomenon seen all over the capitalist world but predictably is most visibly evident in the heartland of capitalism, the USA. As public advocacy group the California Reinvestment Coalition (CRC) notes: “The volume of these investor purchases of property is unprecedented. Since 2012, large investment companies, mainly private equity firms, have raised and/or invested $25 billion to purchase as many as 150,000 single-family homes throughout the United States.”
CRC unites over 300 organizations across California alone to advocate for public and (naively, in my opinion) corporate policy that “advances economic justice and equity”. Surely they must be aware that economic justice is hardly a prime concern of capitalist corporations?
Be that as it may, CRC points out that “from 2013 onwards, Wall Street has issued more than $8 billion of securities tied to almost 60,000 homes owned by companies such as Blackstone, Colony and American Homes 4 Rent. These securities are similar to the [infamous] Wall Street subprime securities that fuelled the housing crisis.”
American investigative reporter Aaron Glantz has written a new book which exposes the predatory, self-serving practices of key members of the Trump administration when it comes to housing policy, including Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and Trump associate Tom Barrack, founder of Colony Capital, Inc. Its title doesn’t leave much to the imagination: Homewreckers:How a Gang of Wall Street Kingpins, Hedge Fund Magnates, Crooked Banks, and Vulture Capitalists Suckered Millions Out of Their Homes and Demolished the American Dream.
As CRC observes, “Following the foreclosure crisis after the 2008 housing bust, Wall Street speculators bought up foreclosed properties, seeing an opportunity to make big profits off the suffering of others. Private equity firms like the Blackstone Group and Barrack’s Colony Capital purchased tens of thousands of foreclosed properties that had been previously owned and lived in by families. What were once opportunities for people to own homes and build wealth, have become rental empires for the wealthy to squeeze profits from working families.”
Here’s a statistic to consider: nine large Wall Street firms together are the absentee landlords of more than 200,000 single family homes in the US.
Comments CRC: “It is now more difficult than ever to buy a home as these corporate landlords swoop in, and it follows disturbing trends that disproportionately impact low-income communities and neighborhoods of color.” Racism, as we all know, is very much alive and well in “the land of the free”. Aaron Glantz reported in the journal Revealthat Black applicants for home loans were denied home loans at significantly higher rates than whites in 48 US cities, Latinos were denied at higher rates in 25 cities, Asians in nine cities and Native Americans in three.
Nevertheless, CRC frankly admits that they know “it’s unrealistic to expect corrective action coming out of Trump’s Washington. This administration has chosen to go in the other direction — proposing to make it even harder to prove discrimination in housing and lending. President Trump has appointed his real estate cronies to key posts in his administration, overseeing much of the US economy and ensuring that it’s tilted to benefit the wealthy few.” They include banker Steve Mnuchin (OneWest/CIT) as Treasury Secretary, Wilbur Ross as Secretary of Commerce and Joseph Otting as bank regulator. These are the very people who have been responsible, as CRC notes, for “displacing our communities and throwing people out of their homes over the last 15 years”.
Naturally, given the similar economic make-up of the two countries, many of the campaigns being waged by American housing advocates are equally applicable in Australia.
These include pushing for the imposition of speculation taxes and vacancy taxes for homes that “remain in the hands of corporations, yet sit empty in our neighborhoods”. That would certainly stir up the property speculators! Almost as much as another of their demands: rent control. We used to have rent control in Australia. I used to work with a chap who lived in a rent-controlled flat in the well-to-do Sydney suburb of Double Bay. He could not possibly have afforded to live there if his rent had not been kept by law well below what “the market” would have charged!
Needless to say, tenants – people who were not property owners − were all for rent control; on the other hand landlords – people who think the public’s need for shelter is merely another opportunity to make a bundle − were bitterly against it. Curiously, it was their view that prevailed with capitalist governments in Australia. Now why does that not surprise us?
If housing is a right, as we said at the beginning of this article, then it follows that it cannot be left to the discretion of profit-hungry corporations to provide housing for people. One of the first acts of the new Soviet government after the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 was to eliminate private ownership of housing. Before the Revolution, the rulers of Russia had not been bothered by whether their “subjects” had somewhere to live. Poor peasants often had no housing at all; instead, they had to dig a hole in the ground, cover it with branches, and live there!
In fact, a crushing housing shortage was one of the most severe problems the new Soviet government inherited from pre-revolutionary times. Solving it took a couple of decades of extreme hard work and sacrifice, but by the late 1930s they were able to declare it licked! Then came the War and the complete destruction of not just thousands of towns and villages, but entire cities. To cope with the two successive housing shortages (post Revolution and post WW2), the Soviet government had the benefit that in the USSR, all housing was owned by the state and was made available as rental property, and most importantly rents were fixed as a percentage of your income – a very low percentage.
But that was in the days of Socialism, when the idea of turning a right into a commodity was anathema. Capitalism, of course, operates on the opposite principle: if it’s not capable of becoming a commodity it’s not worth having!
Working people, however, know that turning their rights into commodities, at the mercy of the “market”, benefits no one but the boss and the financial speculator. In the 19th century, as capitalism developed, working class communities grew up so that workers would be handy and able to service the centres of industry and commerce. In other words, working people lived close to their work. The result was the growth of cheaply made housing for working people, especially in inner city areas.
These small, grimy dwellings often lacked basic amenities including indoor plumbing, but they were, perforce, close-knit communities whose members depended on one another. However, in the second half of the 20th century, property speculators combined with well-meaning social reformers to promote the benefits of “slum clearance”, replacing admittedly sub-standard housing with modern dwellings. Too often, unfortunately, their concentration on the physical form of the housing lost sight of the vital importance of the human element.
Entire inner-city communities were uprooted and dispersed. In Britain, vast tracts of former “workers’ housing” were simply bulldozed and on the bare, windswept spaces left behind, tower blocks were erected, in which the residents were not only alienated from each other but even from the district itself.
Surprisingly perhaps, no less a person than Prince Charles was moved to write an excellent and highly critical book about this destruction of communities and the socially stultifying effects of confining people in the ugly, soulless residential blocks that in England are incongruously called “estates”. In Australia and the USA, instead of wholesale demolishing of inner-city working class housing, it has often been “gentrified”: renovated, and converted into upmarket pads for middle class professionals and the like. The former working class tenants could no longer afford to live there even if they were allowed to return.
The one major instance where this syndrome was not dominant was during the time of the Whitlam government, when DURD – the Department of Urban and Regional Development – took over the Glebe estate in Sydney and carried out a wholesale yet sympathetic renovation of the whole suburb. But we all know what happened to the Whitlam government, don’t we?
Everywhere else, gentrification for profit is the order of the day. Workers are obliged to move to the suburbs and spend much more time travelling to and from work. Affordable housing activists in the USA and Australia are engaged in a similar fight: to stem the tide of housing displacement, to win people the right to stay in their homes and to stop profit-driven practices that displace residents and fuel neighbourhood gentrification.
Paulina Gonzalez-Brito, the executive director of CRC, says of the banks and “property developers” who are busy making money out of people’s need for housing, “These modern-day robber barons have tipped the scales in their favour at the expense of working families; it’s time to tip them back. We must halt Wall Street predation on families struggling to keep a roof over their head.”
Gonzalez-Brito refers to “Wall Street predation” as though it’s a peculiarly New York (or at least, American) phenomenon, but we know that preying on people’s basic needs is fundamental to capitalism everywhere. However, even under capitalism, if the working class and its allies unite to fight for their right to decent affordable housing they can of course with much effort achieve great improvements, and this is a struggle that not only meets people’s needs but focuses attention on just who the system serves. As such, the struggle for your right to “a home of your own” − whether owned or rented − is a significant aspect of the struggle for Socialism. One more reason to fight to change the system!
Covid-19
Edward Duncan
Did you enjoy the way Donald Trump tried to make China the scapegoat for the spectacular failure of the USA’s privatised health system to cope with the Covid 19 pandemic? I certainly did! According to a desperate Trump, China deliberately understated the seriousness of the outbreak in Wuhan, apparently in order to keep the good guys (that’s us white folks in the West) from doing anything about it. The inference being, of course, that if the USA had known in good time just how serious the matter had really been they would have taken appropriate steps. To do what, one wonders?
Probably to produce some more of his rampant Cold War propaganda. With China’s economic star clearly ascending as the USA’s just as clearly sinks into the mire, Trump’s anti China posturing received little support within the international community. Of course, the US leader cares little what foreigners think. Sophisticated he is not. But then, neither are the thick-eared lumpen that make up his main constituency, as he well knows. Trump’s pitch of racism, anti-foreigner prejudice and good old American exceptionalism (crude nationalism in fancy dress) is classic fascism. Change the identity of the foreigners being attacked from Mexicans to Jews or Slavs and you could easily think we were back in the 1930s with you know who.
In fact, of course, contrary to Trump’s propaganda, China treated the Wuhan outbreak very seriously indeed: rigorous travel restrictions, equally rigorous interventions to maintain public health and to prevent the spread of infection within the province, including continuous mass testing of the population and the issuing of millions of masks. Also contrary to Trump’s fanciful notions, China’s public health measures were hardly kept secret.
The USA’s high-priced health system however was seemingly uninterested in what “socialised medicine” was doing in China: the Yanks couldn’t make money from it so they happily left it to the Chinese government to cope with. If they had paid attention free of Cold War hostility they would have had all the warning they could have wished for.
But would they actually have done anything differently? The sad truth is, probably not. The health system of the top capitalist country is set up to treat health as a commodity that can be used to generate large-scale profit. The idea that it is a government’s responsibility to provide every citizen with the finest health service a country can offer is anathema to these merchants of medicine for money.
In Wuhan, the virus came up against a public health system run solely for the public good. Despite inevitably being taken by surprise as the virus took hold and became an epidemic, the Chinese Party and government took resolute action – action not determined by whether local entrepreneurs could run a profit from it or not. With the full support and co-operation of the regional population, they were able to halt the spread of the virus and then to eliminate it in the province.
From being the stricken area that was the source of the infection, China morphed into the generous donator of millions of face masks to Western capitalist countries like Spain and Italy that were not coping very well with the crisis.
Meanwhile, Trump is making a spectacle of himself blaming China for the inadequacies of the USA’s capitalist health system. But trying to blame someone else is all he’s got. The ineptitude of capitalism in the face of this crisis couldn’t be more obvious. In Australia, the formerly lucrative private hospital “industry” has had to be bailed out by a massive government subsidy, despite the Morrison Liberal government trying valiantly to dress it up as the private hospital operators coming to the aid of the beleaguered public system!
The Political Economy of Corona
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Suffragette
Film review by Peter Mac and K. Green
In the early twentieth century the long-running struggle to gain parliamentary voting rights for British women gave rise to the formation of the Women’s Social and Political Union, led by Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughters Christabel and Sylvia. The organization, whose members were derisively described as “suffragettes”, adopted civil disobedience as a tactic to publicize and gain support for their cause.
The suffragettes have been depicted as violent, eccentric and deeply misguided, but they played a crucial role in gaining the vote for women in Britain, which in turn had a major influence on the struggle for universal suffrage in other countries.
They certainly adopted violent tactics, but as the BBC film Suffragette makes clear, their experience convinced them they had no other choice. The earnest requests for suffrage, made repeatedly by women’s rights campaigners throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, were inevitably met with polite but disdainful refusals.
Moreover, the suffragettes’ civil disobedience campaign was not intended to inflict physical injury on persons, but rather to attack the property of the state, or of organisations or individuals who opposed women’s suffrage. The suffragettes chained themselves to iron railings, bombed letter boxes and broke windows, but they adamantly opposed physical violence against individuals. At one stage they bombed the summer home of then Chancellor of the Exchequer, David Lloyd George, but only in his absence.
Indeed, the personal violence that accompanied the struggle for women’s suffrage was overwhelmingly directed at the women themselves rather than being carried out by them.
The violence included vicious beating and sexual molestation by police officers arresting women demonstrators. The suffragettes organized squads of women trained in jujitsu to inhibit police attempting to arrest leaders of the suffrage movement.
After 1909, imprisoned suffragettes began a series of hunger strikes in a campaign to gain formal recognition as political prisoners.
At first the government released seriously malnourished prisoners. However, as more prisoners went on strike, the government resorted to the excruciating practice of force-feeding. This involved several guards holding down the prisoner, forcing a rubber tube down into her stomach through her nose or mouth, pouring in liquid food and then pulling out the tube prior to carrying out the same procedure at the next meal time. Occasionally the liquid entered the lungs rather than the stomach.
The suffragette martyr Emily Davison endured this torture, which invited comparison with mass rape, an unbelievable 49 times without submitting. Working class suffragettes were said to have been subjected to the procedure more often than wealthier women, but the practice was universal.
In 1910 the government made concessions that ended most of the hunger strikes, but they recommenced in 1912 after the imprisonment of Emmeline Pankhurst. To avoid deaths in custody, the government then passed the Prisoners (Temporary Discharge for Ill Health) Act (soon nicknamed “the cat and mouse act”), under which women who became seriously ill as a result of hunger striking were allowed to return home, only to be returned to prison to complete their sentences when they recovered.
Suffragette examines British women’s struggle for the vote in the years 1911 to 1913, through the eyes of the fictional character Maud Watts, a young working class woman employed in an appalling Dickensian laundry who becomes deeply involved in the suffrage movement despite her misgivings.
Maud’s political consciousness develops, but she pays a terrible price, losing her marriage and contact with her son, as well as suffering imprisonment.
The film climaxes in1913, the year Emily Davison threw herself in front of King George V’s horse at the Epsom Derby race meeting and was trampled to death. The tide of public opinion subsequently began to turn in favour of suffrage for women, and thousands watched or marched in Davison’s funeral procession
During the War most suffragettes ceased civil disobedience and organised activities in support of the soldiers. In 1918 all British men over 21 were finally allowed to vote, but for women the franchise was restricted to those over 30 who had university degrees or owned property, or whose husbands had property. Suffrage for all women over 21 was not granted for another ten years.
The film is very important because it examines not only the struggle of women to gain the vote, but also other areas of discrimination and abuse in the home and workplace. As the film points out, it was not until 1925 that British women won the right to custody of their children after marriage breakdown. The appalling working conditions and sexual abuse of female employees at the laundry depicted in Suffragette was typical of many nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British workplaces.
The film is not without faults. It provides a fascinating series of dates when votes for women were granted in various countries (in New Zealand in 1893, in France in 1945, and in Switzerland in 1971). However, it fails to mention that women were first granted suffrage in Pitcairn Island and then Norfolk Island in the 1860s. The Australian government granted it in 1908, but not for aboriginal women. As the film notes, the US federal government granted all women the vote in 1920, but because of intimidation and state laws neither black women nor black men voted in the southern states until the 1960s, after the civil rights campaigns.
The film’s story is presented in simple chronological sequence, with no flashbacks. One reviewer described it with a sneer as “a movie of stultifying, spell-it-all-out conventionality”, and a “three Panky melodrama”, but nothing could be further from the truth.
This gripping and deeply moving film sheds a much-needed light on the historical struggle for a political right which most people in developed nations like Australia and Britain now take for granted, and which forms just one element in the vast global matrix of campaigns for human rights.
The film has great performances from Carey Mulligan as Maud, Meryl Streep in a two-minute cameo as Emmeline Pankhurst, and Helena Bonham-Carter as Edith Elyn, a fictional character based on the suffragette Edith Garrud. (Ms. Bonham-Carter’s great-grandfather, H.H. Asquith, was British Prime Minister from 1908 – 1916 and opposed the granting of suffrage to women)
The singer at the gates of dawn
A short story by Peter Mac
The Department concert was organised by one of the division managers as an attempt to boost staff morale during the government’s selective retrenchment program. Some members of management sympathised with the employees because they knew that the government’s real agenda was to abolish the entire Department.
The performers were drawn from all ranks of the staff. An architect whose name I’ve long forgotten did a creditable job of “Summertime”, which he played bush-style with a bow on a long, ancient cross-cut saw! I myself sang “Reviewing the situation” from Oliver, in which Fagan muses on his meagre prospects for comfort in his old age. I got a few laughs, but the audience fell silent in the last few lines, when Fagan declares:
“Don’t want no one to rob for me,
But who will get a job for me?
I think I’d better think it out again!”
An engineer surprised us with a moving performance of “Old Man River”. Tall and thin, with a very deep voice, he always spoke quietly and courteously, and never at all about his time as an unwilling conscript in Vietnam.
But the biggest surprise came with the last item. The compere loaded into the hi-fi set one of the disks he’d provided to accompany the performers. He turned the volume up and announced laconically: “Rita’s going to give us a song about a girl who decides to write a letter to someone she loves, but can’t make up her mind to send it.”
Invariably cheerful, Rita Jones from the Plan Records section was known as “the hummer” because of her habit of humming along and brushing back her tousled hair as she worked.
As the opening bars rose to a climax, some of us guessed what she was going to sing. Someone called out: “Just hum it, Rita!”, and I heard a friend mutter: “Christ, she’ll never make it”.
But she did. Her voice, beautiful and wonderfully powerful, leapt and soared. We gasped in unison, and sat for eleven minutes dumbfounded, gripped and helpless like Kenneth Graeme’s small animals at the gates of dawn, while Rita, now a total stranger, gave a passionate interpretation of Tatyana’s “letter scene” aria from Eugene Onegin.
It had been a hard week, and I saw that some members of the audience had been caught off guard and had shed tears at Rita’s exquisite performance, with Tatiana’s uncertainty, confusion, and yearning mirroring their own emotions.
The stunning impact was magnified because it was totally unexpected. We knew relatively little about Rita. She was raising two children on her own, and there were rumours of a desperately unhappy marriage with an abusive estranged husband. Everyone had heard her hum, but no one had ever heard her sing, and no one realised she was mentally practising lines from opera while she hummed away at work.
Struggle
In the months after the concert, union members fought a dogged, often bitter campaign against the redundancy program.
We achieved a cancellation of the first stage of the program, during which mid-ranking professionals had been pressured to nominate members of their staff who were the least efficient and therefore (in management’s eyes) most deserving of consignment to the retrenchment section, nicknamed “the holding tank”.
Of the few who cooperated in this shameful exercise, some were found to have nominated people with whom they’d never worked, and in one case a person nominated someone he’d never met.
Management conducted the initial appeal interviews without union representation, but following our protests a former arbitration commissioner was recruited to take charge. He insisted that union representatives be present, and as a result we got several decisions overturned. But our triumphs were short-lived.
Those who were sent to the retrenchment section were encouraged to practice their professions by working on “pro bono” projects for non-government organisations , including the National Trust.
Needless to say, the NGOs were delighted. The free-of-charge service blossomed. The retrenched staff designed smart new logos and stationery, and word spread about the wonderful new government program which used taxpayer money to fund professional works programs for the public good. In the end the venture was so successful that the government panicked and shut it down.
The Government then decreed that the Department had to be profitable, and the Department management decided to buy computer-aided drafting (CAD) equipment.
One union delegate calculated that stand-alone CAD machines (the industry standard) could have been purchased for every professional employee nationwide for $5 million. But the managers got a loan of $50 million (according to our estimate) from the government itself, and bought a grossly complex second hand nationwide land-line CAD network from a bankrupt US architectural firm.
It was far in excess of our requirements. The government charged interest at the prevailing commercial rate, and management soon defaulted on the huge repayments. The government then claimed the Department was commercially unviable and had to be closed down. It’s often very difficult to run a business at a profit, but making it fail is a piece of cake. And we suddenly found that the leaders of our unions weren’t prepared to take on a Labor government in an attempt to save the Department. The coalition won the next election and finished off the job.
On the last day of business for what remained of the Department, the few of us who were left could have taken the day off or come in and done nothing. But we all arrived and worked hard throughout the day, tying up loose ends, struggling to deal with the last rush of requests from client departments and mourning in silence the passing of this part of our lives. Afterwards a few of us went out and got very drunk.
We fulfilled our role as public servants and I was very proud of my workmates on that day.
Losses
and lessons
The department employees were highly dedicated and had a strong sense of social responsibility. In Sydney immediately after the Granville railway disaster the Department’s office was almost deserted because the staff had walked out en masse and had gone to Sydney Hospital to donate blood.
The employees included highly talented people who until the 1990s had designed, documented and supervised the construction of most of the federal government buildings in the post-war period.
The closing down of the Department not only involved the loss of employment for a large group of Australian citizens, it also involved the loss of a valuable public asset.
The Department had won architectural and engineering awards over many years, and it played a key role in urban reconstruction in Darwin, after Cyclone Tracey.
Years after it was abolished three young workers died during the Rudd government’s well-intentioned but rushed and largely unsupervised thermal insulation program. These tragedies could almost certainly have been avoided with proper control by a federal construction authority like the Department, which had a national staff of electrical works supervisors.
After retrenchment, some professional employees with special qualifications readily found work in the private sector. But others who had dedicated their lives to public service experienced difficulty dedicating themselves to maximising profits for shareholders.
And many found themselves tarred with the brush of failure. The government had deemed the Department commercially non-viable, and by association its former employees were seen the same way. As any asylum seeker forcibly detained on a remote foreign island can tell you, if the government rejects you, others will do the same.
The worst-off were middle-aged employees with young children and mortgages, particularly those working in administration or professional support roles. Many joined the ranks of the unemployed. One of the first to be transferred to the “tank” became unbearably worried, moody and bad tempered. His wife walked out with the kids; he sank into a deep depression and was finally admitted to a psychiatric ward.
The Department had employed some people with minor mental disabilities for simple administrative tasks. Good workers, helpful and cooperative, they left quietly. Their outlook was particularly bleak.
And Rita disappeared. Her friends suggested she wanted to escape her obsessive, control-freak husband, and that she had always avoided the limelight of a vocal career in order to avoid him.
There were lessons to be learnt from our experience. If a government wants to abolish a department, its objective will undoubtedly be to rid the private sector of a competitor and convert a public asset into a source of private profit. The biggest lesson is that we can and must challenge any such move. It’s a matter of serving the public interest.
But another lesson is that workers are the nation’s greatest asset, and that working with others can be one of life’s richest experiences. Despite the bitterness of that period of retrenchment, there were good memories as well as bad for all of us, concerning the time we had spent together.
And for me, one of those outstanding memories was the night when Rita Jones from Plan Records lifted the spirits of her workmates in a moment of unexpected musical ecstasy, shining a brilliant light in a darkened hour.