The Antisocial Socialist

We here at Sabotabby Reads the News applaud a surprising turn of events: Three men have been charged in the deaths of four workers killed by a faulty scaffold.

I say surprising because it is the first time in Ontario that company officials have been charged with murder for choosing short-term profit over the lives of their workers. One seldom hears of it happening anywhere, despite the frequency of work-related deaths as companies increasingly skimp on health and safety to save a few bucks. These are deaths directly attributable to capitalism, but, of course, we don't tally death-by-political-system unless the killers are ostensibly communist.

This reminds me of two other deaths last month, those of Ralston White and Paul Roach, who died on a farm near Owen Sound after inhaling toxic fumes that have no business being around human beings. You probably didn't hear those names, because, well, they were Jamaican migrant workers employed under the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program.

Three hundred workers die on the job in Ontario every year. In comparison, 151 Canadian soldiers have died in Afghanistan since 2001. I will state with confidence that fruit-pickers and construction workers are more important to a civilization than soldiers. (What's more important, invading Afghanistan or having a roof over your head and food in your stomach?) And yet, Aleksey Blumberg, Vladimir Korostin, Fayzullo Fazilov, and Aleksanders Bondarevs do not get moments of silence at school assemblies. Ralston White and Paul Roach do not get paraded, with flags and fanfare, down the Highway of Heroes.

It is my hope that the families of these men get some small measure of justice and comfort, and that this marks a turning point at which we might begin to examine the violence inherent in the system our culture's conceptions of whose lives count, and whose do not.