by Kevin Doyle

Thu, 08 May 2008 08:43:28 +0300


The Paddington Rail crash in London in 1999 led to 31 deaths and well over 400
injuries. At fault was a simple set of rail signal lights which were difficult
to see (from the train driver’s point of view). When the crash was investigated
it quickly emerged that Network Rail (then called Railtrack), the company
responsible for rail line maintenance, had been repeatedly warned about the
danger. A number of drivers had been involved in near misses and reported this
to management, yet nothing was done. Then two high-speed trains collided.

What led to that crash is not, of course, uncommon. For example in 2003 there
was a very serious accident at the Kansai nuclear power plant in Japan. Four
workers died and a serious leak of radioactive coolant occurred when a severely
corroded cooling pipe broke. In this case it also emerged that, despite repeat
warning of the serious danger posed by corrosion, the particular pipe in
question – deemed to be critical to operations – hadn’t been inspected for 28 years!

Closer to home, many people will be familiar by with the ongoing blunders in the
Irish health service. There have been many but one in particular worth noting
was the death of Patrick Walsh in Monaghan hospital in 2005. Mr Walsh, a
pensioner, suffered complications during his recovery from an operation. He
should’ve been transferred to either Cavan or Drogheda hospitals – both of which
were properly equipped to deal with his difficulties – however both hospitals
declined to accept him on the grounds that they had no ‘available beds’.

At the time Monaghan hospital was caught up in a turf war to do with the
reorganisation of the health service in the region; it was being starved of
resources to facilitate its eventual closure. In the subsequent investigation
into Patrick Walsh’s death it emerged that there had been a series of other
‘near misses’ at Monaghan hospital. Concerned by these nursing and hospital
staff repeatedly warned management that a serious accident, resulting in death,
would eventually happen – then it did.

Why does it happen and what can be done about it? One argument put forward is
that it’s due to ‘bad managers’ or simple incompetence on behalf of some of
those who make it to ‘the top’. There is some truth in this in that being a
“boot-lick” is often essential to being considered for promotion. But
incompetence alone cannot account for the sheer scale and seriousness of the
problem. Rather, to fully understand why it happens, we have to look at how
organisations are set up and run. This is where the anarchist analysis of
hierarchy comes into its own.

Look around you: at work there is no democracy. There is instead a division of
people into order-givers and order-takers. Right now, wherever you work, no
matter what the job, there is a rigid hierarchy where some people wield power
and others have none; where some make decisions and others don’t. To put it
bluntly, a small number of people (“management”) make decisions for the rest of us.

Because of this reality there are certain consequences. One of the most
important is the disruption of information flow in an organisation. In the
present arrangement information about a problem or a shortcoming often gets to
management (eventually) but they don’t act on it.

The reason why management doesn’t act on critical information or the warnings
that it receives is very much tied with why the workplace is organised
undemocratically in the first place: managers must put profit-maximisation
first. Everything else – service to the public and worker safety – comes second.
So instead of acting on a warning or being proactive about a problem when they
are alerted, management often ignores the issue – until something very serious
goes wrong.

Mis-management is crucially tied up with the way work is organised under
capitalism. Under the present arrangement management often hold the control
levers in a workplace – be that a building site, a factory, a hospital or office
– because they control the allocation of resources and flow of information.
Safely cutbacks and what we see as ‘mismanagement’ are a consequence of this
particular arrangement.

The most important point is that it doesn’t have to be this way. Anarchists want
a world where the workplace is organised democratically. So whether you work in
a hospital or a factory, you should have as much a say in how your workplace is
organised as anyone else. Management is something that we should elect and
retain control of: they should do our bidding – not the other way round.