LOWEST OF THE LOW – MIGRANT WORKERS IN WEST GERMANY
Pranjali Bandhu
[Review of the book by German journalist Gunter Wallraff, “Ganz Unten”, Cologne, 1985. English translation published in 1988 by Pluto Press, London, under the title, “Lowest of the Low.” Below is the revised version of the book review article first published in Mass Line, New Delhi, May 1988]
Political Economy of Migration
Germany’s economy has been strongly dependent on a migrant labour force since the 1870s when it began in earnest to build itself up as an imperial power. At that time it was the less developed areas of Eastern Europe (Poland, for example) and Italy, which supplied the cheap labour for its industry and agriculture, built its railways and worked in its mines. In the 1980s the “slave labour” population of West Germany was drawn largely from countries, whose economies have been disrupted and distorted due to neo-colonial exploitation by West German and other imperialist capital. Out of the 4 million strong population of foreign workers at this time (half of it “illegal”) about 1.5 million, the largest number, is from Turkey. These are followed by Yugoslavs, Italians, Greeks, Spaniards and Portuguese.
In dependent countries, unemployment on a massive scale is firstly the result of the relative forced stagnation of these economies due to neo-colonial exploitation. It also gets accentuated by the kind of limited capital intensive industrialisation imposed upon these countries in the interest of imperialist capital, which has the effect of destroying indigenous industry and agriculture. Large numbers of young men and women, in their struggle for survival and better earnings are forced to migrate to the countries of their oppressors in search of work and bread. Migration is also strongly conditioned by political circumstances, such as wars and civil wars, in the dependent countries. For example, about 70,000 Turks fled to West Germany after the military putsch in Turkey in 1980. On its part, the imposition of a reactionary military dictatorship was the response of the Turkish ruling classes to working class and other struggles generated by neo-colonial exploitation. On the other hand, many Greeks returned from the FRG to their home country after the deposition of the military junta there.
Migrant workers from dependent countries form the lowest substrata of the working classes in imperialist countries. Though it is largely skilled workers who are allowed entry into the FRG most of them (about 75%) are pushed into the unskilled and semiskilled jobs. 40% of the migrant workers are engaged in heavy labour in the iron and metal industry. Assembly production in the heavy vehicle industry is done mainly by the foreign workers. They are also heavily concentrated in the construction industry due to the irregular nature of the work. The dirty work of cleaning the streets, removing the civic refuse and industrial wastes, doing cleaning and repair jobs in industrial plants is largely their preserve. They are also generally picked out for high risk jobs in industrial plants that may result in injury and even death. Women migrant workers are concentrated even more in low paid, unskilled jobs. Apart from working in the iron and metal industry, they are engaged mainly in assembly line production for the electronics industry, occupy low paid jobs in the textile and clothing industry and are recruited as cleaners, servers and cooks in the service sector.
In times of economic expansion the Federal Republic is glad to absorb surplus labour from dependent countries from which it can extract super profits. For the supplier countries outmigration acts as a safety valve and reduces to a manageable level social conflicts, which otherwise, due to the vast unemployment and underemployment, would inevitably explode much sooner. Remittances also help to pay for technology and capital goods imports, which somewhat eases the debt burden. Labour power is imported to West Germany in its most productive and healthy years. Workers are recruited in their twenties and generally given residence permits for only 3 to 5 years. Due to the extremely hard conditions of work they are subjected to, it is expected that their maximum productivity period will be only this long. The old, sick and those suffering from injuries are sent back. Legally without any rights, in recession periods they are thrown back where they came from.
Already early imperialist ideologues, e.g. Bismarck, had realised the necessity of maintaining “social peace” in the own country as a prerequisite for expansion abroad. Parts of the extra profits from colonial exploitation were used to increase the wages of the German workers. Today too foreign workers—whether they are exploited in their home countries by exporting a few industrial plants there, or are imported to the imperialist countries—contribute to the “smooth” running of the imperialist economy, to price stability and to the wage increases of the German workers.
Though unable to get to the roots of the phenomenon and unfold its inner dynamics, at times unable to shed his paternalistic, “integration”-oriented outlook, West German investigative journalist and human rights activist Günter Wallraff in his book, “Lowest of the Low” has been able to present a well-authenticated report on the conditions of migrant labourers in his country. Due to this exposé and others he was hounded by the West German police and forced into exile. By taking on for two years the guise of a Turkish worker, Ali Levent, he personally experienced the “slave market” conditions of migrant labour; the increasing hatred, intolerance, contempt and suspicion they have to face; their ghettoisation and daily humiliations, inhuman treatment and a kind of apartheid, which is their lot.
He worked as a help in a McDonald’s fast food restaurant, offered himself as a guinea pig for medical research, was an “illegal” worker at a construction site, and was part of a contract labour gang in a Thyssen concern. The kind of exploitation he underwent in an “advanced” capitalist country was a resurrection of the pre and early capitalist forms of exploitation, nay at times even more barbaric. In the words of one Tunisian worker: “Slaves were treated with greater consideration by their masters because they wanted to retain their labour power. But we are worth and treated less than dirt because we are expendable, there are enough waiting in line to replace us if we are finished.”
Wallraff, as Ali, was offered only work that was temporary, dirty, heavy and underpaid.
Modern Day Slave Trade
Contract labour is an immensely profitable affair for West German industrialists. This is because they are saved the expense of social benefits, insurance, payment for overtime, paid holidays, bonuses, compensation and wage payment in case of injury, which they would have to pay to workers employed on a regular basis. Contract labour is recruited over sub-firms. Sometimes there is an entire chain of such sub-firms, each taking its cut, taking double, triple, sometimes even four times, the pittance that is actually paid out to the worker. Out of 35-80 DM paid by the Manager for each hour of work only about 5 to 7 DM is given to the worker. Sometimes, in spite of a tremendous amount of running around, he is fleeced of the entire amount and is completely helpless.
Many firms, like the Thyssen foundry in Duisburg (Thyssen was an active collaborator in Hitler’s Nazi regime) have since long reduced their permanent labour force and have engaged cheaper, more docile and easily disposable contract labour over sub-firms. The firm Mannesmann got rid of its own foreign workers by paying them 40,000 DM as a “return aid.” It rationalised itself out of 600 work places, created a racist atmosphere in the concern and was then able to engage cheap contract labour for much dirty work on an occasional basis.
Contract labour is often engaged as gang labour. In these the nationalities are mixed, their composition is constantly changed, they are not allowed to communicate in their own languages; by all means possible the emergence of a stable and solidarist work group is prevented.
Wallraff describes the working conditions in a Thyssen foundry: His gang is given the work of removing dirt, dust, industrial waste, oils and muck. They are treated like beasts of burden and made to work at a murderous pace in the most hostile weather conditions. They are not provided with gas masks (in spite of thick coke dust and ever present danger of coke gas, which in the previous year has already killed 6 workers), safety helmets, shoes, and working gloves, though these are provided for the German workers. Since the workers have neither papers nor an official contract they become helpless against physical and verbal violence. If a worker is not available for work whenever Thyssen requires him and for as many hours, he is immediately out on the street. It does not matter if he had to take his wife for delivery to the hospital or had to fly home for a few days because his mother had died. You can be made to work for 24, 36 or even up to 50 hours at a stretch in work gangs, if required. There are young workers who put in 300-350 hours a month. There are others who work for months together without any holiday. Kept like work animals, they are not allowed any private life. If they are allowed to go home to sleep, it is because this works out cheaper. Some firms even lodge their men in walled-in barracks, like in a prison. In these ten or more men are made to live in one room.
After a few years of such work in Thyssen dirt the workers are spent forces, completely worn out, look years older than they actually are, ill, often for life. Made to work without adequate protection and precaution, they are heavily exposed to toxic metals like lead, cadmium, manganese, titanium and mercury, leading to lung and bronchial poisoning causing their slow death. In asbestos processing plants it is foreign workers, particularly Turks, who are engaged in the health damaging tasks; they end up with heavy lung and bronchial damage due to asbestos fibre dust. In the case of accidents during work, though it may be a permanent injury, there is no compensation offered as well as no pension. Sometimes, in spite of heavy injuries, the firm may be kind enough to allow the worker to continue working at hard, heavy and dangerous tasks which the worker has to accept because he has to feed his family and repay debts. Foreign workers are also used in tasks that require them to remain in certain positions for hours on end resulting in premature wearing out of the spine and joints.
Guinea Pigs and Radiation Fodder
“Stop making experiments with animals. Use Turks instead,” says a slogan on a wall in Duisburg-Wedau. In the pharmaceutical industry Turks, Indonesians, Latin Americans, Pakistanis and refugees from other countries are much sought after as guinea pigs. In only very few cases new substances are tested. Most of the studies are meant only to find new sales arguments for old medicines and expand the market. It can simply be a matter of bringing a 31st medicine on the market when 30 already exist, under different brand names but based on more or less the same substance. In most cases the dangerous side-effects of the particular drugs being tested are already well-known and established.
In nuclear plants it is mainly foreign workers, especially Turks, who are recruited via sub-firms for repair and cleaning tasks in hot areas, i.e., areas where radioactivity is particularly intense. Within a few hours, days or even seconds, these workers are already exposed to the annual permissible radiation dose of 5000 millirem. If there is any repair work to be done in the plant, the first lot of workers is sent in, till within a few minutes they have already received their annual dose. If the work is not yet over, the next lot is sent in, if regular, they are not allowed to work in such zones for the rest of the year, but there are some who do this same work elsewhere in the same year. After such work is done, they are generally dismissed. Sometimes Turks are flown in from Turkey for a short period of time till they have received their acceptable dosage; then they are flown back even if this may be after two hours.
No attempt is made to inform the workers about the dangers of radiation. Instead, it is made out to be quite harmless, comparable to sunlight in its effects! Actually, it is a scientifically well-established fact that every radiation dose one is exposed to, whether big or small, has a harmful effect. It can cause either cancer or genetic defects in offspring. Cancer of the scrotum, prostrate and thyroid glands are known effects of radiation. Women tend to suffer from cancer of the ovaries and the bladder. Because the effects appear only 20 to 30 years later, and nuclear plants are a fairly young phenomenon as yet, it has not been possible to study these after-effects on the workers, because they will then be living in other cities or will have returned to their homelands. Who will be able to prove that these effects, or even death, have been caused by this radiation? No health check-ups are made after the exposure, only beforehand! No records are kept. Death in instalments. In all secrecy. On a mass scale. Every year tens of thousands of cleaners and welders work in the West German nuclear plants. In one nuclear plant alone, Würgassen, about 5000 men were sent into the danger zone in one year. Approximately half of them were foreigners, who would probably return to their home countries before the consequences became visible.
Foreign workers in the FRG are subjected to constant state terrorism, to the arbitrariness and absolutism of the authorities. By giving them residence permits only for short periods at a time they are kept under surveillance and in a state of uncertainty and fear. The police regularly carry out night raids and searches in the homes of foreigners. Deportation actions are also generally carried out at night. Every year an unknown number of foreigners, often the politically active ones, disappear forever in such nightly police actions. Another section dies under mysterious circumstances, for example in hospitals.
For the German worker aristocracy, the foremen, the supervisors, but even for the ordinary worker, third world countries are taken merely to be “holiday paradises”, where everything is cheaper and where “sexy,” “wild cat” women can be bought and enjoyed for practically nothing. Anti-Turk slogans can be found on the walls and in toilets of West German cities: “Death to all Turks!”; “Hang all Turks and all German girls who have anything to do with them”; “there was never a better German than Adolf Hitler.” Jokes about the Turks are rampant among the German workers. Football matches between the two countries become an occasion for open outbreaks of hatred and chauvinistic violence against them by Neo-Nazi youth.
During strikes and other working class actions the Turkish workers have been in the forefront, have proved to be more militant and uncompromising and have rarely limited themselves to economic demands alone, because their conditions do differ in many respects from those of the German workers. Due to this advanced contingent role played by them the West German state uses all possible methods to incite chauvinism and hostility towards the Turkish population.
The basis for fascist ideology exists in West Germany; for one thing there was never a definitive break with the Nazi past. Secondly, imperialism itself makes necessary its renewed emergence. The Turks today are the Jews of yester years. Racism in relation to coloured peoples has the ideological function of dividing the working people and diverting their attention from the ruling classes actually responsible for their worsening living conditions towards a scapegoat.
[Note: Egytian sociologist and political activist, Karam Khella’s book, “Foreigners in the FRG” (original German title, “Äusländer in der BRD”, Hamburg, 1983) was an invaluable aid in presenting this theoretical framework to migration and for data concerning migrant labour in West Germany.]