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From The Militant, Vol. VI No. 50, 4 November 1933, p. 2.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
The mental poison of the propaganda that the last 100 years has been a century of steady, visible improvement in the lot of humanity is paralleled only by the real poison that has killed workers in industry 100 years ago and today. Under the headline “22nd Worker Dies of Radium Poison”, the New York Times of Oct. 28 carries the following news item:
“East Orange, N.J., Miss Grace Fryer, 35 years old, the twenty-second victim of radium poisoning in the old Orange plant of the United States Radium Corporation, died this morning in Homeopathic Hospital here ...
“Miss Fryer, along with the other victims of the poisoning, was employed in the watch dial painting department, where many of the workers contracted the poisoning by pointing luminous paint brushes with their tongues.
“Miss Fryer contracted the poison about fourteen years ago. However, until five years ago she was able to continue working, but she had to wear a brace on her back because the poison affected her bones ...”
For those workers who believe, in spite of this, that we have really witnessed a century of progress we turn the scene back 100 years, change the place from New Jersey to England, the women to children and the watch factory to a match factory.
“The manufacture of lucifer matches dates from 1833, from the discovery of the method of applying phosphorus to the match itself. Since 1845 this manufacture has rapidly developed in England, and has extended especially amongst the thickly populated parts of London as well as in Manchester, Liverpool, Bristol, Norwich, Newcastle and Glasgow. With it has spread the form of lockjaw, which a Vienna physician in 1845 discovered to be a disease peculiar to lucifer matchmakers. Half the workers are children under eighteen. The manufacture is, on account of its unhealthiness and unpleasantness, in such bad odour that only the most miserable part of the labouring class, half-starved widows and so forth, deliver up their children to it, ‘the ragged, half-starved, untaught children’.
“Of the witnesses that Commissioner White examined (1863), 270 were under 18, 50 under 10 only 8, and 5 only 6 years old. A range of the working day from 12 to 14 or 15 hours, night-labour, irregular meal times, meals for the most part taken in the very workrooms that are pestilent with phosphorus. Dante would have found the worst horrors of his Inferno surpasses in this manufacture”.
Taken from Capital by Karl Marx; Vol. I, pages 721 and 272. [sic!]
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