Salient. Official Newspaper of Victoria University of Wellington Students Association. Vol. 40 Number 4. March 21 1977

There you go, bringing class into it again

There you go, bringing class into it again

If a long man replete with long grey beard and glittering eye accosted you in the street, fixed you with his eyes and asked" why are you at university young man/woman?" Chances are you would answer "to get educated."

Now true education as I understand it is the process of learning to perceive, understand and analyse the world around us; it should be concerned with methods and and relationships, not with a body of 'facts'. But if you look at the University you will see that its primary role is conferring degrees based on a supposed amount of facts learned. These 'facts' that we are at Varsity to absorb are the justifications for the validity of degrees. But it is obvious from the way university works that the primary purpose of a degree is to stratify people.

The education system acts as a sudden-death lottery with those who win at one stage being able to go up to another stage and try the lottery again. We are the people who have had the winning streak (of course it is not a conventional game of chance—many of us had initial advantages such as being middle class with intellectual-orientated parents; and most of us have according to the law of the jungle adapted our minds to survive the education system).

Cartoon of a person on a ladder arriving at a door reading uni, many people are sprawled at the bottom of the ladder

In society's terms we are the blue-eyed boys, who are given the key to money, prestige, etc (assuming of course we survive the last tests).

Even those at university not solely to get meal-tickets must admit that whether they intend it or not, a degree gives them considerable advantage in society. This not only refers to possessing a bit of paper, but also to possessing the 'education' that signifies that we know how to act the way society wants us to act and therefore to collect the benefits society offers for those who "succeed".

When we get a holiday job our approach to it is totally different from all our nonstudent workmates. Because we are in a privilidged position we obviously have a different point of view

This was bought home to me in the Christmas holidays when I worked as a machine operator in Griffins biscuit factory. It was a valuable insight into how the structure of society is maintained and made me realise that the education system is one of the main instruments of this. The people I worked with on the factory floor were those who had been weeded out of the education system very early on in the process. This had two consequences. Firstly they possessed no qualifications. Secondly they had been given a certain ideology that, seen in the factory context, is designed to make the workers docile non-thinking cogs in the machine. (As different cogs in the machine, university students have been given a fundamentally different ideology that fits the different role designed for them).

Because of this ideology, the people worked with were stuck in the factory situation and generally unwilling to institute changes. To me coming from outside and seeing the appalling conditions they worked under it seemed changes to the system are not only justifiable but humanly necessary.

We worked a 9½ hour day from 7am to 5pm with a ½ hour lunchtime. Thus there were 7½ hours compulsory overtime. On top of this there was more compulsory overtime at nights and on Saturday morning, so that some people would be working to 10pm on two nights a week and from 6am to 12 noon on Saturday morning (a 62½ hour week). This overtime was compulsory because nobody questioned the company's self-given right to force workers to work more than a 40 hour week.. The company also ensured people worked overtime by paying a low basic wage (one of the job supervisors specifically told me this—"if we pay them more they wouldn't want to work 60 hour, a week").

The basic rate for a skilled machine operator was $2.27 per hour while my supervisor who had been there for twelve years was getting $2.40 per hour. A partly skilled worker who had been there three years was getting $2.11 per hour (as a trainee machine operator I was on $2.09).

Robotic man with wires leaving his head

Most of the men I was working with were married with children, so overtime was financially necessary. And you can imagine what affect this would have on family life. After a hard day at the factory screaming kids and wives with suburban neurosis are not likely to be treated with sympathy.

The working conditions of the factory were physically and mentally exhausting. The machines we worked were loud and continuously running, and because of the ovens nearby it was always very hot. On humid days parts of the factory felt like the inside of a sauna. The whole place was grotty, and to say the least, an unstimulating environment.

The work we did required us to be on our feet all day and maintain concentration; yet most of the time there was nothing to do. After a ten hour day this left you feeling like a walking zombie.

The attitude of the workers to their conditions and wages was a very anaesthised one. They knew they were being ripped off by Griffins (one of the guys told me all about the company which is American owned and makes big profits from its Wellington factory) but accepted this as the way things should be. This is what I was saying earlier about their ideology: lower education works to produce compliant workers. They were also tied to the factory situation both economically and ideologically. Their education and experiences had reinforced the idea that the only kind of work they could do was factory work.

I asked some of the people who had been at Griffins a long time (up to 30 years) why they didn't get another job when their present conditions were so bad. They all told me they would only move to another factory which would be no different.

An obvious corollary of this is the very weak nature of the union (Chemical and Food processers Union). They told me that their union had good relations with the management and practically never went on strike. But in fact the wages and conditions were so bad precisely because the unions had such good relations with the management. Nothing will change to until the workers back the union and make it work in their interests.

As a student, the experience made me aware of what this education system is designed to do. Working at the foundation level of capitalism also brough home to me that oft-repeated phrase. Workers Are Oppressed.

This oppression is maintained through the ideology that is inculcated mainly through our education system.

So if you think you know how society works, or that politics is a lot of bullshit, go and work in a factory.

-Gerard Couper