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A contingent of labourers climbed down from the lorry to begin work on some road repairs. The foremen hurried them up gruffly, contemptuously. I was surprised none of the men responded in kind. Why did they take it? And I looked again at the men. They were not used to labouring. They had the look of clerks. They were office workers who had lost their jobs in one of the repeated waves of recession. This one was the early Eighties when industry was vanishing. The effects on an industrial town were traumatic. I was discovering this reality teaching in a Midlands college. And what I saw was a group of proud men humiliated on some back-to-work scheme. Nobody should consider ordinary work beneath them. I certainly haven’t. But this was awful. Far from being sympathetic, the foreman was more like a gang master. The men were not in chains. The foreman had no whip. But emotionally that was how it looked.
These men had rights, but they were limited. Refusal to work meant loss of benefits. So they accepted the taunts of a rough-tongued supervisor. I saw in that man how slavery works. Cultures that accept slavery have no difficulty finding overseers with whips. Regimes that use torture easily recruit torturers. There is no question that human nature (something we all share) contains its potential element of cruelty. In certain conditions we can all display selfishness and spite for their own sake. We can take pleasure in hurting others who have done us no harm.
