port talbot

“I’ve been here 30 years and it’s just dwindling down and down. I can’t see my own job lasting much longer”

The latest goings-on over near Swansea, Port Talbot, make for very depressing reading. The decline in global steel prices means that the steel factory on the port, a pillar of social and financial stability in the local region for years, is crawling to a painful death. The Port is unable to produce steel at the same, low prices of other countries, namely China, which benefit from being able to employ steel workers at much lower inhumane wage-rates.

“My Dad’s been here nearly 30 years and my grandpa was here too”

The fall of the steel industry is leaving the local community in a state of sad decay: helplessly crumbling into despair and depravity as it is slowly starved of its life-source.

The example of Port Talbot is a clear product of a world in which markets run amok, where empathy and community take a backseat. It seems bizarre that groups of people living in different parts of the world should, without ever meeting each other, compete directly for economic security. The problem is not one of abundance, of there ‘not being enough to go around’. The problem is one of social structure, or rather, competing structures. The competition of economies plays poker with the security of people’s lives.

“In 2012 when 500 jobs were cut, some workers emigrated to find work. Gary Keogh, Luke’s father, knows one who went to Qatar”

Any kind of new world, surely, would predicate production systems upon principles of international cooperation and universality, rather than jingoism and short-term greed.