Hi Nate, thanks and yeah for sure - I have audio and slides. I’ll send them through shortly. I didn’t quite land everything in the talk but I think main points are there and hopefully I’ll wrote some of this up over the next couple of months in our summer. Hope you are well!

Small part of a larger story I’m trying to tease out

To me this story helps to illuminate areas where notions of working class environmentalism need to be developed further - namely in confronting the state.

Important stories here about the origins of health centres, proletarian health and environmentalism, and important lessons about the role of OHS law, public health as iterations of the state as mechanisms for decomposing the radical possibilities of the struggle.

The company is intransigent. The state responds slowly, and unsurprisingly in opposition to the workers, pushes a corporatist, technocratic, and managerial oriented form of OHS legislation, which which passes. Peak union body of NSW agrees to the corporatist model proposed by the state.

Importantly, the formation of workers health centres, oriented to the rank and file, contributes significantly to worker led struggles over health and environment. The circulation of information between the centres and the shop floor plays a key role in the struggle.

The class composition in both technical and social forms, generates a consistency of political composition across both “production” and “reproduction”.

Emerging from the mass labour of the steel works, and the neighbourhoods in the shadow of the stacks, this arrangement of re/production forms the basis of proletarian health struggles across each of these sites.

This strike is located within a cycle of struggle oriented to what can be understood as a form of working class environmentalism and proletarian health, emerging from shopfloor, neighbourhood and community struggles, between the mid 1970s to early 1980s

In 1980 there was a 4 day strike against exposure to cancer causing emissions by over 1000 coke ovens workers at the bluescope (then bhp) steelworks. Within a year there was a further 4 week strike on the same issue. Multiple measures are struggled for to improve conditions.

Today one on class, crime and communism

Thanks! Will do

Will it be recoded and online after by any chance?

Working on Crimes of Class again so rereading Mattick’s the scum of humanity. Always found this but hilarious.