The Preamble of the ASCE Code of Ethics reads: “Members of The American Society of Civil Engineers conduct themselves with integrity and professionalism, and above all else protect and advance the health, safety, and welfare of the public through the practice of Civil Engineering.”
World Petroleum Congress was held in Houston, Texas on 06.12.2021. Where “executives from Saudi Aramco, Exxon Mobil, and Chevron, speaking at the World Petroleum Congress in Houston on Monday, blamed demand for renewables and lack of investment in fossil fuels for recent fuel shortages and price volatility.”
The things that need more attention according to the oil and gas giants are “”Energy security, economic development and affordability are clearly not receiving enough attention.” Energy security and economic development on a dead planet? The economic development of the last century – especially since the neoliberal period has been that of massive concentration of wealth and power and people losing access to essential energy needs. And the worry about affordability once again shows how the state and its subsidies and fundings are essentially what makes a technology, sector, or industry feasible under contemporary capitalism.
The industry is also raising the boogieman of inflation and social unrest. Which are not unlikely but not inevitable and both are guaranteed in a scenario where the world enters irreversible cascading climate collapse.
“Combined arms sales by the three Indian companies in the Top 100 grew by 1.7 per cent. In 2020 the Indian Government announced a phased ban on imports of certain types of military equipment to bolster self-reliance in arms production.” – SIPRI.
A new report by T&E shows that the new “green” hydrogen fuels – which are made by turning electricity into hydrogen which when combined with CO2 produces a liquid fuel similar to petrol or diesel – are as, or maybe more polluting than existing fossil fuels. But the oil and gas and the automobile industry is pushing hard for these fuels. India under Modi has initiated a National Hydrogen Mission which is supposed to be a major part of the net-zero effort. Although the sector is waiting for the policy document to come and “a strong regulatory framework to be created keeping the interest of investors in mind.”
The level of NOx pollutants is equal to conventional fuels while CO (carbon monoxide) toxic production was higher in e-fuel tests.
India will soon be responsible for 3rd of the world’s air conditioning demands given the rise in extreme heat events in the region. But the ability to purchase and make billing investments is within a very small section of the population – my educated guess would be that it is roughly equal to the population owning private cars, i.e. around 2% of the national population.
Once again the only hope out of this entangled situation is the state sector coming to help the market -agencies like Energy Efficiency Services Limited will have to produce cheaper and more efficient air conditioners for the masses.
Meanwhile, European Environmental Bureau released a report on the repairability and replaceability of batteries in consumer electronics. Most new electronic gadgets do not allow for repair or replaceability of batteries creating more pollution, waste, overproduction, and burden of costs.
Sam Dolgoff in a very important article The Relevance of Anarchism to Modern Society wrote that “[t]he progress of the new society will depend greatly upon the extent to which its self-governing units will be able to speed up direct communication — to understand each other’s problems and better coordinate activities.” That this is the case is illustrated by the application of Enterprise resource planning software at workers’ owned manufacturing plants:
“[T]his proved to be an effective communication strategy for the 100% employee-owned company, which relied heavily on teamwork and collaboration as part of its company culture.
Abbate is excited to see how streamlined, digital communication is being embraced by employees. For example, he tells the story of how an employee who did not want a computer on the shop floor is now providing constructive feedback on jobs using the digital information he now has at hand.
“The ERP system is a point of engagement on the shop floor — people are now talking the same language that we’ve been talking in the production meetings and scheduling. Our new communication system gives more opportunity to provide feedback.”
[T]he ultimate goal in streamlining communication was to provide transparent information to everybody.”
In the construction industry, Building Information Modeling (BIM) softwares have the potential for achieving the same goals. BIM software can design the works project, estimate the material required, store scheduling data, maintain inventory based on this data, and can be changed in real-time over the lifecycle of the project. Providing workers on-site with all the information needed for the day-to-day tasks and updating the project based on site activities.
On the other hand, new AI-based Optioneering programs allow the generation of multiple options for a project based on the needs. If a community requires ground connectivity from A to B within a city these programs can generate several options based on the geological and geographic data and the social and environmental decision-making criteria we input. Some projects might have smaller embodied carbon, while others might displace the least amount of informal settlements, while the third might just be the easiest and most profitable for the contractors. If the communities are allowed to become part of the options process and based on informed judgment in deciding the criteria for project selection then this technology has the potential for a genuine democratization of the construction industry. As mentioned in a previous post the pre-tender planning process is very crucial for the future of sustainable infrastructures. cities and life on the planet.
NYT recently reported that “a recent U.S. Chamber of Commerce survey found that 88 percent of commercial construction contractors reported moderate-to-high levels of difficulty finding skilled workers, and more than a third had to turn down work because of labor deficiencies.” Like all other sectors construction in India is also largely labour intensive and productivity is not primarily driven by technological or process improvements. But this fact aside, the general picture is very likely similar in India with the generation of skilled steelworkers, carpenters or masons retiring and the new generation is not trained enough for the kind of work society needs today and is not interested in construction work.
The planning framework suggested in the previous post must therefore include an industrial and construction workforce development program. In manufacturing, work can be divided into minute repetitive small tasks but on the worksite, the nature of work keeps changing to varying degrees as the project progresses – so the intensive division of labour ad hence making do with unskilled workers is very difficult. The alternative to a skilled construction workforce is delays in project completion (i.e. waste of time and material and human resources) and/or unsatisfactory quality of work.
The current pre-tender public works procedure looks something like this: a primary investigation by the concerned department is undertaken to assess the financial and technical feasibility of the proposed project with approximate estimates, which when gets the consent of the department goes for a detailed investigation that if gets the technical approval comes out as the document for tender and work contract – including drawings, bill of quantities and specifications.
Nowhere in this two-stage investigation and approval process, ecological feasibility is examined as an independent factor in the work project. But this stage is quite crucial as the project once notified for tender almost never gets terminated and extensively revised for environmental reasons. Which is understandable because at this stage a lot of material resource, manpower, and political calculas has already been mobilized. Therefore, climate and environmental activists should focus on the policy framework determining the initial approval of public infrastructure projects.
Such a framework must become the law of the land – like the Climate Change Act 2008 in the UK. But given the fact that India is reluctant to even revise its climate goals that is a very difficult task. And even such a law with strict emission targets will not be sufficient to govern particular projects because the impact of a single work, especially small projects like single lane roads, is usually very low even over the infrastructure’s lifetime. But the cumulative effect of all projects in a region or of a megaproject with various sub-projects – like Sagar Mala do have a massive greenhouse impact.
Hence the need for planning. Planning will not only make the ecological assessment and hence the construction of a range of public infrastructure (and possibly private infrastructure) within the biophysical limits of the planet but also give the opportunity to make more just and equitable infrastructure – where the relationships of various projects and their relationship with society and classes within it is better scrutinized.
It is a curious fact that anarchist-communists have so far given merely scant attention to the issue of infrastructure in a free society. Kropotkin famously focused on fields, factories, and workshops but not on flyovers, canals, and water pipelines. Reclus gave passing remarks on the importance of modern transit systems to a cosmopolitan free world. Since then, activists and scholars of the workers’ control movement have focused on manufacturing and recently on services and logistics.
While 100% of the built environment that humans and many other species now inhabit is constructed by underpaid, unappreciated and forgotten workers on sites using largely tools and apparatus developed, improved, and perfected over millennia by the working intellectual-craftspeople.
While also, the infrastructure sector is one of the largest contributors of GHGs and at the same time one of the best tools for emission mitigation and social adaptation. Infrastructure reflects and perpetuates social inequalities. And at the time of terminal global economic downturn, it is the sector getting the most attention in corporate board rooms and parliaments. All this calls for more and serious attention to the engineered world around us and its future.
I learned yesterday that Mike Cooley had passed away almost a year ago. Ever since I came across his work in the mid-2010s it has shaped my social thinking and activity in definitive ways. He along with Seymour Melman and Tony Mazzocchi was a pioneering example of what the intersection of engineering, labour organizing, demilitarization, and radical environmental and health activism ought to look like.
The value of this intersectional politics has increased multifold during our period of chronic emergency – from covid to daily and diverse impacts of climatic collapse, from dismantling of standard employment structures to the historic rise in unemployment. Mike was instrumental in preparing the Lucas Plan. A corporate plan that aimed to transform the war economy to civilian economy and produce socially useful products under worker control.
Mike summed up what socially useful production sought to achieve like this: “We have, for example, complex control systems which can guide a missile to another continent with extraordinary accuracy, yet the blind and the disabled have to stagger around our cities in very much the same way as they did in medieval times.”
Now we have vehicles that can “see” but the disabled, because they are not a profitable market, still await the 21st century. This is not due to technological insufficiency or unavailability but due to capitalism’s preference for profitable and wasteful production, just like it was not profitable for capitalist institutions to fund preventive research on the coronavirus when epidemiologists started warning in 2016 or even produce ventilators or hospital beds.
If the military spending and the incalculable cost of what our society has to forego to sustain it continue to increase at the same pace there is no way to transform our economy to an even a version of capitalism that can prevent irreversible dive toward uninhabitable earth.
But we can neither progress towards producing and constructing what the degrading environment demands nor cut military budget nor prevent job loss because these are not technocratic matters that some right kind of corporate or political leadership or some technological breakthrough can realize. As Mike always noted that these demands are a direct threat to corporate and political managerial power over society. They can only be won by power struggle – by class struggle.
The Union Cabinet on 30th June 2021 promulgated the Essential Defence Services Ordinance (EDSO). The ordinance was passed in haste and with the rationale that the parliament is not in session and that the ordinance needs to be effective for emergency purposes. The urgent and immediate impetus for EDSO is the call for an indefinite strike by workers under the Ordnance Factory Board (OFB) which includes more than 80,000 workers in 41 ordnance factories spread across the country. The EDSO makes strikes and many other industrial actions – including denying to work overtime illegal for workers in any industry that are linked with the production or are essential for the function of defense manufacturing and services. This could include workers in the Mahindra factory engaged in the manufacturing of armored vehicles. The ordinance is in force for 6 months and can be extended every 6 months for the same amount of time.
The EDSO is a draconian law that does away with even the mild labor protections prescribed by ILO standards – most of which are not binding for India, as we have not ratified even the basic ILO conventions. But in this article, I will break down why the labour federations of civilian defense workers are going on strike starting 26th July.
Why are the five federations of the OFB and other trade unions calling for a strike?
The OFB is a government agency that works as the management for 41 ordinance factories and engages in research, development, production, testing, marketing, and logistics of products ranging from small arms, anti-aircraft weapons, tanks, missile launchers, to engines, machine tools, chemicals, and optoelectronics. It comes under the Department of Defence Production (DDP).
In the 2020-21 Union Budget it was announced that “In strategic sectors, there will be a bare minimum presence of the public sector enterprises. The remaining CPSEs (Central Government Public Sector Enterprises) in the strategic sector will be privatized or merged or subsidiaries with other CPSEs or closed.” The strategic sectors classified in the document included Defence, Atomic energy, Space among many others.
In May 2020 during the Atmanirbhar Bharat package announcement, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman made public the decision of corporatization of OFB for “improving autonomy, accountability, and efficiency in ordnance suppliers”. To oversee the corporatization process Group of Ministers, headed by Defence Minister Rajnath Singh, was constituted. KPMG Advisory Services (a subsidiary of the Netherland-based firm) leads the consortium as the consultants for the transformation.
The OFB workers’ federations are striking against this corporatization of the OFB, the world’s largest government-controlled defence producer.
What does corporatization of OFB mean?
As mentioned above, OFB is a government agency and agencies cannot be privatized or as a corporate entity enter into Public-Private Partnerships with private defence manufacturers. And because it is not a corporate entity it is not bound to generate profits for its shareholders every quarter. As an agency, it can work under “loss” to maintain high wages, social security, quality control, and other essential social goods which a profit-maximizing firm cannot.
The cabinet has authorized converting these 41 factories into 7 corporations. They are:
Ammunition and explosives group
Vehicles group
Weapons and equipment group
Troop comfort items group
Ancillary group
Opto-electronics group and
Parachute group
The constitution of the board of directors, creating a corporate plan for the corporations would be the next steps. All of this is going to be extremely difficult, especially given the spatial distribution and levels of technical specializations of different factories. But given the haphazard way in which the plan was announced planning seems wanting.
What are the “experts” telling us?
For Rajnath Singh increasing the quantum of defence export is the primary goal of the corporatization exercise. While for many retired military officers and “experts” it is increasing competition between producers resulting in lower acquisition costs and improving products range. Questions like ‘whether these are worthy goals’ or even if we assume that they are then ‘is corporatization the most credible strategy for achieving them’ have not sufficiently been discussed among the stakeholders, primarily with the OFB and the workers.
But appropriately enough in 2020, an internal report was leaked claiming that OFB was responsible for more than 400 accidents through manufacturing defects. The report was never shared with the OFB and the reporting on the leak failed to consider that most of these accidents could be because of unauthorized design changes, poor maintenance, or faulty fire drillings.
The basis of such proposals is put into doubt by some facts. India is constantly increasing its quantum of defence exports – India was the 23rd global major arms exporter for 2015-2019 and 19th for 2019. The Ministry of Defence’s annual report 2018-19 records India’s defence exports at Rs 10,745 crore, a growth of over 100 percent from 2017-18 (Rs 4,682 crore). OFB is a major player in these exports.
In addition to that, a 2019 study drawing lessons for India from the UK’s defence privatization by Jonathan S. Swift published in the Journal of Defence Studies (Journal of the MoD funded IDSA think-tank) found that “judged in terms of cost reduction, privatization has been a failure.” (pg. 20.)
What is the context of this move?
Privatization of the sectors that were predominantly under public control saw significant push under Bajpai rule. First, commercial aviation and importantly in 2003 Indian Petrochemicals Corporation Limited (IPCL) to Reliance Industries (RIL) for pennies. Then, in 2005 came MoD-appointed Kelkar Committee’s report recommending to corporatize the OFB to improve its efficiency. The report remained in limbo till 2020. But in the meantime, starting in 2009 more than 20 international defense manufacturers established subsidiaries in India – almost all headquartered within shouting distance from Raisina Hill and with ties with defense think tanks. 2014-15 saw the announcement of the Make in India campaign – defence is the biggest component of the campaign.
It is also worth noting that the Cabinet Committee on Security that approved OFB corporatization has the Minister of Finance and Corporate Affairs as a member. And between 2017-2019 Nirmala Sitharaman was the Minister of Defence. Making Sitharaman, Rajnath Singh, Modi, and Amit Shah the primary supervisors of the policy.
What will be the implications of corporatization?
Depending on the exact nature of the next step by the Singh-led Minister’s Group the whole exercise could mean either of two things: first, gradually being sold to private corporations, or second, gradually and through conscious policies being wiped out of the market, like Air India and BSNL.
Either way, one thing is clear: the influence of private, for-profit corporations that live on the war and waste industry will have more and direct influence over India’s foreign and domestic policies. The market for domestic weapons and surveillance systems will also grow. For most of the 80,000 workers, it would mean the end of government workers’ status and a turn to contract jobs and even lay-offs.
By more deeply entrenching industries and economy into war industry, OFB corporatization will be a big step in the direction away from a more peaceful South Asia. It must be resisted and stopped.
