The Navigators [Region 2]

Buy This Item The Navigators [Region 2]  Available from Amazon  $69.98  on 11-29-2008     Ken Loach is attracted by extreme situations. In this film he shows the damage privatisation caused in the railway industry. Team spirit was destroyed among railwaymen with all it brought along : tension, selfishness, isolation, carelessness, even maybe hatred and cruelty. The men lost their daily security and it also meant tension in the families, with their wives, girlfriends, and ex-spouses and children. Family life suffered tremendously, also meaning some other blights like alcoholism, though Loach does not insist on that point. He describes in details the way agencies become the real go-betweens for these now flexible workers and the real employers who cut on cost even if it means less safety and more danger. Of course Ken Loach ends up with an accident : a man is wounded by a train at night because there was no one to make sure the tracks were empty while the men were transporting concrete in buckets, having regressed in their working conditions at least one century. Work there is, for sure, but unions are banned, regular hours are dead, private life disappears, working conditions are primitive and accidents become a real plague, not to mention the tremendous waste it means when two private firms are competing on one site, each one sending less men than before but the two together sending mor men. A complete break with the present in the name of a future that smells like the past very much. And today the state is forced to go back into the picture to guarantee some security and regularity, for the passengers this time. <br /> <br />Dr Jacques COULARDEAU <br /> Reader Reviews The classic privatization process of a governmental agency, taken apart inexorably by the new owners, from the workers' point of view. First come the voluntary retirement slips. Later on, the decreased working conditions, and finally, the dismantlement of the entire working environment. Those who want to continue working must do it through temporary agencies without collective agreements and using their own equipment. Naturally, security levels decline and people get hurt. All what is wrong with neo-classical economics is here: the money that was expended in more wages and better quality work is now channeled towards the owners of the agencies and the contractors, who care nothing about the workers, and if they're the workers themselves they must do un-ethical things to survive at the same level than before. A gifted group of actors bring to life the known pattern of despair that settles after a Thatcherite technocrat has done his work in the name of efficiency, and the gains of the think thank who employs him after hours.

The Navigators [Region 2] Available from Amazon Price: $69.98 Updated on 11-29-2008.

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