Following the explosion in the port of Beirut and faced with the lack of
knowledge of industrial risks in France and their impact on our health,environmental activists founded a collective of popular intelligence and
information last year. Seeking to regain control over industrial risks, they
began to explore union strategies. ---- In September 2019 following the fire at
the Lubrizol chemical plant in Rouen, classified Seveso high threshold, emergency
measures were taken to protect the population: confinement, school closures,
suspension of certain activities agricultural ... Caused by an outbreak of fire
in an adjacent warehouse not subject to regular checks, the risks being
considered minimal, there were no deaths or injuries but it remains difficult to
know the long-term health consequences. On August 4, 2020, in Beirut, the
explosion of 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrates killed 220 people and injured nearly
6,500.
Knowledge is power?
Paul Poulain[1], specializing in industrial risks and impacts, called in as an
expert during the Rouen fire, was then contacted again by the media. He is aware
of the extent of ignorance in France of industrial risks and their impact on our
health. During the interview he gave us this summer, he explains that this is
what he pushed him, accompanied by a few green activists, to found the collective
Notre Maison Brule (NMB), one year after Lubrizol. How many of us know that there
are thousands of ammonium nitrate storage sites in France, many of which exceed
the 2,750 tonnes of the port of Beirut (60,000 in Saint-Malo)?
Who among us realizes that industrial accidents do not happen only elsewhere,
that there are dozens of them in France each year? We have little awareness of
the long-term consequences on our health of toxic pollution of soil and water by
industries. The Covid-19 crisis itself, Paul recalls, has an industrial origin,
whether it is the consequence of a laboratory leak or the accelerated destruction
of wild flora and fauna ...
For the NMB collective, it is of vital urgency to put the question of industrial
production and risk management back into the public debate. The activists have
set themselves the goal of informing as many people as possible on the subject.
With the desire to set up a network of popular education and collective
monitoring of these risks and their impacts, they intervened this year with
various local environmental groups. They presented them with methods to analyze
the public databases Basias and Basol[2], and thus hope that a larger part of the
population will be able to take hold of this information and act on it.
Not all in the same boat
This strategy, based on increasing general awareness of the industrial dangers
that capitalism poses to us and which has the democratization of the management
of these risks as its horizon, may seem idealistic. The members of the NMB
collective know that informing will not be enough to create an effective balance
of power, especially since we are not all equal in the face of these risks. In
the column published on their website[3]it is clear that this ecological and
health struggle is above all a fight for more social justice: the most exposed
are workers in the industry but also those living in working-class neighborhoods.
Only 6% of chemical substances circulating in the EU are subject to risk
thresholds, leaving employers complete freedom in the use of more than 28,000
products in contact with which workers are found. Their life expectancy is
fifteen years less than that of executives in France. And, for historical
reasons, the poorest and most racialized populations, having found themselves
unemployed, in part following the relocation of French industry, continue to live
where the soil and water remain the most polluted.
Deindustrialisation has not wiped out pollution and has in a way increased the
risks, making the causes of poisoning less obvious. In Seine-Saint-Denis for
example, many allotment gardens are located on the wastelands of old factories ...
Ally with unions
Whether in the forum of NMB or the speech given by Paul Poulain, it shyly shines
through the need for an anti-capitalist production revolution that can only be
achieved with workers. Their manifesto emphasizes that the disorganization of
work and the recourse to subcontracting are responsible for the increase in
industrial dangers.
Paul recognizes that informed or not, we currently have no decision-making power.
Faced with this observation, he explains that NMB regularly exchanges information
from the field with trade unionists while, for his part, he has started
consulting work with Sud Chimie to organize the voluntary professional retraining
of workers from 2022. . The objective is to gradually prepare for the stopping or
reduction of certain polluting and dangerous activities (oil production, rubber,
pesticides, etc.).
A new slogan: generalized defection! It is not the shareholders who will come to
the factory to work ... In the meantime, the NMB collective is organizing at the
end of September, on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of AZF and the two
years of Lubrizol, a mobilization to denounce the race for capitalist profits
which daily undermine our collective security.
Mélissa (UCL Orléans)
To validate
[1]Paul Poulain, Everything can explode , Fayard, 2021.
[2]Available on Georisques.gouv.fr .
[3]To be found on Notremaisonbrule.net .
https://www.unioncommunistelibertaire.org/?Notre-maison-brule-S-organiser-face-aux-dangers-industriels
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