Around 1990, I did a spec job for 3-4 years. I was photographing factories and factory workers at risk of loosing their jobs. The whole Western world was in the middle of a structural crisis, moving factories out of the big cities, either to nearby couties or far away, to other parts of the world. So far I´ve only published a few of those works, and kept the pictures in an archive as a treasure. One day, I might know how to use this collection, I told myself. It was never time. Then came the pandemic, and the moment every one of us has been forced into some kind of afterthought and contemplation. Finally was the time for diving into this archive. My work contains 14 unique businesses and I did this on top of several other jobs out of pure self interest, like it was my own life blood I preserved.
90 % of all Norwegians own their own appartments. The owner of Freia Chocholate factory, Johan Throne Holst once told his adversaries; every worker should be offered stocks in the company they work at and own their own appartment. To be universally slammed by all workers unions. At some point, even participating in a theater group at his chocholate factory was banned by the union. Us or Them. Nothing in between. We should all become capitalists, was Throne Holst´s device, with reference to the marxist maxime; a proletarian is one who owns nothing except his own work. Who won, one might ask, Thorne Holst or the labor unions? In our Scandinavian model employees are even represented in the boards of their companies these days. However you see this; bottom line is that all of us has become entrepreneurs, petty capitalists and morgage slaves. Each one of us transformed into a very limited version of a human beings. Or is it me getting old? For sure, I´ve been part of it, and I´m not a hypocrate. But now is time to take a step back. What excactly did this leave us with?
Today pandemic has showed how vulnerable and exposed we are, how dependent we are on each others company, feeling small and left alone in our kohorts, forced to smile on live meetings with colleges who are playing the same sharad. Not only exposed to the virus, but to the fact that we are somehow trapped in our own homes. It´s not only a home any longer, an investment. During the pandemic it has even developed into a workplace too. Then there are vaccines. The instrument to put us back on track. But why can´t Europe just produce them? Why is everybody talking about a factory in the UK and one in Belgium. EU has 27 member states; why don´t we reconstruckt our assembly lines into producing the stuff that can save us all from this terrifying experience? Because they are not there any more. The whole Norwegian farmaceutical industry (2600 workers) is built up for export. We even didn´t have face masks in the beginning. No one produced them here any more. So, if this was a monopoly game, the lucky card woud say: Go back to start, which is around 1990. When politicians talked big about globalisation; all of us belonging to the same (peaceful) familly. Wether the goods were produced in China or Eastern Europe, it was just the same. Geography was remodeled. Old factories demolished, reshaped, and new industry for the new era built. I paid 17% interest rate for my first appartment i 1987. I worked around the clock to handle my morgage. Even today the amount of money I owed the bank each month is a big chunk. I became a house owner. A morgage slave. A responsible adult.
Being a capitalist is not for everybody. It´s overall a very bad idea. Ideology put aside, being an investor is to live in a constant fear of the maket plunging, a bubble looming, prices rising too fast, or falling at the same speed, leaving us with money trouble, family trouble, future thinking trouble, loosing our sleep. Investment going down the drain. Homes turning into a public place for embloyers to interfere at any moment any day, be i morning, night or dinner time. He is there, like a ghost, watching over us. With politicians pushing for this development, with blinking eyes, naming it by the only term available. This is Development. There is no other way. I wonder what Karl Marx would have said about this. He would definetly have to give the term "proletarian" a new meaning. Almost like all the left parties are struggling with these days. Who is a proletarian? No one. Not in this country. The proletarians are on the other side of the world. And if they revolt, then there is Xi Jinping. Who, together with the communist party has given them "the new China". There is such a lack of thinking and relevant philosophy these days. We are all like moths flying around the light bulb.
At some point in my career, I worked as a secretary for a big entrepreneur. This was some 15 years after I had documented the closing of the biggest steel mill in Norway, Christiania Spigerverk in Nydalen. I worked in barracks situated in the same geografical spot as Christiania Spigerverk. I knew every inch of the topography, all the faces, all the machines, the sounds, the smell and the sadness in everybodys eyes when they finally got the message; you will be laid off. It felt a bit strange to be back, now working with appartment builders. Of course I was silent about my past, why should I bother to tell stories no one wanted to listen to. Nostalgia is a private thing. The logic of new times is that they lead to something better. Real estate was future, factories past. Builders, engineers and business people melted together in a new We. Where interior design was lifted up as the new mantra of our times. At the core of modern life.
One day a project manager came to the barracks, and told us he was working on a pitch to the municipal how to name the new streets. I told him about Tor Aspengren. You should name one street after him. He looked at me, his eyes getting more and more blank as I spoke, then at some point turned his head in another direction, wispering a "no, no, no". How stupid I felt. Why can´t I keep my big mouth.
Tor Aspengren is one of Landsorganisasjonen´s (LO, the biggest union in Norway) strongest leaders of all times. He belonged to the genaration of social democrats who built the country from ruins after the big war, resonating into the new era of the 80-ties.
In may 1988 I worked as a press photographer for Osloavisen, a local newspaper. I was sent to Christiania Spigerverk to document the workers response to the government´s decition to close the steel mill in Oslo. That´s when I got the whole idea of documenting this time in history. When Oslo lost it´s factory workers.
A year later I was asked to write a small book for the Union at the same stell mill. It was a book about their holiday resort. A really nice side step in my carreer. Yes, I said, I would love to do that job. While working with the old archives I found that Tor Aspengren was one of the founders of this Feriehjem (Holiday home). He was an old man by that time, but he still held an office at the Union quarter in the center of Oslo. He told me his story. Not about victories and struggles as a top leader. More about his boyhood. 8 years old Tor lost his dad i a work accident at Christiania Spigerverk. His mother was a washing lady at the offices and the family lived at the plant in a small house owned by the steel mill. Barely old enough, Tor had to help support the family. At 12 his mom asked the bosses if her son could get a job as a help worker. Tor never could afford to do the apprentice time to become a skilled worker. He worked moulding the iron after it had been melted. We were sweating on the stomack and frezing on the back, he told me. Slitets dager (struggling times), in Norwegian, that´s how he described those years in the 1930-ties. Then he told me about the Holiday Home. A collective for all workers. Every one of them, whoever I met to ask for their story, had a big smile in their face, when they showed me pictures, hummed lyrics, putting this whole scene of characters and tones into my mind. How I loved this job!
Needless to say, there is no street named after Tor Aspengren in Nydalen in Oslo. There is no history of the steel mill anywhere around Nydalen at all. Except for some buildings and plaques, a logo here and there, and those ubiquitous chimneys characterising Oslo. A cold chimney. That´s what is left from old times. People like to live in old factory appartments, they say. It shows in the prices per square meter. History is in the walls, they say with a smile. Yeah. It is. Those workers owned little but when they left work they had a home where no bosses could claim any rights, a home separated from work.
Left: Arne Lia, Willy Monsen and wife, Leif Jensen, captured dec 1991, all retired workers at Kværner Brug.
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