DEATH IN THE BARON'S FACTORY

The Penarroya lead-foundry, at Gerland, near Lyon in France, has been on strike for the last three weeks. The workers are occupying the factory with the backing of the local population and the support of other Penarroya foundries throughout France.

The strikers, most of them N African workers, are not just asking for more money. They say their lives and their health are no longer for sale.

Their foundry belongs to the world's largest lead producing company. It is not some backstreet concern cutting corners to make quick profit. It iS owned by Baron Guy de Rothschild, one of France's biggest financiers.

Penarroya employs 4,000 workers in France, another 12,000 in 28 other countries.

Last year the company's sales income was flllm and its reported profits after • tax came to £6.42m. These profits cost the lives of men like Mohammed Salem, crushed under a furnacedoor at Gerland last December. He had already been injured six Conditions in the plant read like something from the worst years of the industrial revolution. The furnaces are on the go 24 hours a day, seven day a week There is hardly a mar in the factory who has not been burned maimed by • the hot metal and the moving heavy machinery.

The men work in a heat so intense that it melts the lenses of their protective goggles. Each man is expected to load ten tons of scrap metal into the furnace each day.

Foremen are posted at a comfortable distance from the fur. naces to ensure that the workers don't slip away to relieve their thirst.

There is no ventilation, no fans to draw off the toxic leadladen fumes.

Most of the workers, 'she safe result, have more than level of lead in their blood. The management has never revealed the results of its own bloodtests, but at the Lyon work's sister factory in Saint Denis, near Paris, 90 per cent of the WOr. kers are over the danger level.

Regulations say that the lead concentration in the air must never exceed 0.2 milligrams per cubic metre. But in the batterymanufacturing plant, the concentration is 15 times this level: in the metalworking and milling section, 50 to 100 times, and in the lead recovery section 200 times the safe concentration.

Lead-poisoning is an insidious creeping disease. It attacks the nerves and the brain, causing its victims to lose their sense balance, their muscular coordination, their hearing, their sight and finally their life When workers begin to show the familiar signs, it is only too easy for the management to encourage them to leave 'of their own accord' and lose the right to compensation.

To prevent lead-poisoning, the workers are supposed to undertake strict hygienic precautions They must wash thoroughly all over their bodies, brush their hands and nails, gargle after every meal, blow their noses regularly into a cleán handkerchief.

This sounds good in theory, but at Lyon there are no washing facilities either in the factory itself or in the works canteen.

In any case, the workers are dutinal loved eight daily wonteng allowed into the canteen hours. They have to eat their meals in the shadow of the furnaces, with dirty hands and in soiled clothing.

is one for every lays workers, As for showers, at Lyon, there though the law down minimum of one shower for every eight men. Top: Guy de Rothschild, above and right, workers living conditons, four men to a room, forty men to a wash basin.

Almost half the workers at Gerland actually live on the premises. According to the management this is a great privilege. They live in barrackstyle accommodation, four to a room. The rooms measure seven feet by 32 feet. There is one shower and one long washbasin for every 40 inhabitants.

Outside the fumes from the furnaces blow directly on the windows, while huge lorries drive in and out of the factory past the barracks throughout the day. The night-shift are expected to sleep in this continual noise.

When men are wanted to fill gaps on the day-shift, the nightshift men are expected to get out of bed and fill the vacant places.

If they don't like it, they are threatened with eviction. For the 'privilege' of living under these conditions, Baron de Rothschild stops 30 francs a month from their wages.

For years the workers put up with these conditions because they saw no choice. Most of them are Arabs, unable to communicate with the French who work alongside them and completely neglected by the trade unions.

At the Saint Denis factory, the Arab workers came to regard the factory organization of the Stalinist-led CGT as 'the bosses union' and formed their own separate organization after a young French worker had talked them into realizing the possibility of struggling to improve their conditions.

The management, aided by the union leaders, succeeded dividing the Saint Denis workers from their Lyon brothers. The two factories came out on strike together on February 9. But Saint Denis went back to work two days later. Lyon is still out and determined to win. As they put it: 'Our health and our lives are not for sale." HELP Argentine president Alejandro Lanusse is currently touring Latin America to win support for his inflationridden military dictatorship from both left- and right-wing regimes.

By the time he ends his first year in office in a month's time, he will have visited every • major republic in the sub-continent.

Pursuing his policy of breaking down ideological frontiers', the 53-year-old former cavalry officer has established diplomatic relations with China and has met such diverse political figures as President Salvador Allende, head of Chile's Popular Front government, and General Alfredo Stroessner, Paraguay's pro-Nazi strongman.

He has also been to Peru and Ecuador and received visits from Bolivian dictator Colonel Hugo Banzer and outgoing Uruguayan president General Pacheco Areco.

Last week Lanusse visited Colombia on his way to Venezuela, and the last on his list of projected calls is likely to be the most delicate of allBrazil, Argentina's major 'big power' rival in Latin America which he will visit on March 13.

General Lanusse, who seized power in a bloodless coup from General Roberto Levingston, has been criticized in his own country for neglecting home affairs for the sake of headline-catching foreign tours.

The Argentine economy is in desperate inflationary spiral. The latest of a series of 'hidden devaluations' of the peso, by around 10 cent, arounced by the Buents Aires central bank last week.

The official peso exchange rate is now five pesos to the dollar. When Lanusse took power it was four pesos to the dollar. The 'free market' exchanges dollars at 9.6 pesos to the dollar.

Central bank president Carlos Brignone is currently leading an Argentine mission on a tour of American and European financial centres in a bid to secure credits totalling $1,000m to bolster the change reserves. Latin American country's dwindling foreign excountries have taken retaliatory action Iollowing the latest On the political front, General Lanusse's plan to restore civilian rule with general elections in seven years year, military dictator- March next after almost ship, has led to bitter in-fighting among would-be office-holders.

The only figure with an obvious popular base is the exiled former dictator Juan Peron.

Peron has said he will stand for election. But at 76, he may want the presidency for one of his supporters rather than take office himself Peron's return to Argentina would be sure to arouse opposition from army leaders and sections of the middle class.

Lanusse has already survived one army revolt against him, in the garrison town of Azul last motivated at least in part by officers' suspicions that he was flirting' with Peron.

To win the 'great national accord' he has called for in the pre-election period, Lanusse needs at least Peron's benevolent neutrality.

The Lanusse regime is a constant target for left-wing guerrilla grouDs. including the so-called People's Revolutionary Army, supported by the 'Red" Mole' in Britain.

Tough security measures have been taken after a series of bank robberies and kidnappings organized by the guerrillas.

Under state-of-siege laws currently in operation, Lanusse has jailed many leading left-wing stúdents and trade union leaders indefinitely and without trial.

His. regime has brutally suppressed strikes and is now prestoppage meet a two-day and paring to work March 1, when the trade unions 'have called a General Strike.