Mr. Bucket, the head of a patriarchal household had a big family to care for: his aging parents and his aging in-laws in addition to his wife and one child, Charlie.
Mr. Bucket, as well as his father, and highly likely his father in law are all victims of the insatiate appetite of employers for “surplus labor” - a Marxist term which shows how farmers driven off their plots of land and denied the use of the commons were forced to sell their hourly labor for wages in the urban environment and how the employers seeking to maximize profit reduced wages and increased hours to ensure high productivity at the expense of the health of the worker, his family, his well being, the standards of his living quarters and his ability to keep a family consisting of wife and kids. As the capitalist employer sought to gain more, he pushed for the production of absolute surplus value by forcing the workers to work more just to meet subsistence level and then put their own children to work because of extreme poverty. The story tells us that Mr. Bucket could not afford glasses and his parents and in-laws could not afford medical care. In Capital Marx adds that the capitalist's desire to get maximum surplus labor out of the worker made for the negotiation of the definition of a working day
The capitalist has bought the labor power at its daily value. The use value of the labor power belongs to him throughout one working day. He has thus acquired the right to make the worker work for him during one day. But what is a working day?” (1867: 342)
Marx goes through a laborious study of history looking into the struggle to prolong this day by the employers so that they may maximize profit and the resistance of the workers who seek to work to maintain themselves.
Capital did not invent surplus labor. Wherever a part of the society possesses the monopoly of the means of production, the worker free or unfree must add to the labor time necessary for his own maintenance an extra quantity of labor time in order to produce the means of subsistence for the owner of the means of productions whether this proprietor be an Athenian..an American slave owner, a Waalachian boyar, a modern landlord or a capitalist.” ( 344)
Charlie's father Mr. Bucket is said to have ,
sat all day long at a bench and screwed the little caps onto the tops of the tubes...But the tooth paste cap screwer is never paid very much money” (Dahl, 7)
The scenario of Warner Bro's film interprets this section to “the hours were long and the pay was low.” Yet, Mr. Bucket still doesn't complain about the monotonous, stifling job or about the hours, or about the pay. He accepts his wages and his life of poverty. Interestingly and as the story unfolds, the worse is yet to come. There is the threat of unemployment. His father knows about this first hand but this is omitted in the story lest Mr. Wonka appears less heroic. Mr. Bucket will soon face starvation through unemployment because of the introduction of further mechanization which replaced the workers and reduced them to a state of destitute.
The story unravels the different means by which capital seeks to increase accumulation of wealth by reducing costs. If Mr. Bucket lost his job to a machine, his father lost his job to cheap labor sought by capital in the global markets. Globalization which is about furthering capitalist interests through the free market provides further opportunities for more accumulation of wealth without barriers. Ashley Smith explains why Capitalism seeks globalization,
“Under capitalism, a small minority, the bosses owns and controls the factories, services and stores - and employs the majority, the working class to labor for them. The bosses exploit that labor, purchased in the free market to make profit and to produce goods sold in the market. Competition between the bosses forces them increase workers' productivity by investing in new technology, cutting wages and benefits and searching out cheaper labor and raw materials in other countries..” (2001:30)
McMichael's study shows that globalization has to be understood “as a general condition of the capitalist era.” (2005:2) In Charlie and the Chocolate factory, Mr. Willy Wonka the greatest Chocolateer seeks out cheap labor in the forests of Africa. In the 2005 movie, he is said to have been roaming the world looking for exotic tastes and flavors for his candy. In the book, Mr. Wonka “discovered them himself.” (Dahl, 73) He found the ideal worker from the capitalist perspective who produces surplus labor all the time and only request coco beans in return.
Pygmies they are! Imported direct from Africa! They belong to a tribe of tiny miniature pygmies known as Oompa-Loompas...I brought them over from Africa myself-the whole tribe of them. (73)
The deal is the dream of every capitalist to pay his very diligent workers who live on his premises and serve him day and night where he can define and manipulate the working day. There is no negotiation of working hours or pay because they live in the factory and dress in “ leaves and deerskins.” Mr. Wonka strikes signs the contract with his find,
“If you and all your people will come back to my country and live in my factory, you can have all the cacao beans you want ..I'll even pay your wages in cacao beans if you wish”
There you have it an army of workers, 3000 of them who dislike their home country where they were starving to death and who have no ties to anything but food. They have no other dreams or aspirations, no other needs or wants. They have no past, no mythology, no heritage and no emotional ties to their homeland. Although they are not described as nomads but as sedentary they will forsake everything they had and vowed to work forever loyal to their master, Mr. Willy Wonka the Chocolateer- what a deal for Mr. Wonka! Note that in line with the capitalist tradition the deal is used to exalt Mr. Wonka the great capitalist and businessman even further.
It is interesting that The Oompa Loompas do not have any names. They are lumped together as a tribe or a species of workers. They have no personal identity. They only have a faceless collective identity which is that of the worker much like ant-workers. The Oompa Loompas are depicted as less than humans. Malakki explains the “territorializing concepts of identity.”(1997:53) She says that,
people are often thought of and think of themselves, as being rooted in place and as deriving their identity from that rootedness” (56)
Yet Oompa Loompas are so easily uprooted from their forest. They seem to have no memories and no attachment to their homeland. Even their songs shows no nostalgia for the forest but revolve around their new life inside the factory. Their opinion seems to coincide with that of their master. They are his shadow and his chorus. They don't exist except as his tools of production. Even worse, they also offer themselves as guinea pigs for all of Mr. Willy Wonka's experiments sometimes at the expense of their life. Mr. Wonka tried his chewing gum-meal “twenty times in the testing room on twenty Oompa Loompas, and every one of them finished up as a blue berry. “(Dahl, 105) One Oompa Loompa flew away as a result of another experiment.
It is to be noted that the story absolves Mr. Wonka of any wrong doing or exploitation. He does not seek the Oompa Loompas to reduce cost but to substitute Adam the fallen worker. In a Machiavellian approach Willy Wonka could make this generalization about men, “they are ungrateful, fickle, liars and deceivers. They shun danger are greedy for profit” (The Prince, 1515) The story tells us that some of Mr. Wonka's workers were disloyal. Soon Mr. Wonka's factory was full of spies who pretended to be workers and who stole his secret recipes and sold it to his competitors. Like many world leaders including Hitler, Mr. Wonka reached the false conclusion from a wrong syllogism.. Some workers are spies. Workers are men Therefore all men are spies. He therefore closed his factory and only re-opened when he found a different mythical species of men right out of the jungle who haven't been corrupted by society and its needs. The Oompa Loompas are the noble savages of the romantic Rousseau. In the fairy tale tradition the Oompa Loompas are just mythical creatures who are happy to leave behind poverty and go to plenty. The story of the evil worker who had to be substituted with an uncorrupt worker absolves Mr. Wonka.
What's even more interesting is that Grandpa Joe also absolves Mr. Wonka from any wrongdoing blaming it on man's sinful nature. Grandpa Joe is innocent of any wrongdoing, yet he too was fired. But in honor of the tradition of the capitalist propaganda story, he feels no resentment, and perceives no injustice. He understands Mr. Wonka and just hopes that the great man would remember him.
Yet Mr. Wonka believes that his offer to the Oompa Loompas is a generous offer. It seemed like a wonderful opportunity for the Oompa-Loompas. But this is because it is a question of the story teller's perspective and point of view. The story is written by a British writer who first marketed his work in the US. We were never told the story from the perspective of the Oompa-Loompas because they don't have a voice in the Eurocentric, Western literature. We only hear Mr. Wonka's voice and his version of the story. Also note that the Oompa Loompas are short black people. Mr. Wonka is big and white. Visual physical domination by means of size and color is established especially to the consciousness of an American reader who is well aware of a long history of African slavery to work the farms of the white man in the South. The 2005 film avoid the race issue by introducing lighter skinned Oompa Loompas. Also a new version of the book came out in the seventies with blonde Oompa Loompas from Oompa Loompa land to silence the complaints of the NAACP.
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