VANCOUVER and MARYSTOWN, N.L. –
When old ships reach the end of their ocean-sailing life, they often go to
shipyards in developing countries to be broken into scraps.
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Ship breaking operations at a
Newfoundland shipyard have left an unhealthy legacy.
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But the workers who tear apart
the no-longer-seaworthy ocean liners and tankers put their health, and lives,
at risk to salvage whatever materials scrap dealers can sell.
In the process, thousands of
manual labourers, working with limited or no protective gear, are exposed to
toxins including asbestos for pay that does not come close to compensating for
the risk.
Bangladesh, Pakistan, India,
China and Turkey are the biggest markets for ship breaking and salvage.
The International Labour
Organization reported 90 per cent of the world’s ship breaking occurs in those
five countries.
In Bangladesh alone, the industry
brings in around $800 million a year through its ship breaking yards dotting
the Indian Ocean coast, according to the Independent.
Newfoundland’s
ship-breaking legacy
But it wasn’t that long ago,
before the industry came under international scrutiny, that the Newfoundland
town of Marystown had a ship-breaking operation.
Leo Gaulton worked as a security
guard at the Marystown Shipyard four decades ago and was there in 1970 during
the dismantling of the passenger ferry SS Baccalieu and its sister ship SS
Burgeo. The conditions weren’t much better than what labourers in South Asia
deal with today, he said.
“All the paint and corrosion and
stuff that was on that boat was burnt and you could smell it all over the
yard,” Gaulton told Global News. “Everybody was there just burning away, just
breathing that in. All they had on was their safety glasses and their hard
hat.”
Gaulton blames the working
conditions for his prostate cancer and his heart problems.
“Out of that 500 or 600 people,
I’m safe on saying that’s probably 50 per cent of them [came] down with some
sort of cancer,” Gaulton said. “Some of them are already gone and some are
still suffering, as we speak.”
The Newfoundland and Labrador
government owned the shipyard since it opened in 1967 until the early 1990s,
when it was privatized.
The province’s Workplace Health,
Safety and Compensation Commission (WHSCC) compensated 15 former workers
following a 2007 occupational disease claim filed by Local 20 of the Canadian
Auto Workers (CAW)/Marine Workers Federation.
A Feb. 22, 2007 a CAW news
release stated the claim stemmed from exposure to asbestos: “Seven claims for
lung cancer and eight for various types of gastrointestinal cancer (such as
cancers of the stomach and bowel) are being filed with the WHSCC. The claims
state that all these illnesses relate to asbestos exposure at the shipyard.”
But, a bigger push for
compensation has emerged now that there is a much bigger uproar over the
hazardous industry.
Bernadine Bennett and Bertha
Smith formed the Marystown Shipyard Families Alliance, a group lobbying for
compensation for former employees who fell ill and their surviving family
members. Both women lost family members and say the shipyard is to blame.
“To now include ship-breaking in
what we have already confirmed as very high exposure levels [to toxins],
certainly speaks to the tsunami of occupational disease and deaths we have seen
from the Marystown Shipyard group of workers,” Bennett told Global News.
“I’m hoping that WHSCC and our
government will finally recognize our workers’ claims, because of these
extreme, hazardous conditions that they worked in,” Smith said.
The alliance makes ship breaking
a big part of its next submission to the compensation commission, coming in the
next few months. WHSCC said it is open to hearing new evidence.
The group has attained the
services of accident and injury lawyer Ches Crosbie, for free, who said the
“human cost” of ship breaking is still being felt.
“Back in Newfoundland in those
days, the standards were lower and we were regarded as a third-world place
ourselves. It was a place where the dirty jobs could be done and in fact they
were done, in Marystown” Crosbie said.
He told Global News 100 former
workers are now pursuing compensation.
The
dirty, dangerous job of ship breaking
Brussels-based Shipbreaking
Platform – a coalition of environmental, human and labour rights
non-governmental organizations — has been working to “prevent toxic end-of-life
ships from being beached in developing countries. “
According to the organization,
there are a number risky substances that workers can be exposed to in the
demolition of vessels.
Aside from asbestos, those can
include: heavy metals, such as mercury and lead, polychorinated biphenyls
(PCBs), carcinogenic polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), contaminated
bilge water and ballast water containing sediment and bio-organisms.
Earlier this year, The
Independent reported, “Most ships contain an average of 15,000 lbs [6803.89
kilograms] of asbestos and 10 to 100 tons [9.07 to 90.7 metric tonnes] of lead
paint.”
On top of the risk of being
exposed to toxic substances, Shipbreaking Platform points out there is also the
potential for workers to be injured or killed by fire, explosions, falling
objects or even suffocation.
A 2010 World Bank report on ship
breaking in Pakistan and Bangladesh noted there were as many as 1,200 workers
who had been killed, over a 30-year period, in the ship breaking yards in
Bangladesh’s Chittagong delta.
The situation in Pakistan
appeared somewhat better, as far as safety was concerned. The World Bank report
said the Gadani ship-breaking yards, in Balochistan province, have “a higher
degree of mechanization than in Bangladesh, which mitigates some risks.” But,
the report noted more work needed to be done to modernize the industry.
The World Bank also reported
workers at the Gadani yards were able to form a labour union.
But according to Al-Jazeera, Pakistan
does not have laws that govern ship-breaking work and labourers got a mere $5
per tonne of scrap and Global Post reported many of them are unregistered
migrant labourers.
By comparison, the daily wage in
the Bangladesh’s Chittigong yards was about $3 CAD per day.
Source:
Global News. 12 September 2013
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