BOSTON
— Work. Many of us spend most of our waking hours doing it. We seek it out, we
need it to pay the rent.
And
we often whinge about it.
But
is our daily slog really all that bad?
If
you're reading this on a computer, chances are you labor in the relative safety
of an office, in a chair, in front of a desk, under a protective roof.
You
can rest certain that the walls won't cave in; that the air you're breathing
won't cause your lungs to seize up; that your clients won't open fire to pilfer
the contents of your wallet.
But
that's a comfort that many among the world's 3 billion workers lack.
Here's
an easy-to-ignore fact: every day, millions of people submit themselves to
risks that most urban Americans would consider inconceivable — in the quotidian
quest to make ends meet. More than 6,000 die each day in workplace accidents.
Many others are injured or sickened.
So
exactly what tyranny and abuse do workers suffer to feed their families? What
are the world's most dangerous jobs?
GlobalPost
asked Charles Kernaghan, director of the Institute for Global Labour and Human
Rights. Kernaghan is well-known for his fervent advocacy on behalf of
downtrodden workers in poverty-stricken areas of the world, not to mention his
antagonistic stance toward the persistence of sweatshop conditions. In 1996, he
famously caused Kathie Lee Gifford to cry when he revealed that child laborers
in Honduras were making her clothing line. He has been called an "economic
terrorist" by some manufacturers.
But
of course, one man's terrorist is another's freedom fighter.
The
interview has been edited for clarity and length.
GlobalPost: What are the world's most dangerous jobs?
Charles Kernaghan: Right
up front I'd put the Pakistan and Bangladeshi shipbreaking — that's absolutely
a death trap. I believe that's the most dangerous job in the world.
On
top of that, there's agate polishing in India. We worked on a case there with
silicosis victims — I mean it just tore our hearts out to see what was going
on.
In
Bangladesh, there are 4 million garment workers — they're getting starved to
death too with pitiful wages, and they're brutally overworked. And there are no
health and safety standards. We saw the result of that in the Tazreen Factory
fire on Nov. 24, 2012, which killed at least 117 workers. Less than a month
later another factory, Smart Fashion, went up in flames.
In
China, we recently researched a factory called Kaisi, workers were making
drawer rails which open and close the cabinets. Six fingers were severed in one
single month among workers producing side rails for drawers. The estimate in
China, just in the Pearl River Delta area, is that each year 40,000 fingers are
severed or crushed.
Also,
in Honduras many divers catching lobsters are dying. They're fighting for every
lobster that they can get, that's what they're going to get paid for the
season. No professional divers have ever done what these workers have done.
They just race to the bottom and then race right to the top, [without
decompressing]. On account of that, some of them gets the bends. Some die and
some get crippled. They have very rudimentary equipment, but the main problem
is that they don't stop — it's unbelievable that they're not all dead.
What is being done to make workplaces around the world safer?
In
the developing countries almost nothing is being done. There are a lot of
proposals, like the International Labor Organization standards, but these are
never implemented.
With
the shipbreakers there's absolutely nothing, I mean there are just no health or
safety precautions. First of all they're not even contract workers, so that's
how they really cheat the workers because they're day-to-day laborers. They get
paid very little.
When
we were in Bangladesh, a boy named Korshed —15 years of age — was working a
night shift, all night long from 7:00 p.m. to 7:00 a.m. during the monsoon
season. It was July 17, 2012, when in the middle of the night at 3:00 a.m. a
gigantic metal slab fell and crushed this young kid. Killed, dead on the spot.
There's no health and safety records whatsoever, the workers are just sitting
ducks.
What are the first steps that need to be taken to better protect
workers?
All
that can be done now to address these dangerous situations is muckraking. The
only way that we can have an impact is to go and document every single piece of
it. Take the photographs, interview the workers, interview the parents, because
there's no rule of law — especially in very poor, developing countries like
Bangladesh. There, when workers were killed in shipbreaking, the owners just
threw them off the ship into the water. They wouldn't even report it; at least
now deaths are being reported, but that's only because of the brave people on
the ground.
Basically,
the rule of law doesn't exist, and the international labor standards are never
implemented. Not in the garment industry in Bangladesh, not in the ship
breaking, not in the factories in China. You just come up to that same problem
all the time.
So
the ultimate goal of your muckraking is to get international standards
recognized by all countries and have them enforced?
Yes,
but they're not even close to that. The international workers' rights — freedom
of association, right to organize and bargain collectively, no child labor,
safe and decent working conditions — they're out there and everyone talks about
them, but they're never implemented.
In
many ways nothing is going to change. What happens is the corporations — no
matter whether they're involved in garments, electronics, shipbreaking — demand
enforceable laws to protect trademarks. When we say to these companies
"can't we have similar laws to protect the rights of human beings?' The
very same companies come back to us and say, ' No, that would be an impediment
to free trade.'
So
the corporations are protected and their products are protected by law, but the
rights of the workers have no protections whatsoever.
After
the Tazreen Fashions fire that killed at least 117 people last year in
Bangladesh, many people were shocked to learn that Wal-Mart actually knew that
the facility was unsafe. Are there other workplaces that you can name that face
imminent threats that we know of?
As
sad as it sounds, almost every single garment factory in Bangladesh is in the
exact same position. There are no fire safety regulations, there are no fire
escapes, there are no fire extinguishers, there's no emergency lighting, there
are no fire drills. We've seen this over and over again.
There
are really no protections because companies like Wal-Mart and other
corporations want to pay the least amount that they can, pennies per garment.
Wal-Mart was asked in 2010-11 to put in some money so that there could be fire
safety improvements, fire extinguishers and so on, and they flat out said '
no.'
At
this point in countries like Bangladesh and Pakistan, there's no serious
attempt to improve conditions for the garment workers. Hopefully something will
give, but right now corporations will have nothing to do with it.
What
brands are or products should Americans avoid because of the way workers are
being treated? What can Americans do to help other than avoid buying these
products?
It's
hard because of what happened early on. Like in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory
Fire, when the fire broke out so many workers leapt to their deaths. After that
law after law was passed so that by the 1940s there were no sweatshops in the
United States. They were completely wiped out because the rule of law was there
and unions were organized.
By
the 1980s, everything was being outsourced. The law-based model that came out
of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire was completely wiped out, and by 1980 we
returned to what it was like in 1911. It's an enormous problem because every
company is going after the cheapest wages they can get. In Bangladesh they have
the lowest wages in the world, but because the fire embarrassed Wal-Mart
they're thinking of moving some of the work to Burma, Cambodia and Vietnam —
it's a race to the bottom with no regulations.
Are there any companies that are actually doing a good job of
trying to buck the trend and protect worker safety abroad?
Some
are better than others. We just did a nasty case in Guatemala involving PVH
[the parent company of Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger, among other brands].
Workers were being cheated of their benefits and were not being paid. When we
contacted one of the labels, Van Heusen, they took it very seriously. If there
are violations, we will bring them into compliance, they said. So there are
some labels, like PVH, that if you catch them in sweatshop conditions, they
will immediately respond. That's about as good as we've seen.
David
Michaels, administrator of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration
(OSHA) told GlobalPost that in the US, workplace fatalities have dropped from
38 per day in 1972, to about 13 per day today even though the workplace is twice
as big currently. Do you see any similar trends abroad, and is there any hope
that workplace fatalities and workplace injuries are decreasing?
Not
in the desperately poor countries, like India. They still have not been solving
silicosis with their young people [polishing agate stones]. These workers are
still abandoned, still dying and not receiving proper medical care.
At
the Sensata factory in Freeport, Ill., which was producing for Bain Capital,
they brought Chinese engineers to the factory so they could learn how to use
the machinery. The first thing the engineers said to the US workers was
"the minute we get back to China we will tear off all of the safety guards
to improve the productivity.' There are still tons of violations like that in China,
with serious poisonings and other horrible human rights violations.
Source: Daily News. By David Case. 27 March 2013
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