Bangladesh’s Other Exploited Workers
By In all the emphasis on factory conditions in Bangladesh’s apparel trade, we’ve forgotten about the other major industrial hazard in the country–tearing apart decommissioned ships for domestic steel production. I’ve seen this highlighted in Jennifer Baichwal’s outstanding documentary Manufactured Landscapes, about the photographer of industrial disaster Edward Burtynsky.
Now this is some awful work:
As the recent tragedies of the garment industry show, safety standards for Bangladesh’s low-paid labor force are painfully lacking. Shipbreaking Platform, a Brussels-based coalition of groups that advocate for better conditions in the Chittagong yards, says 15 people died in the area last year. (The total on-site workforce is around 30,000.) One victim, Korshed Alam, was crushed by a falling metal plate. He was just 16.
One worker remembers an incident 10 years ago when a 40,000-ton oil tanker arrived at a nearby yard without having the highly flammable gases still contained within its holds properly drawn off. It exploded. “The bodies just flew out like birds. Maybe 100 people died,” he says. Another winces as he sits down to speak to TIME. The 23-year-old hasn’t been able to work for a year — last July he was sent up a ladder to cut down a piece of metal that others had been unable to shift. It swung down into his right abdomen, shattering five ribs and damaging his urinary tract. His company paid for a month of treatment, but he is still in pain and, unable to work, has to sell his possessions to survive.
Yet the business continues because, as a poor nation, Bangladesh has little choice. “To develop we need a lot of steel, and importing the finished product becomes very expensive,” says Mohammed Mohsin, head of one of Bangladesh’s largest shipbreaking companies, PHP Group. “We say these vessels are like floating iron-ore mines.” Every part of the ship is recycled — not just the steel — and stores line the highway to the yards selling items that have been carried off, from bathroom sinks to gas cylinders and rubber pipes.
It’s a more complex situation than apparel because the multinational corporations sell their ships to Bangladesh to offload them rather than contract with them to produce products for western markets.