Dying to work

Australian’s rallied in support of the failed Burmese peoples’ uprising in 2007. Footage of dignified, serious faced, burgundy clad monks taking to the streets in a peaceful protest against the increasingly untenable living conditions in Burma captured the world’s imagination and sympathy. People were increasingly angered as the images changed to those of the ruling junta beating and arresting hundreds of protesters, monks included.

Central to the protest were the images captured by brave students, activist and monks. Tourists caught in the melee shot their footage to wire services, from where it was propelled at light speed to global TVs. We all held our breath at that point. Sighing and crying as the inevitable happened.

There was little that was dignifying about the deaths of 54 Burmese migrant workers inside a refrigerated truck last week, and the horrifying images of rows of young dead, some only eight-years-old, were not sent around the world.

I had accidentally found the initial report in the Seattle Times and sent it to my friends in the exiled Seafarers Union of Burma (SUB) and a watchdog NGO who advocate for Burmese migrant workers. The SUB immediately rushed out and took photos. They are grisly and depressingly modern.

One shows the insides of the truck still littered with the detritus of the lives that had been suffocated inside. One can only imagine what it must have been like as the air grew fetid and hot, then heavy with sweat and dead in oxygen. How the workers must have looked on in horror as one after the other, the impossibly young men and women in jeans and T-shirts fell, slumped against each other dying.

Another shows men heaving a lifeless pale body off the truck. One man is smiling, perhaps at a snickered joke or in embarrassment of being caught with the dead.

Others simply show the lines of bodies, laid out like fish at a market. As disturbing are those of the distressed survivors, behind bars, weeping and looking dazed, the cries of their friends still in their ears.

Of the dead, 37 were female (including one eight-year-old girl) and 17 were male (including one boy). An additional 67 workers, 14 of them under 18-years-old and one pregnant woman, survived the incident. The 14 child survivors were separated from the adult survivors and have been kept in immigration detention in Ranong. All 53 adult survivors were sentenced by a local court for illegal entry and to a 2,000 baht (US$63) fine. In Australia they would have perhaps been counselled, or given medical attention. But the next bit would be familiar to refugee advocates.

As all but four of the adult survivors were unable to pay the fine, they were sentenced to imprisonment for 10 days. Now these 10 days have passed, the adult survivors, alongside the child survivors, are being kept in an immigration jail and have limited access to lawyers and other non-governmental assistance.

While this was an extreme case, the NGO group reported that at least 100 other Burmese migrant workers die each year trying to get to Thailand or anywhere where they can find work. They were at the time of this event trying to secure compensation for a legally registered Burmese woman migrant horribly injured on a Shangri La hotel site in Chiang Mai. A 300kg moulding fell from the 12th floor when the sling broke, and parts fell on her as she worked below.

April 28 is now set aside as a day when we remember the victims of occupational accidents and injuries. International Workers Memorial Day is gathering more and more victims to remember. More die each year in workplaces than in the conflicts that plague their nations. They die quietly and with no fanfare in the globalised factories of the world, most without compensation or health care.

Those that do not die at home leave the world as migrant workers, among strangers, often in violent or degrading conditions. I have met Indonesian women branded with hot irons in retribution for some sleight or because of jealousy.

Another had a kettle of boiling water hurled over her rousing her out of self-imposed numbness, for the crime of leaving her shoes inside her employer’s house. The women, a sociology graduate from one of Indonesia’s better university’s had not been paid in 8 months. When I talked to her she was skeletal and clearly deeply damaged.

Two years ago the World Health Organization (WHO) reported that fatalities from workplace and road injuries were killing more people in developing countries than infectious diseases. But the Western media is still obsessed with Avian Flu, (which one could argue is itself an occupational illness), or artifact diseases such as Ebola. The news camera will seamlessly switch from a Ministry of Health spokesperson talking about a potential pandemic, to an economist or banker talking about yet more seductive trade deals. Both are harbingers of death. The major difference is that while resources, human and monetary are hurled at Avian Flu, occupational safety and health in developing countries is witnessing rapidly declining services and attention.

Last year the Ministry of Health in China admitted that more than four million died a year from industrial lung diseases such as silicosis, asbestos and cotton dust disease. Like pages from the medical books of Industrial Revolution Europe, diseases that have largely disappeared from developed nations are now rising like swamp gas in the nations of Asia, Latin America and Africa.

In China, the Hong Kong owned gold Peak factory making nickel cadmium batteries became the target of international outcry after at least 14 workers died of cadmium poisoning. Mixed metal intoxications including cobalt, meant that women were giving birth to deformed and ailing babies. Several newborns were stained black as though soot had been rubbed into their skin. Others had soft bendable bones and skulls that depressed when they slept.

In the industrial zones of China workers are increasingly not returning to report for factory duty at the end of the spring holiday. Work is so degrading and wages poor when compared to the cost of living. Many choose to stay at the farm and grow food instead.

I was told a battery making plant had been built in Udomxai north of Vientiane where young women work in a haze of metal fumes. A Newsweek article extolling the “Kinder Gentler Dam” that is the Nam Theun 2 in southern Lao omitted the less gentle fact that by March last year 11 workers had died and more than 400 had been injured. Sawmills are the secular Sharia, taking hands and fingers from Laos workers for whom there is no compensation or available rehabilitation.

Free marketeers and scions of deregulation such as the Mont Pelerin Society are fond of using the word “freedom” much as George W uses it; like a party hat of frills and glitter for those “fortunates” invited to the party. But under the hat is the scurf of entrapment for others. Safety and health, or lack of it, rarely sullies the ra-ra hype about globalisation. We in the south all know that the internationalisation of production, has been accompanied by the internationalisation of occupational injuries and illness and in particular the outsourcing of hazardous work such as ship breaking. Increasingly the globalisation of industry is being accompanied by the globalisation of protest.

At a 2004 meeting in Benin the WHO, which along with the International Labour Organization (ILO) takes international responsibility for workers health and rights, agreed that global economic changes have direct and dire consequences for occupational health.

Globalisation may be the best thing that happened to T-Shirt and sports shoe prices, but it has led to growing social inequity, persistent poverty and challenges to peace and security. Occupational health institutions are becoming weaker as result of deregulation and the decrease of state intervention in economy. These challenges are contributing to the global burden of diseases.

Workplace health and safety competes poorly with other poster issues as poverty alleviation, HIV-AIDS, and water and sanitation. There is lack of co-ordination by the various international agencies, donors and national agencies, which give scant attention to programs on occupational health and safety. An injured worker, once the major income earner, is a drain on scarce food resources, particularly at this time. Work, ironically, can lead to impoverishment as hospital bills and dependency mount up.

Abraham Lincoln once said that “Labour is more important than capital. Without labour, capital cannot exist.” The truth of his statement is realised when one recognises that the global workforce produces a staggering global gross domestic product (GDP) of US$21.6 trillion per year. This GDP provides the economic and material resources by which all other activities, including health and social services, training and education, research and cultural services, are sustained.

Despite that working conditions for the majority of the world's workers do not meet the minimum standards. Occupational health and safety laws cover only about 10 per cent of the population in developing countries, omitting many major hazardous industries and occupations.

With rare exceptions (US, Canada and Germany), most countries deflect responsibility for global OHS onto UN agencies. But the largely elite UN has had limited success. ILO conventions are intended to assist nations promote workplace safety, but conventions and recommendations are international agreements that have legal force only if they are ratified. The most important ILO Convention on Occupational Safety and Health has been ratified by only 37 of the 175 ILO member states. Only 23 countries have ratified the ILO Employment Injury Benefits Convention that lists occupational diseases for which compensation should be paid.

Labour, unlike governance and gender is not sexy, and directing funding to counter rising casualty rates and devastated living environments would belie the feel good “econospeak” about globalisation raising all boats and blessing all with prosperity.

The degree to which nations protect their workers should be regarded as central indicators of development success and equity. Labour impact statements should be part of major institutional development planning in any newly industrialising nation.

While the developed world has been asleep at the wheel, developing countries have been organising, and the first initiative has been to present the Thai government with a message signed by 100-plus labour groups protesting the Burmese worker deaths.

Korean health and safety groups have initiated the “Killer Company” award which Hyundai construction “won” last year.

Chinese workers went to Baslworld in Switzerland to protest the rapid rise of silicosis in the jewelry industry. They were rewarded by with the introduction of stringent production standards. That the workers and people of developing countries care about this issue enough to organise across regions and rivalries, should indicate to the rest of the world that this is deserving of more attention than it gets.

I doubt whether global OHS made it onto the butcher’s paper at the recent summit, More the pity. The pens used by the summiteers are probably made by solvent intoxicated workers in China, the paper in Indonesia. Workers who produce our daily, taken-for-granted, goods need more from us that we are giving.