Dying to work

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.