EDITORIAL: Healthy Working

Ed Shepherd

Westerners use the term 'as mad as a hatter' to describe someone who is eccentric. The saying is based on a character called the Mad Hatter in Lewis Carroll’s nineteenth century fantasy, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

The Mad Hatter reflected Carroll’s awareness of industrial diseases - in Carroll's day, hatmakers developed nervous problems, leading to a common misunderstanding that they were crazy. But mercury vapour, formed during hat production, causes nervous problems when we absorb them. Hatters were not mad; they suffered from erethism - memory loss, irritability, depression and anxiety.

The mercury compound was eventually banned from use in factories, one of the first modern protective measures to be implemented for occupational safety and health (OSH).

This issue of ALU looks at OSH in Asia Pacific where we find companies unwilling to protect workers?wellbeing. Main articles are based on documents submitted to regional OSH seminars jointly organised by AMRC in Cambodia and Bangkok recently.

There is no doubt that one of the most important but neglected issues for working people is accidents and disease at work.

Unfortunately it is not a popular topic among workers or unions, an attitude encouraged by managers who urge workers to take dangerous, even fatal, shortcuts to boost profits as we saw at the Tokaimura nuclear plant in Japan.

Workers often receive money for saving production time, as is systematic for piece rate workers.

Because of the importance of OSH, labour activists must find ways to make it appealing to workers.

AMRC has advocated OSH for over 20 years, particularly in connection with the Toy Campaign which began shortly after factory fires in Thailand (Kader) and China (Zhili) needlessly killed hundreds of workers in 1993; many more hundreds are maimed terribly for life.

These devastating fires occurred in factories producing toys. AMRC used the opportunity as a launching pad for occupational safety and health.

We target toy factories for lacking OHS standards simply because the issue of toys appeals to consumers who do not want their children's gifts made by sweated labour. We have nothing against toy factories themselves; factories producing other goods lack impact on consumers.

Companies care about consumers?attitudes, not workers?- while government labour officials generally take the company line. Take the case of RCA (see related article), Taiwan's Council of Labour Affairs carried out several investigations but failed to conclude that workers?ailments are occupational diseases, despite the Environmental Department’s conclusions of the increased (several dozen times higher than normal) cancer risk faced by residents near the former RCA plant. Officials said that despite cleaning up for several years, underground water supplies still show high concentrations of toxic chemicals.

Because of a general attitude to minimise the importance of occupational diseases, coupled with under-reporting work-related health problems, there is little awareness of them among professionals like doctors and lawyers.

Doctors in the Third World are reluctant to specialise in OSH because it does not pay well, so there are few experts.

If a worker is injured at work, getting compensation is difficult. Doctors with little OSH training and no literature cannot assess disability accurately, even though the World Health Organisation has clear guidelines for assessing disabilities.

Unlike the West, most Asia Pacific lawyers are reluctant to take compensation cases because workers cannot pay them if they lose. It is made worse by managers cynically dragging their feet until workers' funds run out.

Therefore OSH work among labour activists must include professionals to improve awareness. Without them, preventive measures will never even make the OSH agenda.

As with all aspects of working life, it is essential that experienced workers are involved in OSH decisions, and other workers are consulted about it - after all it is their lives, deaths and injuries that are under discussion.