Melts Into Air: Modernity Politics and Workplace Health

Issue No : 77  October - December 2010

By Melody Kemp

The world’s peoples rallied in support of the failed Burmese people’s 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, activists and monks. Tourists caught in the melee shot their footage to wire services, from where it was propelled at light speed into global TV sets. 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 shortly after, 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 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 of their own. 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 a pregnant woman, survived the incident. The 14 child survivors were separated from the adult survivors and were kept in immigration detention in Ranong. All 53 adult survivors were sentenced by a local court for illegal entry to a 2,000 baht (US$63) fine. In Australia they would have perhaps been counseled, or given medical attention. The situation would be familiar to refugee advocates.

Those who deal with occupational safety and health (OSH) are confronting a mélange of situations; some, like the example above, have political roots. They are modern, enabled by new roads, transport and mobile phone technology with which to make the deals, and modern geopolitics that enables resource-rich regimes to render their peoples so impoverished they have to flee. They are also engineered by globalization and the sorts of repressive client relationships that Wikileaks has begun to reveal. The solutions are political and strategic rather than technical.

Others scenes are typically ancient. Workers building endless ribbons of road in Asia inhale creosote, a known carcinogen, as they have for years. Asphalt workers; rubber, aluminum, iron, steel, and tire factory workers; and people working in the coke-producing industries are also at risk for potential exposure to coal tar pitch and coal tar pitch volatiles. They maybreathe in vapours from or have direct skin contact with wood-preservation solutions, freshly treated wood, asphalt mixtures, or other products of coke-producing industries. Workers who use creosote-treated wood in building fences, bridges, or railroad tracks or installing telephone poles may also be exposed.

That’s a lot of workers. Road building and telecomunications are growing industries in modernizing Asia. In addition to the lowly paid sweating labourers who live in makeshift tents on the side of the road, inhaling road dust as well as coal tars, the new roads that link the wealthy in adjoining nations have as their price the lives of truck drivers, bus drivers and other transport workers whose horizons used to be the next town, but who are pushed by deadlines to drive their huge loads under the influence of drugs like yaa baa (methamphetamine).  I have seen their blood amongst crashed heaps on the side of the road. The ancient and the modern lie together. (See photo, next page.)

April 28 is 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. But like the truck drivers who get pulled from wrecks, or the fishermen whose boats are lost at sea with increasingly unreadable weather patterns, some are harder to recognize as the victims that they are.

Social networking sites such as Voices on the Wall have poignant epitaphs or painful descriptions of workers, parents, husbands, or lovers dying of asbestos disease. More die each year in workplaces than in the conflicts that plague their nations. They die quietly and with no fanfare in the globalized workplaces of the world, most without compensation or health care. But what of the truck drivers, the road workers, those who are not linked by computer, the fishermen and boys who get lost at sea? Who remembers or works with them? They are a symbol of the modern meeting the ancient, the ancient skill of fishing meeting the modern of climate change, cutting up wild seas and sending men to their deaths.

Labour activism in occupational safety and health, is increasingly enhanced by the environmental movement linking one of the oldest political movements with a relatively modern one. A recent story reprinted in China Dialogue¹ reveals how the environmental movement has embraced safety and health as part of its concerns. It is less clear how the labour movement has reciprocated, by understanding or levering environmental concerns with its safeguarding of workers’ well-being. Fishing workers are also the concern of environmentalists caring about declining catches as they know that less fish equate with greater risk.

Lack of data, skilled personnel, educational resources and policy direction limits the development of strategic OSHprogrammes, as does knowing where to start or how to approach the hydra of illness that is sweeping Asia and the Global South. On the contrary, the environmental movement is attracting funding and public attention.

Truck driver and two passengers/co-drivers en route to China were killed on a steep stretch in Lao's North. Photo: M .Kemp

Two years ago the World Health Organization reported that fatalities from workplace and road injuries were killing more people in the Global South than infectious diseases. But the Western media is still obsessed with the flu de jour, 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 a yet more seductive trade deal. Both are harbingers of personal and environmental death.

The roads that kill truck drivers have in Laos directly affected over 33,450 people. They require the clearance of forest on which people rely for food and building materials, medicines and dyes. It was a group of environmental NGOs led by the International Union for Conservation of Nature that did the evaluation of an Asian Development Bank roads project and found that health and safety measures were absent.

The demands for dam-generated electricity that fuels the Chinese electronics firms come at the expense of precious agricultural lands. Their construction kills workers. At least 15 died and another 400 people were injured building one dam in Laos alone. Many of the people leaving Myanmar who end up becoming limp corpses or illegal immigrants are driven by ecological catastrophe. It is a public secret that the army uses dams and ecological destruction as a weapon. This, while smacking of modernity, is a re-creation of the scorched earth policies of old.

Free marketeers and scions of deregulation such as the Mont Pelerin Society are fond of using the word ‘freedom’ much as George W used to use it, like a party hat of frills and glitter for those fortunates invited to the party. But under the hat is the dandruff of entrapment for others. Safety and health, or lack of it, the ecocide that fells carbon-sequestering forests, rarely sullies the ra-ra hype about globalization. We in the South all know that the internationalization of production has been accompanied by the internationalization of occupational injuries and illness and in particular the outsourcing of hazardous work such as ship-breaking. All of this also poisons the places in which workers live. Rachel Carson, a middle-aged woman with a bad perm, was the first to make that clear, and she has inspired us all. Increasingly the globalization of industry is being accompanied by the globalization of protest in both the labour and environmental action networks.

Workplace safety and health competes poorly with other development poster issues such as poverty alleviation, HIV/AIDS, and Millenium Development Goals. But it does now emphasize governance, which should make the labour movement sniff the air. There is a lack of coordination by the various international agencies, donors and national agencies, which give scant attention to programmes on occupational safety and health and exclude the rights of nations’ workers as part of the governance programmes. Rather than poverty alleviation the labour movement could raise the banner of poverty prevention. An injured worker, once the major income earner, is a drain on scarce food resources, particularly at this time. Safety and health are governance issues as health deficits mount, victims demand services that don’t exist, and anti-corruption bodies look into the relationships between politicians and corporations. To maintain relevance and effectiveness, labour, in particular safety and health, mayhave to reframe its activities to maintain its relevance.

Abe Lincoln once said that ‘Labour is more important than capital. Without labour, capital cannot exist.’ The truth of his statement is realized when one recognizes that  the global workforce produces a staggering global gross domestic product (GDP) of US$21.6 trillion per year. This GDPprovides 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, aid planners consider it a budgetary triviality despite rising fatalities. This is the fault of the labour movement, not of the planners. Without strategic thinking and positioning, labour will continue to be a poor cousin. Rage or sanctimony itself will not change things.

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 that touch and reform all levels of government in any newly industrializing nation. Labour and the environmental movements are natural partners. Maybe it will take the insidious effects of global climate change with its gradual inundation of low-lying areas with their inevitable poor labouring classes, increasing food prices and scarcity that affect the poor, to motivate a potentially powerful marriage.
 

Endnotes

1.http://www.chinadialogue.net/article/show/single/en/4072-Apple-s-darker-...