Vol. VIII, Bulletin No. 5. May 2, 2003
A Decade of Scandalous Neglect
Workers Still Imperiled by Death Traps
10 Years After World's Worst Factory Fire
"How many more corpses will it take?" With that question as their campaign slogan, more than 20 unions and non-governmental organizations in Thailand are jointly demanding that the Thai government at long last act to protect the lives and limbs of workers in the country's dangerous workplaces.
The campaign reaches a high point this month on the tenth anniversary of the most deadly industrial fire in Thailand's -- and the world's -- history. On May 10, 1993, an inferno at the Kader Toy Factory on the outskirts of Bankgok killed 188 workers (174 women, 14 men) and injured 469 more, some as young as 14. The factory was a huge death trap -- it had no fire alarm, no sprinkler system, no fire hoses, and no fire escape. Several exits were blocked or locked.
Ironically, just this March a provincial court dismissed negligence charges against 13 Kader owners and managers, but jailed a worker who, by allegedly lighting a cigarette, allegedly ignited the conflagration that destroyed the Kader factory compound. Building code violations, which caused four factory buildings to collapse quickly, killing many who were frantically trying to escape, brought a fine of only $12,380.
Independent Agency for On-the-Job Safety Demanded
Meanwhile, the Thai government has for years sat on reform proposals that would reduce the country's factory accident rate, which is more than twice that of neighboring Malaysia. The most important reform demanded by the joint campaign is the creation a new agency for occupational health and safety and health, with regulatory powers independent of the present sluggish bureaucracy.
This month, as they have every May 10 after 1993, demonstrators will march through Bangkok to the site where the Kader factory complex once stood. They will remember not only the victims who once made Bart Simpson, Mickey Mouse, Barbie, and other dolls there, but also the workers killed, maimed, and poisoned in other Asian factories and mines, including the 87 toy workers who died in China's Zhili factory fire in November 1993.
Voices of activists are resonating far and wide in protest. "We will not forget," they are declaring in demonstrations, in their publications, and in Websites such as the one published by the Asian Network for the Rights of Occupational Accident Victims. Its May 2003 newsletter provides extensive details on the Kader and Zhili fires, its causes, its victims, and needed reforms, including an independent OSH institute in Thailand.
At prominent places in Bangkok, 4,000 posters, produced with the help of the AFL-CIO Solidarity Center office in Thailand, ask in large black script above the sheet-covered corpses of Kader workers: "How many more corpses will it take?"
How much longer will it be before the lessons of the two Asian tragedies, now both ten years old, start to move governments, employer organizations, and intergovernmental agencies such as the World Trade Organization?
Under consumer and activist pressures, a few employers in the region are improving health and safety conditions in factories, but deadly dangers still face many millions of Asian working men and women -- the global economy's "sacrificial lambs," as a woman's magazine in China has called them.
Crassly Defending the Indefensible
Shortly after the Kader fire in 1993, the Economist of London offered its historical perspective on the tragedy. "The early stages of industrialization are often rough," it explained editorially. "Britain and America were able to afford better laws and safer workplaces as they got richer."
But, as I wrote in Commonweal magazine several months later:
"This kind of analysis, often deployed to put a gloss of inevitability on even the most indefensible abuses of human rights, can sound plausible to the uninformed. But in this case it clearly doesn't fit the facts.A U.S. Landmark of the Unspeakable
"The Kader factory, owned by some of the wealthiest Asians in the region, mass-produces stuffed dolls (Bart Simpson, Cabbage Patch, and others) for highly profitable U.S. retailer outlets selling to the richest consumers in the world. The enterprise has been well integrated into a thriving global economy, one that differs radically from the historical model on which the Economist builds its rationale.
"Despite Kader's economic success, its workers have long been victimized by the company's low-wage policy. According to sources within the company, Kader has avoided paying many of its workers even Thailand's $5-a-day minimum wage by classifying them as 'temporary,' on renewable contracts."
Outside a skyscraper on a Manhattan street corner on March 25 this year, a silver bell tolled 146 times, as it does every March 25, in remembrance of the 146 young workers, mostly women, who died there in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of Saturday, March 25, 1911. It was the deadliest factory fire in U.S. history, spurring action to enforce fire safety and unionize garment workers.
This year the 10-story building where it occurred became an official landmark -- "a landmark of the unspeakable" a New York Times headline called it. At the ceremony New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg said that the history of the building "serves to remind us about one of our greatest assets: New York's ability to follow great tragedy with great progress." (For the history of the tragedy and the progress, see Cornell University's Website.)
How long will it take for Bangkok's great tragedy of 1993 to be followed by great progress?
Seeing the Light on Pollution
It's just dawned on me that I've paid too little attention to environmental pollution. I neglected it because I felt that, by focusing on worker rights, I had enough on my hands. Besides the environmental movement already has a sizable army of advocates. They do their thing; we worker rights advocates do ours. The two concerns, while overlapping somewhat, fit pretty much in separate compartments.
Wrong. Two things helped me realize how wrong that is. One was a new book, "When Smoke Ran Like Water: Tales of Environmental Deception and the Battle Against Pollution" (Basic Books, 2002). The other was a luncheon talk by the book's author, Devra Davis, a world-renowned specialist in epidemic diseases, currently a visiting professor of public policy at Mellon University.
The Workplace's Environmental Blight and Its Ripples
Where do many serious environmental problems originate? At the mills, factories, mines, and other places where people work, from which they spread to surrounding neighborhoods and beyond, as Davis pointed out. That was not news to me. But reflecting on it sparked insights into major implication of what Davis writes and says. Hence, enforcing a safe and healthy workplace is an important key to protecting not just workers but others against illness and premature death.
That's the basic insight. Somewhat obvious, true, but as Davis writes, for an obvious idea to take hold in everyday life sometimes takes century.
A related insight is more complex. It owes less to Davis and more to my own concerns about globalization as a vehicle not for just good but for evil. I went to the luncheon prepared with a question that I hoped would lead to a discussion of how international trade and investment spread pollution.
But my question was probably too abstract to elicit a clear response, or at least the kind of response I hoped to get. Besides, the agenda for the luncheon centered on the impact of U.S. anti-pollution measures on U.S. jobs.
Perverse Consequences and How to Correct Them
During a recent sleepless night, I continued my reflection, and the next morning formulated these propositions:
- the world's health and safety problems are serious, and becoming more serious every day. Example: the acute serious respiratory syndrome (SARS), spreading far and wide beyond its origin in the industrial areas of China.
- Today's phenomenal expansion of cross-border trade expansion of trade and investment contributes to the deterioration of health and safety globally. Example: "China's Workers Risk Limbs in Export Drive," an article in the April 7 New York Times, subtitled: "Thousands of Chinese workers are killed or maimed in unsafe factories."
- This breakneck expansion is vigorously, even militantly, promoted by Western governments and multinationals, especially those of the United States. At the same time these governments and multinationals block the adoption of enforceable international rules that would protect workers and others against pollution and other workplace perils. The shocking disconnect between these two policies should, and can be, corrected.
- When anti-pollution measures are adopted in the United States, and not in the developing world, the perverse effects include giving another incentive (besides lower wages) to U.S. companies, large and small, to abandon the United States. In today's global economy -- highly competitive and mobile, with extraordinary protection of corporate rights but none at all of worker rights -- that outcome is logical. After all, expenditures in the U.S. for workplace health and safety, health insurance, and anti-pollution equipment add up, and provide another incentive to move manufacturing and service operations to countries where employers are free of those responsibilities.
- The evil consequences of the current international
system are not inevitable. They have been created by the deliberate
actions of people -- government officials at all levels, corporate
leaders, trade lawyers, international bureaucrats, and their academic
supporters -- plus the inaction of ordinary citizens. And the evils
can be corrected by the actions of people.