[Joe8Bit]

I visited Chittagong a decade or so ago (as part of a non-profit working with child workers) and I can only emphasise what a visceral and horrifying thing this kind of ship breaking is to witness. 10,000's of people (as young as 6/7) working 24/7 in conditions that bear absolutely no respect for their health or safety.

One of the most morally repugnant parts of the Western legal system is the creation of the labyrinthine corporate structures used to to protect the ship owners for any liability as part of their ships being broken.

[jpollock]

By the time they're beached, they're not owned by a Western company. They've been sold for scrap to the scrappers.

"right now, selling a vessel to a beaching facility would get maybe $500 (£371) per tonne."

https://www.chemistryworld.com/features/the-toxic-tide-of-sh...

[jahewson]

Juuuust before they're beached:

> ‘There’s also the Basel Convention, which is on the trans-boundary movements of hazardous wastes, such as end-of-life vessels.’ The problem is that a vessel only counts as hazardous waste once the company announces its intention to dispose of it. ‘It’s very easy for ship owners to simply claim that they’re on an operational voyage, sail all the way to India, Bangladesh and Pakistan, and only then declare that the vessel is actually heading for scrap. It makes it impossible to enforce that piece of law.

[Swenrekcah]

But they all know what’s going to happen when they sell to the scrappers. It’s disgusting and should be illegal.

[e40]

You build it, you recycle it in a way that isn't detrimental to the health and safety of humans. That should be the (international) law.

[badpun]

Any long-term commitments can be potentially worked around via bankrupcy. As long as we allow companies to take the full responsibility for consequences of their actions, and completely absolve their owners, the system will not work that great.

[wahnfrieden]

No profit in eliminating foreign externalities. Your faith in capitalist law and liberal democracy reforming these problems is curious

[refurb]

It's unenforceable regardless.

You think some poor African nation cares about worker safety and environmental issues when half of their population can barely get enough to eat?

Hell, they barely have control over their own country let alone enforcing environmental or worker regulations.

[Y_Y]

I'm sure you could just contrive an accidental sinking, or even better have the ship taken by "pirates" who happen to leave some cash in the lifeboats with the dispossessed.

[ClumsyPilot]

need to collect that cash as evidence

[gpm]

Seems like you'd have to just outright ban selling it to foreign owners?

Otherwise someone will make a "legitimate" business in a country that doesn't ban selling to (non-compliant) scrappers, whose job in life is to purchase old ships and sell them to scrappers. Maybe hanging on to them for a bit first to make it slightly less blatant...

[roflyear]

That seems like a lot of money.

[version_five]

Is it more horrifying than them starving to death though or doing some worse job? I agree the conditions sound horrible, but it's still bringing jobs and money. Is making it illegal or uneconomical going to result in a better quality of life for the people that work there and their families?

[rayiner]

My dad is from near Chittagong. I think it’s a thousand percent better for Bangladesh to do this dirty work to build a real economy of its own, instead of depending on European countries for hand outs. It’s not like america didn’t have kids working in coal mines when it was in an early stage of development.

[NegativeLatency]

I think the point is that the corps should have to pay to keep their workers and the environment safe

[version_five]

To me this is first order thinking. If paying to keep workers and the environment safe means developing countries are denied work and resources, is that actually better? The simplistic "dangerous work is bad" analysis doesn't account for the upside compared with not bringing this work to the subcontinent. And the solutions seem to ignore the downside of shutting down or rendering economically unviable the shipbreaking yards. There's certainly going to be a gradual pathway to improving working conditions, but I think it has to be gradual and deliberate, or it's just going to shut the current workers out.

More regulation always favors big companies. A bad end point would be where Indian and Bangladeshi shipyards are regulated out of existence and established companies that can do lots of paperwork get to benefit from a regulatory regime that makes them mandatory. That's where is is likely to head when the problem is considered in a shallow way

[Timon3]

This looks deep at one side, and fully ignores the other. Think about the consequences of not improving safety - personally a lot of poor people will be hurt, either resulting in them having to be supported by their family, or more likely simply dying, and structurally you're not encouraging any change in these conditions. By allowing the workers to be made to work in unsafe conditions you'll reduce cost and prices, but you won't have an incentive to develop safer ways to process everything, since the unsafe way is allowed and way cheaper!

> More regulation always favors big companies.

Is there actual research into this? I see this religiously repeated by a lot of people, but I somehow never see actual data to support it.

[euroclydon]

Why not just break the ships up in Western countries then? For Western countries to impose their safety and environmental regulations on other countries is denying them their sovereignty. The whole system of growth of nations and their economies is built on the fact that developing countries don't have to play by the same rules until they want to, or they have something to lose (in a reciprocal fashion, like with IP rights). In a trade regime, they're supposed to be punished when they engage in mercantilism, not self-sacrifice.

[rayiner]

These aren’t the workers of any western corporations.

[CuriousCosmic]

They aren't but that's really semantics. It's labor being used by these western corporations. You are explicitly responsible for the labor you directly source but you are also implicitly responsible for the labor you source through the services/products you purchase.

Outsourcing labor intensive work to lower income regions is almost universally a good thing but that doesn't mean that western corporations shouldn't be held liable for that outsourced labor. What needs to change is that corporations need to be required to perform due diligence that the work they contract out is meeting at least some established international labor standard (likely a lower standard than the country the western corp is operating out of has).

In the case of ship breaking, what needs to change is that any western corporation that owns and/or operates a ship during the last few years of its life needs to be held directly responsible for that ship until after it has been scrapped. They can contract the work out and all that but they should not be able to sell the ship off to a scrapper in the last few months of its life and wash their hands of their responsibility.

How long that last few years should be probably needs to be class dependent and you should probably be able to push off that "last few years" time window with a re-certification process (i.e. showing the ship still has at least x years of life on it).

If western countries actually held their corporations liable and stopped them from blindly pawning off work, they could drag up labor standards in other countries without depriving those countries of the outsourced work that their economies are heavily supplemented by.

[badpun]

Shouldn't it be a Bangladeshi government responsibility to make sure that their companies aren't abusing their workers? And, if the government doesn't care, why should foreign governments intervene? That sounds like a return of patronising colonialism.

[rad_gruchalski]

Right? Like those people in China who were so happy to break, split, sort and burn the plastic waste we used to send them back in the day. Why don’t they want it anymore? They should have been grateful. At least they had jobs. Otherwise who knows what they would have been doing! /s

[zizee]

This is not what the grandparent is saying. The typical situation is not that people are forced to do the work. We're not talking about slavery* here.

They are doing it because they see it as their "best option". By stopping it, the result is their "best option" is taken away from them, and they have to go do the next "best option". You could keep saying "this is inhuman, let's stop it from happening", but the effect is just making it worse and worse. Instead, better options should be provided. That's the real solution, but it's a whole lot harder to implement than the knee jerk response of stopping an activity.

edit to preempt ridiculous interpretations of my words: This is assuming slavery is not the case. If slavery is involved, it is a different situation to what i am talking about.

[rad_gruchalski]

> This is not what the grandparent is saying. The typical situation is not that people are forced to do the work. We're not talking about slavery* here.

> They are doing it because they see it as their "best option". By stopping it, the result is their "best option" is taken away from them, and they have to go do the next "best option".

Exactly. I know what the gp said. It was the same with those in China. The West didn’t force anybody in China using slavery to take that plastic. They were happily buying it. It was the “best option under given circumstances” for those who were doing it. Whole families built businesses on it.

[zizee]

Oh right, sorry! Ironically I misunderstood what you were saying :facepalm:

[tfourb]

And it would be really easy to regulate this issue away. Pass a law in the EU or US that stipulates that ship owners AND the shipping companies that contract them have to perform due diligence on the end of life value chain of their vessels. AND make it possible for foreign nationals to sue these companies in U.S./EU courts if this due diligence hasn’t been done for damages due to injury or environmental damage.

[Ekaros]

Hmm, so how would that work if the ship changes hands multiple times. And might end up in it multi-decade service life in hands of some bankrupted entity? Original buyer being responsible of also decommissioning? What if they get restructured or cease to exist?

[tfourb]

If at each transaction the prior owner would have to do serious due diligence on the likelihood of the next owner to dispose of the ship sustainably and would be liable for the method of the due diligence, it would preclude unreliable owners from ever buying the ship. And in well regulated economies, going bankrupt is not actually a license to ignore your corporate responsibilities. Owners and executives retain personal liability until the entity is actually dissolved, including assets like ships.

This is actually how we do a lot of regulation quite successfully, when we care about the outcome. There is not actually a government regulator sitting on every assembly line of every factory. Companies mostly self certify that they adhere to regulation and face steep liability if they don’t.