[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.

[ElevenLathe]

It should be the business of other countries too, because their workers have to compete with Bangladeshi workers. It's harder for a German shipyard worker to tell the boss to pound sand when asked to do something needlessly dangerous without the right gear if their job can easily be moved somewhere where worker safety is just not a consideration at all.

Therefore German workers should use their government to stop this practice using whatever levers they have, which mainly means going after German companies.

Not to mention that forcing companies to internalize the full cost of breaking up ships safely will put pressure on shipbuilding firms to design ships that are easier to break up, probably increasing full-lifecycle efficiency without anyone needing to risk their life for a couple tons of scrap metal.

[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: