[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.

[JamesBarney]

But then this really isn't about the safety of Bangladeshi workers, but protecting German jobs.

[ElevenLathe]

It's about protecting German workers' safety, not just "German jobs". They're inseparable goals. One abused worker is a threat to all workers.

Anyway yeah, realistically, the reason rich-world workers should care about poor-world worker safety is because it's in their material interests: They will be forced to do unsafe things at work, or else face being fired/laid off and the company will move the work to locales where (expensive) worker safety isn't done.