Chittagong lies in southeastern Bangladesh on the edge of the Bay of Bengal. With a population of four million, Chittagong is the second largest city in the country. It is a major coastal seaport and the financial centre of southeastern Bangladesh. A few short miles north of the city more than eighty ship-breaking yards ply their ugly industry, filling an eight mile stretch of once pristine coastal beach.
Little is required for ship-breaking in Bangladesh today: a simple crane or derrick, a few blow-torches and if workers are lucky, a bulldozer. Cheap and exploitable human labour provides the main component. If a person is killed or maimed, well, that is no problem: there is a vast pool of humans waiting to take their place.
The workers come from the northern parts of Bengal, the poorest areas. Farmers desperate to feed their families leave their land for the ship-breaking yards. Here, uneducated and unqualified, with no knowledge of their rights, they work up to sixteen hours a day, seven days per week for an average wage of twenty-five cents an hour or four dollars a day. The top wage is forty-seven cents per hour—for the lucky ones.
When asked why they continue to migrate to the ship-breaking yards, the reply from the workers is simple. If a man goes to the yards then yes, perhaps he will die from an accident, but if he remains at home, then five people will die from starvation. It is impossible to make a living from his farm or in his local village so what choice does he have? A man who is any sort of a man must feed his family.
These men and their families get their strength and courage from their religion. The women visit the mosques daily to pray to Allah. In their prayers they thank Allah for giving their men and boys work, they thank Allah when these same men and boys survive a bad accident and they ask for courage to face each day. These people consider themselves blessed when a day passes without injury to family members.
Today, more than half the world’s large ships come to Bangladesh to die an inglorious death. Ninety-five percent of a ship can be recycled making it one of greatest sources of revenue for a poverty stricken country with a population of 163 million. Bangladesh needs steel, having no iron ore of its own. Ship-breaking provides more than eighty percent of the country’s steel needs.
The yards are ruled by fear. Often the city mayor will own a yard causing local government to look the other way and ignore the daily atrocities. There is no job training, no unions, no decontamination facilities or monitoring, no form of medical care or attention, no protective laws for the workers, no hygiene, no compensation for injury or death, no cremation payments for families of dead workers. It is much cheaper to throw the dead bodies into the sea. People vanish all the time, just disappearing from the official statistics. Protecting workers costs money. Human life does not. Government at all levels is prepared to turn the other cheek.
Life is cheap and brutal in the shipping graveyards where threat of job loss keeps most workers quiet. Access to the ships is via rope ladder. The men work with bare hands and feet and use no safety equipment at all. Every hour of the day they are exposed to gas explosions, falling steel plates, asbestos, heavy metals such as mercury, lead, cadmium, zinc and copper and toxic oil and fuels. Burning of various wastes exposes workers to Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons (PAHs), many of which are carcinogenic.
The workers live in makeshift huts constructed from remnants of their trade, such as asbestos. Both water and food are contaminated. Asbestos is found in many places on these ships, its resistance to heat, its strength and durability, making it a preferred material for making fire proof doors, engine casings, electrical cable sheeting, boiler casing packings, exhaust pipe packings, sandwich panels in corridors and mounting panels on electrical heaters, to name but a few of its uses.
Bilge water is a combination of fresh water, sea water, oil, sludge and chemicals which accumulate in the lowest part of the ship’s hull, the bilge wells. It can contain cargo residue, inorganic salts, arsenic, copper, chromium, lead and mercury. Bilge water is pumped out directly into the ocean, adding to an already heavily contaminated coastal zone. Fish from these seaside waters is a major source of food for workers.
Once ship-breaking belonged mainly to the industrialised nations, primarily the United States, United Kingdom, Germany and Italy. But in the early 1980s, greedy ship owners found a much cheaper way: send their vessels to the yards of India, China, Pakistan, Bangladesh, the Philippines and Vietnam, where men desperate for work would slave for a pittance, where there were no health or safety standards and where people were expendable. Another factor came into play: governments of developed countries wished to rid themselves of the industry since it did not comply with the new environmental protection standards. Industrialists in countries such as Bangladesh were quick to embrace ship-breaking with its massive profits. No major investment was required and the people and the environment were ripe for exploitation in such a country.
Today, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, Southern Asia is the world centre of the ship-breaking and recycling industry. Eighty percent of large tankers and container ships are scrapped in Bangladesh, India and Pakistan. China and Turkey account for fifteen percent with only five percent of the world volume being scrapped outside these five countries.
Each new ship that is driven onto the beach means employment for the hungry, more money for the owners. The ships holds many tanks and chambers which contain oil, petroleum and poisonous gases. First, the level of danger has to be checked: a living animal is lowered down by rope to see if it can survive the poisonous gases. If the animal does not die, the first worker will be lowered down to ‘check the danger level’. He has no instruments or equipment to help him in this so-called assessment.
If the first worker gives the all-clear, has not collapsed or died, the first group of workers will enter the ship to clean away the oil, petroleum and other flammable substances. Anything that can be burned off will be so. Explosions are a common occurrence. Next the cutters enter the ship to break it into huge pieces. Once the tide drops, dozens of workers tug these massive steel plates ashore where they are then cut into much smaller pieces. These pieces are then sent to the factories for recycling. The workers use blow torches and wear no gloves, goggles, shoes or hard hats. The smoke, fumes and heat add to the savagery of the working environment.
There is no family at the Chittagong yards that has not lost a brother, cousin, son, father, friend or fellow worker to fatal accident. Body bags are a common sight. Then there are the non fatal incidents: one serious accident per day in each yard is the norm. These result in severed limbs, crushed toes and feet, spinal injuries, blindness, ripped away fingers and hands and severe burns, and this is just the beginning. Then there are the illnesses which take longer to appear: exposure to toxic chemicals can harm the nervous system, cause mental retardation, affect neurological and physical development in children, impair vision and hearing, damage muscle coordination, cause cancer, harm the lungs and heart and impair the immune system. We must not forget mesothelioma, a rare and very aggressive form of cancer which develops in the lining of the lungs, abdomen or heart, nor asbestosis, a lung disease resulting from the inhalation of asbestos particles, and so the list goes on and on and on…
Official statistics differ greatly from those obtained by the investigative journalists brave enough to venture into the yards of Chittagong but unofficially, it is estimated that the industry employs up to 200,000 workers. If a worker from the yards talks to a journalist, he will lose his job. There have been instances where workers have been prepared to help journalists access the protected yards: these helpful workers usually mysteriously vanish. Outsiders are not wanted behind the high, razor wire topped fences and any show of interest or curiosity, let alone the appearance of a camera, will be warned off at gun point.
Young Power in Social Action (YPSA), a non-government organisation, has begun work to address the basic needs and rights of workers in the ship-breaking yards. They are the first organisation to attempt to tackle the problem and the first successful changes are coming through the women.
YPSA encourages women to meet to discuss the main problems of daily living and helps them to implement suggested changes. Some yard workers now have access to clean water for drinking, cooking and hygiene and clean, free community bathrooms, thanks to their women. Before this, hundreds of yard families had to share a filthy community bathroom and pay local government a daily fee for the privilege. The only other option was the contaminated sea for bathing and personal bodily functions.
The United Nations agency, the International Labour Organisation (ILO) has also begun to take notice, although it has been remarkably slow to do so. It seems to be quite efficient at writing charters to document preferred conditions for the workers of the ship-breaking yards but actually putting such things into practise appears to be much more difficult.
These once mighty queens of the ocean are born with such ceremony, a tradition dating back to before the birth of Christ. Christened with a bottle of champagne at the hands of a lovely lady, they majestically slide into the sea to the applause of an adoring audience. It is both a blessing and a public celebration: the crowds wave and cheer, the cameras click and roll and the occasion is committed to print. Humans are humble before these glamorous mammoths of the sea.
But these modern giants have an average lifespan of twenty-six years. Each year around thirteen hundred ships die on the beaches of some of the poorest countries in the world. It is an inglorious death: they are driven hard onto the shore, deliberately beached, dumped on poisoned sands amidst the partially stripped carcasses of their sister ships. There they end their days, to be broken on the beaches of Chittagong and her like.
There is a proverb from the ship-breaking yards of Alang in India: Every day one ship, every day one dead. There is little need to say more.
© Ingrid M. Smith
References: Bob Simon 60 Minutes
National Geographic RTD Documentary Channel
Mark Knopfler So Far From the Clyde
Photos: Dreamstime Stock Images
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