The deaths this week of over 300 people in two separate factory fires in Pakistan raise serious questions over the welfare of workers in developing countries.
In the week of the announcement of Apple’s iPhone 5, it is easy to forget the scandal that dogged the California computer giant for years of high suicide rates at the company’s manufacturing facilities in China, run by Foxconn.
The demand from Western consumers for the latest Apple gadgets appeared to be at the expense of workers’ welfare, and the company has had to work hard to convince people otherwise.
But as the spotlight was turned on the high-tech world, the issues around garment factories in these countries seemed to have died down.
In the space of a few hours this Tuesday, the world was reminded of the shocking conditions that workers in Pakistan can be subjected to. First a fire in a Lahore shoe factory killed 25 people and then hours later another fire broke out in a Karachi garment factory, killing at least 289.
Workers were apparently doomed to their fates in a building with only one exit and steel bars on the windows. Victorian working conditions alongside ageing 20th century factory technologies was always going to be a recipe for disaster.
In a country that is technically advanced enough to maintain a nuclear arsenal, the absence of even the most basic fire safety precautions seems extraordinary and certainly exasperating.
Many developing nations do have fire safety regulations in place, but the biggest problem seems to be enforcement.
The responsibility to protect workers’ safety will always ultimately lie with the business owner. Will the devastating scale of this loss of life be enough to wake business owners up to the risks they are putting their staff at?
The factory owners in Karachi handed themselves in on Friday to request pre-arrest bail. Police are seeking charges of murder describing the attitude towards workers’ safety as displaying ‘utter negligence’.
If found guilty, the courts now have an opportunity to show that putting profits ahead of people’s lives cannot be tolerated by imposing significant sentences.
United Nations safety sanctions?
In recent weeks there has been 38 deaths in India at a fireworks factory and an explosion at a Venezuela refinery killing 48. Combined with the deaths in Pakistan this week, that makes a total of 400 deaths at industrial or commercial premises in the last three weeks alone.
This is more in three weeks and four incidents than the total annual number of fire-related deaths in the UK, which stood at 388 in the latest full year (2010-11).
The question we’re asking you on our homepage poll is: Should the UN impose fire safety sanctions to protect workers in developing countries? If governments are unable to enforce proper fire safety measures, then should the UN intervene?
In developed countries we are used to a combination of legislation, enforcement, standards and guidance to help drive down deaths from fire. Now we need to ask how we can help other countries start bringing down the number of their fire related deaths, many of which are quite clearly preventable.
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