What’s The Matter With Tuzla? Another Death
As Turkey’s parliament joins its citizens at the beaches and in the cool mountains for summer vacation, it has signaled that in the fall it will focus on getting the new, more liberal constitution off the ground. Come autumn, the ground will be as thick with things to do as leaves on the ground.
Enforcing work safety requirements, while not as exciting a topic as the constitution, is an important matter that should be given priority as YET ANOTHER worker at Tuzla district shipyards in Istanbul is killed, bringing the number to 101 in seven years (18 in seven months over the past year). According to previous news accounts, the shipyard uses poorly paid, temporary, unskilled labor, and workers are afraid to complain because they’ll be fired and their job taken by one of many waiting at the gate. This situation reminds me in many ways of the problems in the US with meat-packing plants that use low-wage, expendable undocumented migrant labor. The workers are afraid to complain to the company or to anyone outside because they’ll lose their jobs and because they’re illegal. The work is dangerous, little attention is paid to safety, and injured workers are simply let go.
The Tuzla shipyard owners have claimed to the press that they have safety equipment. I do remember in 1991 leading a group of Texas schoolteachers around the Pasabahce glass factory. The teachers were appalled that the workers were running around in nothing but shorts and flipflops, carrying the red-hot molten glass without goggles or even gloves. We saw a man in the back shoveling a pile of lead dust (no mask, etc.) used in making crystal. And the men who engraved the crystal by holding it to spinning grinding wheels also wore no goggles. The teachers were so appalled that they insisted I confront the manager with these inhumane working conditions. I did and he led us to a room filled with goggles and other protective gear. “The men won’t use them,” he explained. They thought it was unmanly.
I’m not saying the Tuzla shipworkers are to blame, certainly not for being crushed by plates of steel that fall on them! But there is a laxity about job safety on everyone’s part that must be addressed through inspections and fines to companies that aren’t safe and don’t force their workers to be safe (and to make sure their work is of a quality that it doesn’t endanger others). The solution has to be government oversight of the companies, with the benefits filtering down to the worker and ultimately the consumer. This process has a long history in the US and is a continuing battle.
One minister, responding to the previous recent Tuzla accident, in which a man also was killed by a falling steel plate, in a press conference blamed the accidents on “outsiders” who are jealous of Turkey’s economic success and wish to undermine it. Again, the knee-jerk disavowal of responsibility: ‘What can we do about it? It was the CIA.’
It’s time for the government to take responsibility for the safety of Turkish workers. There is some movement on this: in the past years, there has been a worker’s strike. At least one shipyard has been closed down, others heavily fined. Yet the deaths continue…
What is wrong with our ministers, mayors, etc?
Isn’t there also the possibility of ‘hitting someone where it hurts’ in order to get him in line? I wonder what the role, if any, of litigation has been in the US example. If the companies (or the responsible ministry if it’s state-owned/operated) were made to pay damages, they couldn’t be so casual about it. I presume, they wouldn’t be able to prove “CIA did it” line in a court of law.
I don’t know, with all that EU-alignment things, some broadened opportunities may already be there waiting to be exploited. Maybe some AC…, sorry, TCLU type of organization is needed. Maybe we have to look at Kerincsiz and Co., or Adnan Hodja and Co., and learn.
Nihat, I have a similar instinct. It doesn’t need to be litigation, (unsubsidized) liability insurance can also provide a feedback mechanism affecting the bottom line. Micromanagement by the government assumes, at the very least, the existence of a properly working and competent cvil service with teeth against the well-connected. There might be a significant difference between the effectiveness of private companies and gov’t agencies though both would suffer from the same social and systemic ailments.
I haven’t looked into the role of the insurance industry in coming up with or influencing building codes and such in the US, but that might provide clues about the other ways to skin this cat. Worker’s comp. is a similar mechanism though I don’t know if the premiums reflect the risks as accurately as private insurance would. (Oh, BTW, our wise government is apparently seeking legislation to prohibit mortgage lenders from requiring that the property and the borrowers life be insured. Here’s a link, note how Sabah chose to downplay the home insurance aspect.). .
Ultimately it is probably a matter of how risk averse the people are and how badly they need to work. Neither can be changed in the short term and I wouldn’t trust the government to push things in the right direction — especially against a well-connected industry (MPs from all sides seem to have interests in companies there). They’ll probably push for subsidizing the cost of safety and care rather than making sure that the cost is borne by those who can effect change to make it cheaper.
Hmm, I said:
Worker’s comp. is a similar mechanism though I don’t know if the premiums reflect the risks as accurately as private insurance would.
I still don’t know, but I have checked out the <a href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workers%27_compensationWikipedia page and the references there seem to be a good starting point for looking into this. I also implied a falsehood in hinting that workers-comp wasn’t merely regulated but actually implemented by the gov’t in the US. Sorry about that.