This film by the USA based National Labor Committee on shipbreaking in Bangladesh.

Some of the world's largest decommissioned tanker ships - measuring up to 1,000 feet long, twenty stories high and weighing 25 million pounds - have been run up on the beaches of Bangladesh. In July 2009, 112 tanker ships were strewn over four miles of beach.

Thirty thousand Bangladeshi workers, some of them children just children just 10, 11, 12 and 13 years of ages, toil 12 hours a day, seven days a week, for wages of just 22 to 32 cents an hour, doing one of the most dangerous jobs in the world.

According to estimates 1,000 and 2,000 workers have been killed in Bangladesh's shipbreaking years over the last 30 years. Currently, a worker is seriously injured every day, and a worker is killed every three or four weeks.

Each ship contains an average of 15,000 pounds of asbestos and ten to 100 tins of lead paint. Helpers often children, who go barefoot or wear flip flops, use hammers to break apart the asbestos in the ship, which they shovel into bags and carry outside. Workers lack even the most rudimentary protective gear. Cutters, who use blowtorches to cut the giant ships to pieces, wear sunglasses rather then protective goggles., baseball caps rather then hardhats, wrap dirty bandanas around their noses and mouth as they are not provided respiratory masks.

To view the whole report 'Where ships and workers go to die' please visit: http://www.nlcnet.org/article.php?id=672

 

Workers Uniting Ad has major impact supporting Bangladesh wage demands:

A Workers Uniting full page ad, supporting the 3.5 million mostly young women garment workers in their demand for a 35-cent-an-hour minimum wage--was published on July 21 in The Daily Ittefaq.

This is what the union leaders told Rafiq:
"This kind of solidarity support for the garment workers in their campaign to raise the minimum wage from the Western world via the media is unprecidented. Most of the trade union leaders told me that an ad of this type is the first in the labor history of Bangladesh, and it has helped to build confidence both of the workers and the union leaders. They realized that they are not alone and that the working class across the globe are with the garment workers of Bangladesh."

Mr. Abul Hossain, president of the Textile Garment Workers Federation, immediately printed 20,000 copies of the ad, which are being distributed at rallies and worksites across Dhaka and Chittagong.

The day after the ad appeared, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina told the media: "The wage the workers are paid, I will say, is not only insufficient, but also inhumane. The workers cannot even stay in Dhaka with the peanuts they get in wages."

Another popular newspaper, The Prothon Alo, carried a news story on the Workers Uniting campaign to support Bangladesh's garment workers' wage demands.

In the Workers Uniting delegation meeting with the Bangladeshi Minister of Labour, the Minister directly accused the giant multinational retailers--like Wal-Mart and Tesco--of constantly driving down production costs and wages, leaving the workers trapped in misery. The multinationals have to be controlled, he told us, as they have no interest or regard for the Bangladeshi people.