Babu's Story: A Child Worker In The Shipyards Of Bangladesh

NOTE: This Reporter's Notebook accompanies the story on public radio's Marketplace which aired on June 18. For the original radio story, go here.

"Did anybody ever tell you," I asked the child worker sitting on the cement floor, "'You're only 13, you shouldn't have to work like this'?"

Ismael "Babu" Hussein paused to reflect on the question. All around him were other kids, sitting in the small airless room that was shared by several worker families who sleep there in shifts. Like Babu, these boys, some as young as 12, do the risky, often terrifying work of breaking down ships by hand on the beaches of Chittagong, Bangladesh. The boys are apprentices to older "masters" who operate the blowtorches that cut the steel walls into six-by-ten-foot plates, and thus turn useless old tankers and cargo ships into usable scrap.

When their masters get tired, Babu and his fellow child laborers often handle the blowtorches on their own, frequently without goggles, risking serious injury or blindness. Some are forced to climb tall rope ladders to the ships' highest points to retrieve items, risking death if they slip. And all the children are on constant lookout for falling metal plates and rods, which have killed many a worker before them. Lately, Babu has been having nightmares of falling steel, or of being thrown into melting iron by an angry boss.

"There was another foreign guy who came here years ago,"Babu answered after a pause. "He also said this. But nobody else ever told me this before, except the foreign guy."

Indeed, for many of the children here, the idea that they shouldn't work is an entirely foreign concept. Despite laws in Bangladesh restricting child labor, the reality is starkly different. A
2005 report from the International Labour Organization says in Bangladesh, a country of 65 million packed into a land mass the size of Wisconsin, there are nearly 5 million laborers under the age of 15.

The context, of course, is poverty. Babu's father, Atiqur, was 13 himself when he came to Chittagong looking for work. Today, 25 years later, he loads scrap metal onto waiting trucks, for which he is paid about three dollars a day. But the work is sporadic, and after paying the rent on the family's tiny bamboo shack, he has barely forty cents left to feed each of the family members: Atiqur and his wife Hosneara; Babu; daughter Bethi-Akhtar; and son Papi. With no other options, Atiqur and Hosneara recently sat their eldest son down and told him they needed his help. Babu, who never learned to read or write, would go to work. His job would add $2.20 to the family's daily budget.

"If it wasn't for my labor, my family would starve," Babu says. Still, he dreams of something else. "There is no fun in the work. I wish I could find something easier to do."

According to advocates for the shipyard workers, the work shouldn't be so hard - or so dangerous.

When decommissioned ships plow into Chittagong's beaches, armies of poor Bangladeshis walk along the tidal flats and begin the work of dismantling. More than 20,000 laborers work in the city's 36 shipyards. They unload every item - sinks, toilets, couches, crystal, flatware, microwaves, computers, mops, life preservers - and transport them to the dozens of shops lining the road north of Chittagong. Then begins the work of blowtorch and hammer. Teams of workers, hundreds strong, can dismantle a ship in four to six weeks. Many of the ships contain toxic materials, sometimes hidden in pipes that workers will cut open with their torches. These include asbestos, PCBs, arsenic-laced paint, and tons of oil and grease. Add to that the risk of falling steel from vessels that are literally coming apart, and it's easy to understand why Babu has nightmares.

According to a 2005 report by Greenpeace and the International Federation for Human Rights, between 1975 and 2005 an estimated 1,000 Bangladeshis died from accidents in the shipbreaking yards - an average of about three deaths per month. Statistics cited by the Bangladesh Environmental Lawyers Association (BELA) suggest the figure is much higher: 2,000 deaths since 1998. Unknown numbers of others are maimed or severely sickened by toxics. It's impossible to know how many become ill or eventually die, for example, from exposure to asbestos.

Environmental and human rights groups, led by BELA, have been fighting on national and international fronts for worker and environmental protection. In March 2009, BELA lawyers won a ruling from the country's highest court, ordering the shipyards to shut down for two weeks and requiring them to get government-issued environmental clearances. The shutdown angered many worker families like Babu's, for whom bad work is better than none. An estimated 10,000 shipbreaking laborers and their families, concerned for their jobs, protested the High Court ruling.

The High Court also ruled that ships would no longer be able to enter Bangladesh's waters without first "pre-cleaning" their toxic wastes. This was a huge victory for shipbreaking watchdogs, but given the country's history of strong laws and weak enforcement, advocates say it isn't enough.

"All the agencies - environment, labor, shipping - they have categorically failed to protect the laborers from this havoc," says BELA director Rizwana Hasan, who in April 2009 won the Goldman Environmental Prize, a prestigious international award recognizing "grassroots environmental heroes." Hasan and her colleagues are pushing for international measures requiring pre-cleaning of ships, and a ban on shipbreaking on beaches.

A 64-nation accord signed in Hong Kong in May 2009 will require companies to produce toxic inventories, but will not fundamentally change the shipbreaking workers' operations. "Yards that have been dormant for years are bouncing back to life," acknowledged Enam Ahmed, technical head of the Bangladesh Shipbreakers Association, in an interview with Agence France Presse. "There's a sense a boom time is coming with more ships heading our way."
Not surprisingly, BELA and other advocates are highly critical of the accord for for not going far enough. "I don't want the developed countries to take Bangladesh as a dumping site," Hasan told me, "and to take our laborers and our environment for granted."

For Hasan and her fellow activists, the goal is not to destroy the shipbreaking industry, but to bring it under stricter labor and environmental controls. Crucial for Bangladesh - as well as other shipbreaking nations like India, Pakistan, China, Vietnam, and Turkey - will be not only the agreements themselves, but also enforcement. This will become more pressing as single-hull oil tankers are phased out by 2010, sending more decommissioned ships to South Asian shores.

"A work should give people dignity," Hasan told me in her office in Dhaka, Bangladesh's capital. "A work should provide you a better life. A work should be able to bring you out of your poverty circle. It is not doing any of these things. So it's not a solution to unemployment, it is just exploitation. And they're doing it because these people are poor, and no one is listening to what they have to say."

For Babu, who doesn't follow the national debate and in any case can't read any of the agreements, the issue is simple. If there are rules about safety, why doesn't anyone follow them?

"They usually don't provide us with protective equipment, but when any law enforcement agency comes into the yard to check, they immediately provide all this stuff for half an hour or so," he says with a frown. "Then they take it back when the inspectors leave. My question is 'Why?' Why do they only provide this stuff when the law enforcement people come? Why don't they give it to us all day, every day, so we can protect ourselves?"

Special thanks to Mainul Islam Khan and Shah Mohammed Nurul Islam, for indispensable help; to producer Ki-Min Sung; to Ismael "Babu" Hussein and his parents, Atiqur and Hosneara; and to Kavan Prabhu of Nairobi, Kenya, who provides the English-language voice of Babu in the radio program.

For information on the history of the global shipbreaking industry, see "The Shipbreakers," the Baltimore Sun's 1998 Pulitzer Prize-winning series by Gary Cohn and Will Englund.

Comments

[VisionForChange]

I think its a pragmatic response to an alarming situation in Bangladesh. The West should not tie it with the human rights issue. Its the vicious triad of unsustainable population, socioeconomic underdevelopment feeding on illiteracy and stark poverty that is a stumbling block to the enormously natural gas, offshore oil and minerals-rich Bangladesh's economic prosperity and progress.

[VisionForChange]

Bangladesh's population has more than doubled from 75 million in 1971 at its time of independence to 150-160 million in 2008. Bangladesh is about the size of Wisconsin but it has an unsustainable and unbearable staggering population that is half of the United States' population. I think it is a miracle how so many people are huddled into such a tiny piece of land.!

You have a lot of NGOs like BRAC and Grameen Bank (which are hyperinflated in the Western media for their deeds) and foreign organisations working here but you hardly see them doing anything about the exploding population that is at the root of all her socioeconomic and political ails. Their motives are directed at perpetuating the age old problems to keep Bangladesh mired in stark poverty for profiteering purposes and attracting foreign grants and aid that hardly ever trickles down to where it matters the most.

In today's parliamentary session in the evening one of the MPs who also happens to be the nephew of the PM Sheikh Hasina, Fazle Nur Tapash said something worth mentioning. He cited the Chinese one child policy for over three decades which could be a solution to the booming Bangladesh population getting out of control. He opined that Bangladesh should target a negative birth rate to immediatly cut down her swelling population.

[averygard]

Until brangelina have a movie coming out and decide to get some positive coverage by doing a photo shoot there, unfortunately, nothing's likely to happen.

[mados123]

I heard this on the radio yesterday and it was captivating altough quite sad to hear the story. I highly recommend following the link to get a more "complete" sense of the the situation being described.

[Ira7]

Man, I can be a heartless SOB at time, but this story really rips at my heart .

To me, there's no greater crime than denying a kid a childhood. There's (hopefully) plenty of years to be MISERABLE on this earth, so the least one can expect is to have some good memories of those younger years.

[confidance government]

Its unfortunate that the kid has to work to make ends meet, but what is really despicable is that they are not provided with the neccessary safety equipment.

Its also really funny to hear the commentators blame capitalism when the majority of the economic progress in Bangladash has been driven recently by microcredit, which gives poor people the capital neccessary to commence their own businesses; aka capitalism.

Not to mention that the largest industries and banks in Bangladesh's economy state-owned, or the fact that the country was devastated by the partition of India, its war for independance from Pakistan, and successive military coups.

But it you prefer to be intellectually lazy, sure go ahead and blame capitalism.

[Khirad]

Alang, in Gujarat (in India) breaks down roughly half the world's ships. Being familiar with South Asia I wish I were surprised by this. What? laws not being followed? Gasp! Children laboring? shocking! I was amazed however they bothered to put on the show for the inspectors and weren't able to pay them off -- maybe this was just cheaper.

[KinkyGirl]

Unfortunately, working children are becoming a common place. Very little we can do. Really

[larry278]

Many people worked at adult jobs while still children in the USA in the past. They worked a breaker boys in coal mining, bobbin boys or girls in the textile industry, plow boys in farming. Only adults do these & similar industrial jobs now-if the jobs still exist in the USA. Many of these jobs have been exported to 3d world nations where kids still do dangerous jobs. That is capitalism.

[mariegachelin]

This is what we get with the level of illeteracy and poverty in many parts of the world. At a point the industrialized world had child labor, that, went away with regulations and compulsory education.
If the UN had any influence, it would push for compulsory education in countries where children are abused and treated as cattles and mules. It breaks my heart to see such abuse. It's a shame that human beings can treat other human beings with such callous attitude.

[Rog49Thomas]

I wondered what the folks in Galt's Gulch were doing.

This is the sort of story that brings home the manifest danger of unions and things like EFCA.

Absent all the distortions to the "free" market caused by unions in this country, your kid could have an exciting career like this. Maybe if you were lucky, you could too.

But sadly you don't.

I blame the UAW, AFL and CIO!!

[Hank007]

LMAO! It's because of unions your kid isn't working now. Don't worry though, eventually business will get the unions all busted, the remaining reforms dropped, and American children will be working in factories making shoes for Indian and Chinese children, your neocon dream fulfilled.

[writerjohnny]

The ENTIRE history of working people is a struggle for safety and security which are ALWAYS secondary to corporations and capitalists. Capitalism and it's highest evolutionary moment as imperialism are temporary and while seeming to be at the peak of their powers they are quickly crumbling. While I would be happy for the owners and runners of the world to give up their power righteously let us remember that in the entire history of humanity NO rulers have EVER given up anything without a death struggle. To this I say death to the fascist insect that preys upon the life and work of the working and oppressed people of the world. Not this year for sure but the survival of the human race depends on it's ability to provide political and economic equality to all. Think about it. Science and the advance of technology will assure that at some point the ability to kill hundreds of millions of humans will be available to one person or a small group of people. Unless there is NO reason to use this technology it will be used. Happiness and contentment among ALL humans is essential to ANY future of humans on Earth.

[mariegachelin]

"Some people regard private enterprise as a predatory tiger to be shot. Others look on it as a cow they can milk. Not enough people see it as a healthy horse, pulling a sturdy wagon."
I couldn't say it better than
Winston Churchill

[Peripatetic]

It's a shame that Bangladesh and other South Asian countries have not been able to provide safeguards against child labor. One of the reasons, among many, is that the vanguards of the society in these countries themselves employ children (especially girls) as household helps. They are not going to rob the house and population explosion has made sure that they are cheap to employ. The parents of these children are only happy to have them work as servants in wealthy households than have them work in the dangerous ship-wrecking yards.

Countries like Bangladesh have to seriously implement strong educational policies at the lowest strata of the society. The have to convince children like Babu that when he grows up, he should make sure, if he would have children, that they should have guaranteed access to education. Unless this awareness is created, I expect to see, in twenty-five years, Babu's son working in these fields as did Babu's father.

[PVHurt420]

This is totally heartbreaking to read, and I will pass this on to my 14 yr old sister who should appreciate what she doesn't have to do.