Occupational health and safety

EDITORIAL: It’s very unfortunate that every now and then a report surfaces about miserable working conditions in some part of the country that cause needless diseases and deaths among labourers, and pleads with authorities to take prompt action, only to fade from the headlines till another one pops up down the road.

Punjab’s stone crushing industry is in the spotlight this time, with HRCP (Human Rights Commission of Pakistan) urging a human rights body to immediately investigate claims of silicosis, a fatal lung disease common among workers in the sector.

This report, too, like so many in the past, highlights the appalling state of occupational health and safety (OHS) standards in yet another industry that employs hundreds of thousands of workers – approximately 500,000 people are directly or indirectly employed in Pakistan’s stone-crushing industry.

And, as usual, factory owners and relevant government officials are blind, perhaps willingly, to the effects of their old habit of not following safety rules. If only there were better implementation of the few rules that do exist, workers would not be exposed to crystalline silica dust during industrial processes and would not, in the long run, become vulnerable to silicosis.

The rot doesn’t end here. Suffering workers are then left to work out how to sustain their families and finance their treatment on their own, besides worrying about what and how much to leave behind for their families.

That is why the report also suggests that the government should set up a special commission to identify all victims of silicosis and their legal heirs and duly determine the “quantum of compensation” to which they are entitled.

It also demands that the commission consider factors such as loss of earning capacity, number of dependent family members and all other factors based on the disability-adjusted life years formula developed by the World Health Organisation (WHO).

And it calls for punitive measures against factory owners that do not follow proper protective guidelines and needlessly expose workers to diseases, and suggests that owners should be held liable for payments for workers’ treatment.

Hopefully, this report will catch the attention of authorities where all others have failed. For, a lot of steps suggested in it are already part of the rule book, and many such concerns have been voiced before, repeatedly, yet there has been no on-ground action to speak of.

That this problem is not confined to the informal sectors means that the government machinery is as bad as the unofficial, black economy when it comes to monitoring working conditions.

Such apathy at the top not only puts workers’ lives in danger, but also amplifies the chronic crisis of productivity and drags the entire economy down. Policy wise, too, a country with one of the largest populations in the world cannot afford a working class afflicted with easily avoidable health problems.

So the government needs to wake up not just for the sake of the people, which doesn’t usually figure too high on its priority list, but also for its own survival.

There should be a thorough, countrywide investigation into working conditions to determine not just how to better protect workers, which is their right, but also to identify and punish government officials who have either been asleep at the wheel or involved in an unforgivable violation of worker-and human-rights.

The past doesn’t give much reason for optimism. Yet perhaps provincial caretaker setups – labour devolved to provinces after the 18th Amendment – can do the people, especially helpless labourers, a big favour by getting the ball rolling before they bow out soon enough.

Copyright Business Recorder, 2023