Ignoring workers' safety—a recipe for disaster
The lack of any medical facilities in or around the Savar Tannery Industrial Estate which poses severe threat to the health and safety of around 1.29 lakh workers employed in the leather industry, is simply unacceptable. In October, when four workers at the estate suffered from serious acid burns, they had to be transported to the Dhaka Medical College Hospital nearly 20 kilometres away, with one worker losing his life as a result. And there have been other cases of preventable deaths at the estate, mainly due to the lack of medical facilities.
But apart from that, many more safety irregularities at the estate were reported by this newspaper yesterday, including the failure to keep fire extinguishers in the factories, and the absence of the most basic safety gears for workers. Additionally, gross irregularities by owners, when it comes to compensating their injured workers in violation of our labour laws, were also mentioned in the report.
Given the huge cost of the project, one would have expected the estate to have all the necessary facilities to ensure not only the health and safety of the environment, but also for its workers. The fact that this is not the case, however, raises serious questions about how much the concerned stakeholders and decision-makers really care about workers' safety. Moreover, while all these irregularities have been going on, the government bodies tasked with inspection and enforcement of the labour laws that ensure workers' safety claim to be suffering from a manpower shortage, which is equally shocking.
We call on the authorities to take note of these glaring shortcomings that are needlessly putting people's lives at risk, and to address them urgently as there can be no substitute to ensuring the safety of workers first.
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