In its November 2023 report, A Call for Safer and Healthier Working Environments, the ILO observes that:
According to the latest estimates developed by the ILO and covering the year 2019, over 395 million workers worldwide sustained a non-fatal work injury. In addition, around 2.93 million workers died as a result of work-related factors, an increase of more than 12 per cent compared to 2000.
These estimates are a crucial reminder that workers continue to face serious injury, disease and the risk of being killed at work. It adds to the urgent call to implement comprehensive measures to protect workers; ensuring that workers’ occupational health and safety rights guaranteed in ILO Convention No.155 are treated as fundamental rights.
The aggregate number of work-related injuries, illness, disease and deaths can only be estimated because the data compiled by the ILO is only as good as the national data made available. This in turn is only as good as good as the inspection, reporting and enforcement mechanisms that produce this information. For every worker who dies of a long term illness caused by or exacerbated by work – sometimes years after retirement – her or his death is not recorded as work-related. An unknown death of an unknown worker, unrecorded. Every worker who dies in an unreported industrial “accident” is another unknown death. For every worker not considered a worker by legal definition and excluded in employment statistics, she or he dies in silence.
In our continued call to stop the killing on International Workers’ Memorial Day, April 28, we must also remember the workers whose injuries and deaths are not recognized or recorded as they fall through the gaps.
Often the gaps in subnational, national and international data are institutional – due to limitations in technical capacity, a lack of standardization, and vast differences in legal definitions and regulations. But gaps in the data on work-related injuries, illness, disease and deaths are also political. The lack of public resources and funding for the inspection, monitoring and reporting that produces data is not due to poverty or underdevelopment or a lack of coordination. It is the result of political decisions that minimize the importance of workers’ lives, pushing them to the low end of the policy spectrum and into the margins of national budgets. Austerity (cutbacks) not only put workers’ lives at risk, but prevents the reporting of health damaged and lives lost.
In private industry – including the workplaces of global companies – “safety first” and “zero accidents” may appear to be a commitment to save lives, but in practice has become a financialized target; a key performance indicator (KPI). Instead of motivating local management to guarantee a safe workplace through bonuses and rewards for meeting targets, it has in many cases become a financial incentive to not report.
In the period in which the ILO report claims a 12% increase in work-related deaths (2000-2019), we were directly involved in more than three dozen conflicts with transnational food and beverage companies in the Asia-Pacific region that involved deliberate under-reporting or non-reporting. The cover up of gas explosions, ammonia gas leaks, fires and the collapse of physical structures or machinery effectively deleted from existence the injuries and deaths that resulted from these workplace tragedies.
In the Pakistan operations of a global food business, for example, contract workers carrying out repairs suffered severe burns in a gas explosion. They were not rushed to hospital for emergency treatment. Instead they were placed in the company guest house while management tried to figure out how to not report it. This delay in receiving treatment contributed to the death of one of the workers and the lifelong disability of another worker.
Similar delays in treatment occurred in the operations of three other global food and beverage companies in Pakistan and India. In all of these cases trade union representatives were reprimanded or suspended for demanding the use of the company ambulance. (In one case the ambulance could not be used because it was used for storage and had no medical equipment on board. In another case management was using the ambulance for private events like weddings.) Any record of utilizing the company ambulance automatically led to reporting a serious industrial accident. This in turn affected the bonuses and financial rewards linking to meeting KPI (“zero accidents”). So the best way to achieve “zero accidents” was to not report it, which meant not using the ambulance.
At a site of one of these global companies in India, a crane carrying an excessive load fell, nearly missing a group of workers. The trade union representative was suspended for demanding that the scene be preserved for the labour inspector. Instead the accident was cleaned up before the inspector arrived and no record of the incident or of lost working hours was made. Three months later the replacement crane fell, nearly hitting workers below. But this time there was no inspection because the trade union representative was still suspended. No one dared report it.
Here is an example of what we reported in June 2013 at a factory of a global beverage company:
At 3:45AM on the morning of 7 June two workers were killed when boiler house chimney collapsed onto the boiler house wall, crushing them. The Boiler Operator, Komal Chandel (55), and the Chilling Operator, Ravikumar Sony (26), were severely injured. The Narmada Drama Centre hospital 60 km away from the plant declared them both dead on arrival at 5AM. According to witnesses (who cannot be named for fear of persecution by management) Komal Chandel died at the site of the accident while Ravikumar Sony, who never regained consciousness, died on the way to the hospital. Komal leaves a wife and 5 children and Ravi was engaged to be married in November and has dependent parents and siblings.
The chimney that collapsed was not tethered and fell in a storm. It was not an accident. It was an unsafe workplace. Six months before the deaths of Komal and the Ravi, the union wrote a letter to management regarding unsafe working conditions. Management responded by text message, saying they are too busy to meet because of peak season production.
To gain some insight into how little workers’ lives are respected by one of the biggest beverage companies in the world, it is worth noting the letters their families received. Komal and the Ravi were declared dead at 5AM on Thursday June 7, 2013. On the afternoon of the same day management sent letters to their families with compensation cheques attached. In the same letter it invites the family to send a family member to replace the deceased at work.
The two workers who died – Komal and Ravi – have names because the union reported the tragedy and fought for justice. Tens of thousands of workplaces without union representation (or suppressed by a corrupt union in the pocket of management) will never see the names of the dead and injured reported. The death of these unknown workers is tragic. But this also points to the ongoing risks that workers face. If there are zero accidents and unreported injuries and deaths, then nothing needs to change.
How do we prevent something that is not known? How do employers and governments guarantee it will never happen again if they do not acknowledge what happened and how?
What happened and how is not about blame. It is about cause and effect, remediation and prevention. For major corporations blame is understood only in terms of liability. In fact, this obsession with liability already undermines or limits human rights due diligence. The question of liability is not “how did this happen?” and “how do we prevent it happening again?”, but “what’s our exposure?” The irony should not be missed. Workers are exposed to hazardous chemicals, dangerous working conditions, and extreme temperatures, and yet the main concern appears to be the financial exposure of the employer to lawsuits, compensation claims and reputational damage.
In several countries the most commonly used data on injuries at accidents at work is based on compensation claims. It is a key means of determining the kind of accidents and injuries in the workplace and identifying trends. But this also means that the injuries or illnesses inflicted on any worker not eligible for compensation claims due to their employment status, immigration status, gender or age are also excluded from the source data. They could not claim, so it did not happen.
The tragic silence in the data on work-related injuries, illness, disease and deaths grows with informality. It becomes less visible with the employment of migrant workers, precarious employment (outsourcing and casualization), hidden employment relationships, and self-employment, then becomes completely invisible in the darkness of trafficking, forced labour and child labour.
In the informal economy work-related deaths, injury or illness are generally unreported and are invisible in the official data. In most cases it is because it is beyond the scope of the labour inspection system, or is simply unworthy of investigation. Informal economy workers and their families encounter biased authorities who believe that the “unskilled” self-employed are always to blame. And more importantly, any deaths, injury or illness are not work-related.
When Jasper Dalman, a food delivery rider working for a leading digital delivery platform, was struck and killed by a car, his death was recorded as a traffic accident, not death at work. Thousands of delivery riders injured or killed while working are excluded from the data on work-related injuries and deaths because they are not recognized as workers. And the roads where they are struck down are not considered their workplace. They are among the unknown.
At just 19 years of age, Jasper Dalman was a Foodpanda delivery rider in the Philippines. Jasper died in a horrific traffic incident on February 19, 2023, while working.Also unknown are the thousands of undocumented fishers on commercial fishing vessels injured or killed at sea. In the Philippines the campaign to recognize the rights of fishers culminated in the adoption of Department Order No.156 Rules and Regulations governing the Working and Living Conditions of Fishers on board Fishing Vessels engaged in Commercial Fishing Operation in 2016. This new regulation treats fishing vessels as workplaces and guarantees the right to a safe workplace, with the commercial fishing companies as the responsible employers. However, in the eight years since the Department Order No.156 was adopted, the commercial fishing industry has effectively lobbied against its implementation.
In that eight years fishers continue to be injured and killed at sea, yet these are not recognized as work-related injuries and deaths. Abandoned fishers and those lost at sea are not recognized at all.
Wilfredo Estampa was among hundreds of fishers abandoned overseas by the tuna fishing corporation, Citra Mina. He died before being being able to return to the Philippines and his death was never classified as work-related.Families of fishers lost at sea desperately campaign today. They campaign not for the return of the bodies of their loved ones, but simply for the recognition that they are dead. Without a declaration of death they cannot claim the insurance so desperately needed in the face of poverty and marginalization. It is the same poverty and marginalization that underpins the vulnerability of fishers, their precarious employment and hazardous working conditions. And for these families their poverty and marginalization is worsened by the deaths of their loved ones – workers that governments and employers refuse to recognize as workers. They are among the tens of thousands of unknown workers who must be remembered on April 28.