- Commercial and Industrial Workers’ Union President, AAL Swasthika Arulingam opined that technical education being promoted under edu. reforms will push youth, even 16-yr.-old children, into the workforce/industrial sectors/part-time work/apprenticeships, leading to school dropouts/child labour
- Factory workers or blue-collar workers don’t have sick leave as a right
- No evidence except corporates’ imagination to support argument that labour laws are too stringent and inhibiting FDIs, and hence require being made flexible, which actually means removing available protections
- No serious state-to-state dialogue and country-to-country agreements on the occupational safety of migrant workers
Across many productive industries in Sri Lanka, workers are increasingly pushed to prioritise meeting targets over protecting their own health and safety. Underscoring this, the Commercial and Industrial Workers’ Union President and attorney Swasthika Arulingam noted that since salary structures are tied directly to productivity, workers often feel they have no choice but to ignore basic safety measures in order to earn enough to support their families.
The situation, she noted, has been observed in many sectors including the plantation sector where female workers face a complete absence of essential sanitary facilities. She made these remarks during an interview with The Daily Morning on workplace safety.
Following are excerpts of the interview:
What conditions or actions can we identify under workplace safety?
Whether it be a factory or an office, unions have fought for safety precautions to be taken in terms of day-to-day accidents. For instance, if an accident happens, what are the steps a company must take to protect the worker, and at the same time, if there is something like the Covid-19 pandemic, what are the steps the workplace must take for the safety of the employees? But, one thing that is now developing is about the psychological safety of workers, which includes how much pressure you exert on workers and how that impacts workers’ health. So, occupational health and safety covers all three aspects, i.e. physical safety, mental safety and the environment in which they work.
What do you think about the domestic mechanisms such as laws that are most relevant to workplace safety?
In Sri Lanka, there are certain aspects to this. For instance, if you are working in a factory, the Factories Ordinance as well as the Workman’s Compensation Act deal with certain safety measures, and the safety precautions that the company has to take is something which is covered by the law. If you are employing women, what are the safety precautions that you must employ is also something which the law provides for when it comes to women and children. But, what this law does not provide is a larger occupational and safety law to cover large occupational and safety concerns, which is not limited to women and children. That is not available in Sri Lanka. For instance, forming occupational safety committees within the workplace and unions being involved in these committees are not things which are covered by the law at present. That is why since 2007, the unions got together with the Government as well as employers, and drafted an occupational health and safety law. The legal draft is available, but, it has not been passed into law. So, passing an occupational health and safety law is something which the Government must urgently do.
At the same time, unlike in the Shop and Office Act, in the Factories Ordinance, factory workers or blue-collar workers don’t have sick leave as a right. If you fall sick, you need to get company permission to take time to rest or go to hospital. But, if you have sick leave as a right, the worker can take their sick leave and it’s their right, just like taking annual leave. This is also tied to occupational health and safety concerns, where if a person falls sick, that person must have the right to take sick leave, which does not exist in our law. That is something which the Government must urgently bring into the law. Recently, on the same estate, within a month two workers died, one from the factory and the other from the plantation. These incidents can be avoided if we have robust occupational health and safety protection in workplaces, whether it be the factory or the plantation, which we don’t have at this point.
When it comes to industrial accidents in Sri Lanka, what sectors are most vulnerable and what accidents are the most prevalent?
Any sector which works with machines is prone to physical accidents. For instance, in garments, workers’ fingers or hair could get stuck in the machine, or in the rubber manufacturing industry, where they have to work with a lot of heat, workers are prone to accidents. Also, in any industry which deals with production targets, workers are subjected to severe mental pressure. That also contributes to workers’ health, which in turn results in unaccounted for health complications, including high blood pressure, diabetes and heart attacks. That is also something which we have to look into.
When you look at the past few years, do you think that working conditions for groups such as women and people with disabilities have improved?
There is still no measure to account for whether women are discriminated against from being hired in a particular employment. For instance, employers not hiring women because they take maternity leave is not something which we have any statistics to prove.
I don’t think the situation has improved. How many workplaces cater to people who cannot see and how many workplaces are accessible to people who cannot walk? Then, on the other hand, how many work opportunities are created for people who are physically disabled? When I say access for disabled people, I think of both whether existing work is actually accessible to disabled persons and, at the same time, what the Government has done to allow people with disabilities who cannot work in certain sectors, to be employed? If you want people to be employed, it is important that people have something to do. The Government’s productive engagement in this regard is not something that I think has improved. Unions have also been advocating for transport as almost none of our public transport is accessible to a person who cannot walk. So, if you cannot commute, how you are going to get to your work is also a question. This entire system is not structured to cater to disabled persons. This is something which we have to urgently look into.
Do you think that policies related to workplace safety and health have improved? How do you propose to improve them?
Under the previous Government, there was a conscious move by the Government to eradicate child labour. But, now what we see is a complete U-turn of the policy, where education reforms are coming into place where technical education, which is important, is being introduced for children. We also see a push towards getting younger people, even children of 16 years, into the workforce, and to introduce part-time work for children. So, when it comes to the policy of completely eradicating child labour, under this Government, there have been indications – perhaps from the push of companies or the private sector under the guise of part-time work, apprenticeships or technical education – of a morphing towards bringing children into industrial sectors. I think that that is a negative turn of policy and is going to lead to a lot of child school dropouts and child labour.
At the same time, industrial policies in terms of the safety and security of workers have been moving really slowly. To give an example, for the last 10 years, unions have been asking that Governments must pass a workplace anti-harassment law. There is already an International Labour Organisation (ILO) Convention which deals with anti-harassment, i.e. C190 (Violence and Harassment Convention), and we have been pushing for the Government to ratify it. But, they have not ratified it. Even if they don’t want to ratify it, they can pass an anti-harassment legislation, which has also not been done. Overall, industrial policies which ensure the safety and protection of workers have moved really slowly.
On the other side, in the push to make labour laws flexible, removing protections available for women and children has consistently been pushed and has always been on the agenda of the current Government as well as the former Government, under the guise that our labour laws are too stringent and foreign direct investments (FDIs) are not coming into the country because of our stringent labour laws. That kind of opinion is not supported by any evidence-based argument. It is just on the imagination of certain corporates in Sri Lanka, and Governments also keep pushing this idea. Flowing from that idea, they are trying to make labour laws what they call flexible, but, what that actually means is removing the protections which have been available for workers up until this point.
There is an ongoing discussion about workers’ mental health, and some companies have taken initiatives in this regard. What do you think about the overall situation ensuring workers’ mental health at the workplace?
The complaint that Government workers make is that they are pressured for targets. They are exposed to severe mental pressure and harassment in order to achieve really high targets, almost impossible targets, so much so that workers sometimes work without drinking water because they have to go to the washroom if they drink water. They are put under severe mental pressure in order to achieve these targets.
After workers start feeling harassed and go through issues like anxiety and depression because of work pressure, employers bring a counsellor into the factory and want to provide counselling for workers who are under mental pressure because of the conditions the factory has put them through. At the same time they are not paid properly, because their salaries are tied to incentives which they won’t be able to achieve. So, employers subject workers to mental harassment, pressure and anxiety, and then bring in a counsellor asking the workers to go and talk to them. This is how companies and factories gaslight workers giving the impression that, “it is your fault that you feel depressed and anxious, and it is not our fault if you feel depressed because we are harassing you”.
So, whenever people talk about mental health and mental health in the workplace, firstly, workers need to be allowed to exercise their agency by creating their own unions inside the factory. Any industrial factory without a union will ultimately have mental health issues because workers there are being subjected to severe harassments to achieve targets. It is only a union that can confront that pressure and push back on the management’s actions. Unless workers are permitted to come together and organise a union, I don’t think that factories should bring in counsellors and try to counsel workers on mental pressures they are causing.
What do you think about workers’ awareness and understanding about workplace safety?
Particularly in productive industries, workers are singularly focused on achieving targets because targets are what will give them their salary at the end of the month. Since they are forced to achieve these impossible and very high targets, workers place their health and safety at risk. For example, in the seafood industry, factories claim give workers gloves in order to take the seafood out of the ice packs and clean it. But, many workers don’t use these gloves, and as a result of that, many workers have wounds or rashes in their hands. When we speak to workers as to why they don’t wear gloves when they clean seafood to prevent these health conditions, what workers say is that when they wear gloves, the amount of seafood they clean will reduce, because the gloves slows down their work process. They say when they use their bare hands to clean seafood, they can clean more thereby earning more money. So, workers always give second place to their health because of the kind of salary structure in existence in production industries, which ties their salary to productivity and targets. When you do that, workers always put their safety concerns as a secondary priority, because, they have to get a certain amount of salary at the end of the month otherwise they cannot feed the family.
When it comes to the health and safety of plantation workers, when female workers get periods, they don’t have a place to go and rest or even a proper washroom. Even on the days of their period, they are forced to go and pluck in order to get paid. They don’t have proper sanitation facilities, toilet facilities and facilities where women can go and change when they are on their period. So, the plantation industry is a completely different industry, where health and safety does not exist at all for workers.
Recently, there were reports about various safety threats to Sri Lankans working in Israel and South Korea, and such incidents have been reported from the Middle East as well. What do you think about Sri Lanka’s approach to ensuring the migrant workers’ safety?
When it comes to workers in Israel facing attacks including racist ones at the hands of Israelis and various other persons, the Government must take singular responsibility for that. Even when they were sending migrant workers to Israel, as unions, we consistently raised objections to this saying that firstly, Israel is a warring country and that it is not a place where you send workers to work in safety. Secondly, when it comes to the politics of sending workers to Israel to take over the jobs of Palestinian workers who are working in Israel, the absolute racial politics of making our workers complicit in this kind of genocide is something which we have spoken against as unions collectively. But, the Government ignores our call, and continues to send workers. The implications of that are what we are seeing now.
In terms of migrant workers, we have heard horrendous incidents of migrant workers being abused in Middle Eastern countries, in East Asian countries, as well as now in Israel. The Sri Lanka Bureau of Foreign Employment has, by and large, shut its eyes and been extremely insensitive to the suffering of migrant workers who form the third pillar of the country’s economy. So, the Government has not actually drafted proper policies. Even this Government is not looking into the occupational safety of migrant workers by getting into a serious dialogue with foreign countries, and unless we have state-to-state dialogue on the occupational safety of migrant workers, we are not going to be able to achieve any kind of protection for our migrant workers. At various points, there have been instances where Governments have made lukewarm attempts to negotiate with, for instance, the Saudi Government in terms of some kind of protection for migrant workers. But, I would say that Governments have, by and large, let this responsibility slip, and have not taken serious steps to look into a country-to-country agreement in terms of the protection of migrant workers.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect those of this publication