Manslaughter - by intent, not neglect

A country that disregards and holds in contempt the health and safety of its people at work and in public spaces shows clear signs of negating the very purpose of its being. "Why fret over safety when everything is pre-ordained" is a fatalistic excuse, not without its painful consequences. Events like the Baldia factory fire, the Gul Plaza inferno, coal mines collapsing, school buses overturning, infants dying in hospitals, HIV outbreaks, trains derailing, over 500,000 cases of dog bites, and hundreds of sanitation workers dying in raw sewage gutters every year do not have to become routine and acceptable statistics of our daily lives.

Why must thousands of citizens be deprived of their right to life and made to die every year, simply because of incompetence, neglect and misgovernance of a dysfunctional bureaucratic system? Why is our state so reluctant to learn anything new, scientific or humane? Consider the following real-life examples to understand how the civilised world translates the respect for human life into effective safety systems and accountability at the highest levels of management.

In June 2024, a fire killed 23 workers in a lithium battery making factory in South Korea. The investigation revealed that the company failed to establish adequate systems for identifying and addressing workplace hazards. Park Soon-kwan, the Chief Executive of the company, was sentenced to 15 years in prison. In April 2010, a coal mine explosion in West Virginia, USA killed 29 miners. Don Blankenship, the Chairman and CEO of Massey Energy Company, was sentenced to one year in prison along with a fine of US$250,000. In March 2020, a worker suffered fatal injuries while flattening fertiliser bags in a factory in Queensland, Australia. The CEO pleaded guilty to failing to exercise due diligence and was personally fined A$60,000. On 14 April 2017, an employee was crushed to death by a robotic packing machine at the Deco-Pak factory in the UK. Michael Hall, the company owner, was convicted of gross negligence and manslaughter and sentenced to five years' imprisonment.

Now consider how effortlessly and remorselessly, the heads of the water and sewerage departments in Sindh and Punjab walk away, with no questions asked, after the manslaughter (by intent, and not merely neglect) of approximately one hundred sanitation workers every year in the diseased and deathly graveyards called sewage gutters. Why do the police fail to register an FIR, and why has not even a single CEO been jailed? Why is the state so reluctant to legislate complete prohibition of the inhumane practice of workers entry into sewage gutters?

Similar to National Environmental Quality Standards, Pakistan ought to establish National Occupational Health & Safety (OHS) Standards. Some of the core provisions of the International Safety Standard ISO 45001 could be easily incorporated and made mandatory for every organisation and industry in Pakistan. The standard expressly requires the top management to "take overall responsibility and accountability for the prevention of work-related injury and ill health". This is arguably the most powerful statement in ISO 45001 concerning the direct responsibility of the chief executive, ensuring that the accountability is not relegated to the safety manager or the contractor.

Societies cannot genuinely heal from injustice, oppression or human rights violations unless the truth is acknowledged, responsibility is accepted, victims are compensated and meaningful steps are taken to prevent the recurrence of such abuses. There is no compulsion on us to continue killing our exploited workforce. We need to hold accountable all those CEOs who presided over the death of our citizens. We need to introduce new scientific safety organisations and standards. We need to identify the families of those who suffered because of our criminal neglect. We need to compensate, rehabilitate and train them to become equal citizens of the state. Much before mediating at the global level, must we not reconcile with our own deprived, discriminated and dying workers?