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Death toll in Philippine factory fire rises to 72

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By OLIVER TEVES

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So much crap happens in that country. They need change. It's time that country be rebuilt from scratch. I was there visiting in 2013 and 2014 which was my first visit since I was temporarily assigned to the former Clark Air Base and nothing has changed. It is still an armpit but it's not the innocent people's fault, it's the fault of their government. The people of the Philippine deserve better. Sad story today.

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The problem in the Philippines is not the lack of government safety regulations but more so the lack of meaningful enforcement. The Philippine Occupational Safety and Health Center has published volume upon volume of worker safety regulations covering an amazingly wide range of occupational situations and has an ongoing program of training and informational dissemination. But enforcement is an extremely difficult proposition when faced with the powerful influences of poverty, greed and corruption. Poor people are willing to do whatever they can to survive (read work in unsafe conditions), greedy company owners and management are always looking for ways to increase their profit margin by exploiting their workers and corrupt government officials can always be counted on to take a little “lagay” (bribe money) to look the other way.

I remember when I was living in Mindanao, one of the neighborhood kids (about 10yrs old) came home all excited because he had landed a job and was now able to contribute to his family’s livelihood. I was happy for him until I heard who his new boss was, I knew the guy and I knew that he was one sleazy greedy pr*ck. I asked the kid where he was working and the next day I went there to check out the situation. As it turned out his new “job” involved being locked into a stifling hot warehouse where he was required to smash broken glass bottles into little pieces so they could be efficiently packed into old oil drums and sold to a glass recycling plant. No safety glasses, no dust mask, no proper shoes (just a mismatched pair of rubber slippers), no shirt and no access to drinking water or bathroom. His only tool was a short length of rusty pipe. His boss just locked him in in the morning and let him out at the end of the day. All of this for a little less than $1.50 a day and he had better have met his quota or he wouldn’t get his pay. I told the kid to come with me and we went to see his employer. After expressing my concerns about the kid’s working conditions I was told that if I wanted to do something about it I could pay for the proper safety equipment myself or keep my mouth shut. I then went to a local government official with my concerns and was told that if I wanted him to do something about it I would have to better the deal he was getting from the boss. Just like that, right out in the open. The general consensus was that the kid was lucky to have a job, and if he wanted to keep it he (or I) shouldn’t make any waves.

I ended up just hiring the kid myself to tend my garden and feed my animals. I paid him about twice as much and let him take home stuff from the garden for his family. I felt pretty good about that but he was just one kid out of millions in similar situations. I went by the warehouse a couple of days later and there was a new kid smashing bottles.

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