Pakistani migrant workers on a construction site in Dubai. Credit: S. Irfan Ahmed/IPS

By Jennifer Hattam
ISTANBUL, Apr 30 2020 (IPS)

A daily commute of two-and-a-half hours each way would take a toll on anyone, but for Özkan, a construction worker in Istanbul, the hardest part of his long journey is coping with his fears about what might happen after he gets home.

“The conditions on our job site are deplorable, and I feel psychologically broken with worrying that I might infect other people, especially my wife or my 8-year-old son,” Özkan says. “We don’t have any way to disinfect ourselves on the site, so as soon as I get home, I go straight to the bathroom to take a shower. I can’t kiss my son, I can only greet him from afar.”

Around the world, governments are asking their citizens to stay at home to protect themselves and others against the COVID–19 pandemic, but millions of construction workers are still on the job, caught between risking their health and losing their livelihoods.

Around the world, governments are asking their citizens to stay at home to protect themselves and others against the COVID–19 pandemic, but millions of construction workers are still on the job, caught between risking their health and losing their livelihoods
More than 15,000 construction workers in Istanbul were let go from their jobs on large projects, most without receiving any compensation, during one two-week period in March as sites began halting operations or reducing their workforces, according to the Turkish construction workers’ union Dev-Yapı-İş.

The union estimates that around 295,000 people are employed in construction in Istanbul, and more than a million countrywide. Workers and labour advocates say those who remain employed have been offered few protections against coronavirus in an already-dangerous occupation where it is difficult to enforce social distancing.

“Masks are distributed at some construction sites, but not many. Both knowledge about how to use these masks and especially the number available, are very insufficient. No other precautions are taken,” says Dr. Ercan Duman, a member of the Occupational Health and Workplace Medicine Commission of the Istanbul Chamber of Physicians. A recent report by the Confederation of Progressive Trade Unions of Turkey (DİSK), which includes Dev-Yapı-İş, indicates that DİSK members have tested positive for COVID-19 at a rate three times higher than the average rate per 1000 people tested among the general public in Turkey.

At the site where Özkan and around 70 others are employed, he says the only change has been a directive for workers to sit apart while eating, a measure he calls “meaningless” given the poor hygiene standards in their makeshift canteen.

Videos and photos circulated on social media by Turkish unions and their supporters show workers crammed into cafeterias andsleeping 10 to a room in on-site dorms. Describing the worker accommodation at his site, Özkan says: “The street is cleaner. You live in filth. It’s contrary to human dignity.”

Essential work?

Construction industry practices have come under scrutiny in many countries amid the on-going pandemic as governments set divergent — and not always clear — policies on the kinds of building projects that are considered essential work and thus allowed to continue amid stay-at-home orders and lockdowns.

“It’s understandable that the public is concerned, because they’re looking out of their windows in the city and seeing this construction going on that’s raising issues about social distancing,” says Ian Woodland, construction national officer for the British and Irish trade union Unite. “There are a number of projects that are critical infrastructure like building hospitals, but others, like luxury flats being built, are not critical in nature.”

Unite estimates that only around a quarter of the UK’s construction sites have suspended work amid the pandemic. The union has called for tougher measures to be taken to enforce safety, and to ensure that workers are not compelled to work on non-essential projects. Nearly 130 members of parliament have signed on to a letter that raises concerns about the increased coronavirus risk posed by allowing non-essential workplaces, including construction sites, to stay open. Similar debates are occurring in large cities in the United States, with 10,000 members of a major construction industry union in Boston holding a work stoppage this month over coronavirus-related health and safety concerns.

The logistics of much building work, and the structure of the industry in many countries, make either option difficult to ensure.

“For certain jobs on-site, pairing up is a necessity for safety reasons as well as the nature of the work. It’s impossible to do the recommended social distancing of two metres in all construction operations,” says Woodland. “Starting with travelling to work, either on company buses or on public transport, to queuing up to clock in and get onto the worksite, to accessing canteen and toilet facilities during the workday — it’s virtually impossible to enforce social distancing in all of those situations.”

Precarious, migrant workers

In many countries, including both Turkey and the UK, construction workers are often self-employed, irregularly employed by agencies, or employed by subcontractors, conditions which may result in them being left out of paid furlough schemes or not receiving government subsidies for the unemployed. This precarity can have dangerous consequences.

In Turkey, the vast majority of the construction workforce in Istanbul and other large cities is made up of internal migrants from smaller towns and rural provinces. When workers were laid off earlier in the pandemic without compensation, many returned to their hometowns, potentially contributing to the spread of the virus. Since Turkey halted most intercity travel in late March, those who lose their jobs are marooned in the cities where they had worked, often with little financial or social support.

Similar scenarios have played out elsewhere. “The lockdown in India has left many internal migrants, mostly construction workers, stuck in the cities without food to eat,” says Yuson. “They have to work to get paid, so you still see many people in the streets, going to work, or trying to find work.”

“Construction has been deemed an essential industry in the UAE and protections for non-citizens are being rolled back through allowances for employers to cut workers’ wages,” says Isobel Archer, a project officer at the London-based Business & Human Rights Resource Centre (BHRRC). Though the measures in the UAE call for obtaining the mutual consent of the employee, already-vulnerable migrant workers have little power to negotiate, she says.

“Both countries have taken measures to close social venues and cancel or postpone events, so they’re clearly aware that coronavirus is a huge public health issue,” Archer adds. “That’s why it’s so alarming that there’s this distinction being made in the UAE with migrant workers.”

Developer Emaar Properties recently announced that it would suspend major projects in Dubai, while Qatar has directed private-sector employers to restrict working hours on construction sites and increase health and occupational safety measures to protect against the spread of the coronavirus. But seven of 14 construction companies surveyed by BHRRC on what steps they are taking to protect migrant workers did not respond, and none of those that did had adequate plans in place, the organisation said in a press release.

“The pandemic is really highlighting the need for reform on issues that have been repeatedly investigated by NGOs,” Archer says. Concerns have long been raised about abuse and exploitation of migrant labour in Gulf countries, where workers on projects such as Qatar’s 2022 World Cup facilities often live in cramped, unsanitary conditions on huge labour camps. A coronavirus infection in one of these camps would be “a ticking time bomb,” says Yuson.

Istanbul construction worker Özkan says that when concerns are raised about workplace issues, employers first stall for time, then dismiss those who dared to complain. “After that, you’re not going to be hired at any other worksite,” he says. Unions in Turkey have reported that workers are also being fired if they don’t sign declarations agreeing not to hold their employer responsible if they contract coronavirus while on the job.

“Blacklisting has been a problem in the UK as well, with workers afraid to raise issues due to the precarity of their job,” says Woodland of Unite. “They could get a tap on the shoulder and be told they’re not needed on site anymore. So there’s a possibility that health and safety issues are not being reported as a result.”

This story was originally published by Equal Times

Relatives of victims of workplace fatalities have been staging monthly vigils in central Istanbul for the past two years, asking for those responsible for the deaths to be identified and held accountable. Photo courtesy of Worker Families in Pursuit of Justice

By Jennifer Hattam
ISTANBUL, Jun 8 2014 (IPS)

The half-built Metsan Nexus complex towers over Istanbul’s Kartal district, just one of dozens of massive, high-end, multi-use development projects that are transforming the city’s skyline. On May 31, three men were working outside the building’s 16th floor when the construction scaffolding beneath them gave way, sending them plummeting to their deaths.

“The scaffolding does not collapse spontaneously, when it is erected properly. The workers do not crash on the ground, unless there is lack of safety precautions,” urban researcher Yaşar Adanalı wrote following the incident in a scathing post on his Reclaim Istanbul blog.

Worker safety issues in Turkey’s mining industry have been the subject of a national outcry following the mid-May deaths of at least 301 workers in one deadly incident in a coal mine in Soma, a town in western Turkey. But the country’s construction sector, which has been a key driver of Turkey’s economy as it boomed over much of the last decade, is no less perilous for workers.“[Turkey’s current] model of growth based on construction has triggered further dangers in terms of health and safety [due to] the speed of construction and a desire to reduce costs in a competitive environment” – activist Demet Ş. Dinler

“Construction workers [in Turkey] face hard and dangerous working conditions, with very long work hours, insufficient usage of protective equipment, and low salaries,” says Dr. Ercan Duman, an occupational physician and member of the Istanbul Occupational Health and Safety Council.

He identified “falls from height” as the leading cause of worker death on Turkish construction sites and “being struck by objects” as the top source of injuries.

According to the Istanbul-based advocacy group Worker Families in Pursuit of Justice, many fatal falls happen because proper mechanisms for attaching safety harnesses are never installed, forcing workers to clip and unclip themselves to the scaffolding as they move around the building.

Turkey’s construction sector accounted for 34.4 percent of worker deaths – 256 out of a total of 744, the most of any industry – in 2012, according to data from the national Social Security Institution; construction ranked third, after the metal industry and mining, in terms of workplace injuries.

The Turkish government has touted its progress in reducing workplace deaths. Speaking at the 7th International Conference on Occupational Health and Safety, which Istanbul hosted in early May, Labour and Social Security Minister Faruk Çelik pointed out that the Turkish workforce had grown by 128 percent between 2002 and 2012 and the number of new workplaces by 111 percent. “Despite these increases, the number of fatalities per 100,000 workers has decreased from 17 to 6,” Çelik said.

That number is still significantly higher than the EU15 average of 1.5 fatalities per 100,000 workers, and workers’ advocates in Turkey say death and injury rates are underreported due to the large number of unregistered workers – who make up an estimated 30 to 40 percent of the country’s total workforce – and the growing prevalence of subcontractors, who now account for more than 1 million workers.

“The widespread use of labour subcontracting [in Turkey] is one of the reasons for the decline in workplace safety, as subcontractors fail to provide the necessary training or equipment to workers and refuse to observe occupational health and safety measures in the workplace,” says Makbule Sahan, a Human and Trade Union Rights Officer at the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC), which ranked Turkey among the world’s worst countries for workers in its Global Rights Index 2014.

Thirteen subcontracting firms employ approximately 2,000 workers at the Maslak 1453 project site, another luxury multi-use development currently under construction in Istanbul. A worker employed by one of these subcontractors died there on May 27 after being hit on the head by a piece of iron. Fellow workers told Turkish press outlets that an ambulance was not standing by at the site as required, and that netting was not in place to catch falling objects [or persons].

Work has continued on the Maslak 1453 site despite a court order in April ruling that it should be halted over environmental concerns. The project’s owner, construction mogul Ali Ağaoğlu, was called in for questioning in December as part of a sweeping probe alleging widespread corruption in the building sector.

Ağaoğlu, who was released without charge, has become one of Turkey’s richest men over the country’s decade-long building boom, which has seen nearly 600 billion dollars invested in new construction, and the land area approved for building projects increase by almost fivefold, according to a Bloomberg report in January.

Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has repeatedly vowed to make the country one of the world’s top 10 economies by 2023. But that emphasis on rapid growth comes at a cost, according to researcher and activist Demet Ş. Dinler.

“[Turkey’s current] model of growth based on construction has triggered further dangers in terms of health and safety [due to] the speed of construction and a desire to reduce costs in a competitive environment,” says Dinler, a PhD candidate in the Department of Development Studies at the University of London.

“Health and safety is the responsibility of the main employer but the fragmented structure of the work process makes it difficult to check whether measures have been taken and apply to all workers on the site,” she adds.

“[And] main employers put pressure on subcontractors, who in turn put pressure on workers to complete the projects in a [shorter] period of time and with the lowest costs.”

Although Turkish labour law obliges employers to “provide for the work-related health and safety of workers,” Dinler says there is “little incentive for employers to take the necessary measures” due to the lack of enforcement mechanisms or serious legal sanctions for non-compliance.

Unions that might have pushed for stronger protections have seen their right to organise and strike limited further over the past decade and their membership numbers have dwindled by 40 percent.

Even when workplace deaths occur en masse, fault-finding investigations proceed slowly, according to the Worker Families in Pursuit of Justice. Members of the group have been holding monthly vigils in central Istanbul for two years, displaying photos of lost loved ones such as the 11 workers killed in March 2012 when a fire broke out among the dormitory tents where they were living on the construction site for the Marmara Park shopping mall in the city’s Esenyurt district.

According to Dinler, the use of tents as worker housing was prohibited after this deadly blaze, but a report by the Association of Construction Workers found them still in common use a year later, and frequently overcrowded and unsafe.

And although inspectors from the Labour and Social Security Ministry identified various safety violations at the Esenyurt site, including an improperly installed electrical system and a lack of emergency exits or fire-fighting equipment, no one has yet been held legally responsible.

An expert report presented at a new court hearing this week on the incident suggested that the workers bore “secondary responsibility” for their own deaths because they had stacked up foam mattresses on a bed next to the tent’s only doorway, impeding their exit when the fire broke out.

In times of political and financial crisis, the rights women thought they had secured decades ago are once again under attack. Credit: Karlos Zurutuza/IPS

By Jennifer Hattam
ISTANBUL, Apr 23 2012 (IPS)

The world’s recent financial and political upheavals have not been kind to women. In Libya’s Tripoli, female suicide rates increased tenfold during the revolution, while dismal job prospects have young Greek women abandoning their career aspirations, participants in a global forum on women’s rights said over the weekend. “Many people say this is a time for transformation and moving forward but we know from our work that it’s also a time of instability and uncertainty,” Jamaican activist Mariama Williams, a senior programme officer at the South Centre, said at the closing session of the 12th International Forum on Women’s Rights and Development in Istanbul. “In times of crisis, the solidarity we thought we had, the rights we thought were secured are again being questioned. Whatever is not convenient for growth is being questioned,” Williams said. Participants in the Apr. 19-22 forum, organised by the Association for Women’s Rights in Development (AWID) around the theme of transforming economic power, engaged in questioning, among other things, how economic growth and development should be measured and defined. “If we were to account for inequality, the average Human Development Index would be 23 percent less than it is currently,” Associate Administrator of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and former Vice-President of Costa Rica, Rebeca Grynspan, told the more than 2,000 attendees from 140 countries. From national budgets to financial-stimulus packages, economic policy typically fails to address women’s needs – or to recognise the contributions they make through their unpaid labour, participants said.

But forum organisers also expressed optimism that amid these challenges, the global climate is becoming more receptive to the demands for gender and social justice that activists have been making for decades. “What the financial crisis has provided is an (environment) where even mainstream actors have begun questioning the dominant economic model, (asking) whether there is a way to regulate the financial sector so it works in the service of everything else,” Lydia Alpízar Durán, executive director for AWID, told IPS. “Before, the system’s failures were only felt by the very poor. Now they’re starting to create a new poor, to hit the middle class, and people are beginning to wake up,” AWID Board President Lina Abou-Habib, the director of the Collective for Research and Training on Development-Action in Lebanon, told IPS. Durán cautioned, however, that women, especially women activists, face an elevated risk of backlash in many parts of the world. “One of the biggest challenges is increased violence and repression; those struggling for change are becoming targets of attacks,” she told IPS. One area of the conference venue was adorned with dozens of memorial photographs of women the movement has lost over the years – some dead of natural causes, many others mysteriously vanished or violently murdered. In another corner, the face of Galila Khamis Toto, a Sudanese activist from the Nuba mountain region, stared out from a poster, the text informing participants that she was supposed to be there among them but was instead being detained in inhumane conditions in her home country. During the forum, activists from Egypt, Tunisia, Syria, Morocco, Libya, and other countries in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) spoke about their ongoing battles to enshrine women’s rights into new constitutions and increase female participation in new political systems – while often facing renewed challenges to their personal freedoms. “Polygamy has been abolished for more than 50 years in Tunisia, but now we’re talking about it again. Traditional marriages, how women dress, abortion limitations, even female circumcision, which we never had before, are all being discussed,” said Ahlem Belhadj, the president of the Tunisian Association of Democratic Women.

“These are all things happening after the revolution.” Creating solidarity with women’s movements in the MENA region was one of the reasons AWID chose Istanbul as the 2012 location for its triennial forum, Durán said on the opening day of the event. “In the post-Arab-Spring phase, we need to be clear that what happens in this region has major implications for women around the world,” she told attendees. “Cultural relativism is growing and we cannot allow respect for cultural traditions to justify the violation of women’s rights.” Woman who participated in toppling Arab regimes sometimes think their countrywide struggles should take precedence over stronger pushes for women’s rights, speakers from the region admitted, adding that there can be no democracy without equality between men and women. Neither can there be “economic rights without also looking at bodily rights, at political rights,” Durán told IPS. “Women’s realities are determined by their ability to make decisions.” Tying all these different threads together into a cohesive movement is no small task. “What we see all around us at this conference, civil society, the women’s movement – that resource has to be really fostered and advanced,” U.N. Women Deputy Executive Director Lakshmi Puri told IPS.

“We’re trying to get resources directly into the hands of women who are working to bring changes about in their own areas.” At the AWID forum, those areas ranged from demilitarisation to the rights of domestic workers, religious fundamentalism to climate change, topics covered in the more than 200 different sessions on the conference program. Participants’ diverse interests were also represented in the hallways of the Haliç Conference Centre, where indigenous crafts, black-and-white nude portraits of Chilean transsexuals, and Egyptian graffiti art were all on display. The coming together of what one speaker called “the most diverse group of women outside the U.N.” is the most important outcome of the forum, Abou-Habib told IPS. “The idea of the ‘one percent’ is such a powerful one because the rest of us let it happen. We give them that power by not resisting,” she said. “There is a strong body of critical feminist economic analysis but we need to take it out of the journals and the classrooms and onto the streets,” Radhika Balakrishnan, the executive director of the Centre for Women’s Global Leadership, said at the forum’s closing session. Following her remarks, attendees did just that, massing in Istanbul’s central Taksim Square for a protest march in solidarity with their Turkish counterparts.

Worldwide, women are largely responsible for managing family budgets, controlling 65 percent of global spending. But, women’s needs are often ignored when it comes to government budgeting, delegates at an international meet in Turkey’s largest city observed.

Over the last 10 years, there has been a growing movement to monitor national, regional, and local budgets and demand changes to allocation priorities to give women their due.

More than 100 countries from Norway to Tanzania engage in some kind of gender-responsive budgeting. Yet, the concept is facing new challenges due to the global economic crisis.

“Investing in gender equality is often just seen as a matter of providing money for the gender ministry,” Lakshmi Puri, executive director of United Nations Women, told IPS at the 12th International Forum on Women’s Rights and Development.

The Apr. 19-22 forum, organised by the Association for Women’s Rights in Development, has been described as a process with a multiplier effect for local and national initiatives as well as strategies at the global level.

Impacts on women of seemingly “gender-neutral” budget investments in transportation, agriculture, education or infrastructure need to get attention, said Puri.

Budget decisions can determine whether a woman in a village has to spend hours each day gathering fuel; if her children can attend a free after-school programme; if she has to pay for private care or whether the neighbourhood bus stop is well-lit enough for her to feel safe.

“You can work hard, you can get laws passed to protect women’s rights, laws passed to improve women’s lives, but if no budget has been allocated for them, they’re not going to be implemented,” Diane Elson, the chair of the U.K. Women’s Budget Group, told IPS.

“Government budgets connect very directly with the everyday lives of women – the taxes they pay and the services they do or do not receive,” Elson said.

Those services are diminishing in both developed and developing countries as financial crises prompt “austerity” cuts, whether initiated by a national government or imposed by an outside institution such as the World Bank or IMF.

“When countries cut expenditures, it’s usually bad for women,” Elson told IPS.

“The powerful are able to protect themselves. The military budget doesn’t get cut. Services that help big business don’t get cut.

“What do get cut are the public-sector jobs women often hold, the services they rely on while caring for children and the elderly, even the hospital-provided bedclothes and bandages – that women then have to procure for ailing family members,” Elson said.

So-called “stimulus” or “economic recovery” measures often focus on reducing corporate taxes or decimating the tax base that provides social services, said Kathleen Lahey, a law professor at Queen’s University, Canada.

Declining tax revenues and individual governments’ shrinking roles in the modern globalised economy led some critics to ask if gender budgeting is still a meaningful tool.

“When you have limited funds is when you really need to look at equality,” observed Mary Rusimbi, executive director of Women Fund Tanzania.

In some cases, the world’s fiscal woes seem to have opened up more space for positive reform. “In Iceland, the government that presided over the financial collapse has been thrown out,” Elson said, noting that women now hold powerful posts as prime minister and finance minister in the new administration.

“Iceland had a referendum on whether the government should take on the liabilities of the banks and the people said no,” Elson added. “More democracy and transparency are being demanded.”

The need to “go deep down into the data” to create gender-responsive budgets “increases transparency and accountability because you have to know where the money goes,” Rusimbi told IPS. “It also raises issues of corruption that haven’t been talked about before.”

Equitable governance is good governance, said Zohra Khan of U.N. Women, which supports gender- budgeting initiatives in 55 countries, including in Mozambique where the group started its work by holding meetings and asking women what they needed.

“At first the men were furious, but we showed them how this kind of budgeting can help them get water closer to their homes and maternity wards built in their neighbourhoods – things that benefit the whole community – and the men got behind it,” Khan told IPS. “This is not about taking something away from men, this is about how local governments can be made more effective.”

The success of such initiatives has pitfalls. Unscrupulous or simply out-of-touch governments may seek a share of international funding for gender equality or attempt to use the concept to burnish their own credentials.

In the Philippines, officials have tried to count any activity in which women participated, including ballroom dancing classes, as “gender development activities,” while in Hungary, equality funds from the European Union were spent to promote anti-abortion campaigns, according to forum participants.

Well-meaning donor organisations can also create problems by just “offering to give a government money to train officials and produce some handouts,” Elson told IPS.

“It’s very different for a government to have the political will to really change how it allocates resources, than it is for it to have the will to take UNDP money for a three-year project,” as happened with an unsuccessful effort in Pakistan.

A better approach is the one taken in Mexico City, where women’s rights activists trained municipal officials and parliamentarians in gender-responsive budgeting; the government has now been carrying out the work on its own for six years.

“If it’s not rooted in what people want, in what women’s groups are advocating for, it can be very short-lived,” Elson said.

Engagement with grassroots women’s groups not only helps improve the success rate of gender- budgeting initiatives, it also provides a way for activists to engage more deeply with economic policies that may previously have seemed distant from their work on poverty, healthcare, education, or other issues.

“It’s very important for us to demystify the budget,” said Maria Victoria Raquiza from Social Watch Philippines. “At the end of the day, that’s our money.”