Fire fighters from Working on Fire on fire line at recent Muizenberg fires. Credit: IPS-WoF1

By Munyaradzi Makoni
CAPE TOWN, South Africa, Jan 20 2016 (IPS)

Nolukhanyo Babalaza finished her final year of high school and received her diploma in 2000, but this was not an immediate passport to a good life. She was frustrated to see some people making it while she struggled to afford basic things like everyday food.

“It gives one negative thoughts. One ends up doing things you regret,” she said.

A breakthrough came three years later. Babalaza became a fire fighter. She joined the South Africa’s Department of Environmental Affair’s Working on Fire Programme (WoF).

Fires are considered a persistent problem in South Africa, a merciless destroyer of life, property and environment.

Either in the dry summer months in the Western Cape, or in the dry winter months in the rest of the country, wildland fires are started by lightning or, in mountainous regions, by falling rocks or accidentaly from careless individuals. Millions of properties are lost annually. Lives and the environment are wasted.

Good things have, however, emerged from this perennial problem.

South Africa’s Department of Environmental Affair’s Working on Fire Programme started in 2003 has become a means to fight unemployment and poverty.

Youths have been drawn from the ranks of the unemployed and poor.

“These young people are trained to help fight unwanted veld and forest fires across the country and often they use their skills as a stepping stone into the formal job market,” says Linton Rensburg, WoF National Communications Manager.

The youths are trained as drivers, brush cutters, dispatchers, helicopter safety leaders and in environmental education. It isn’t big money but it offers a gateway to the future.

The jobless rate in South Africa increased to 25.5 per cent in the third quarter of 2015 from 25 per cent in the previous period, according to Trading Economics. The unemployment rate rose 3.6 per cent while employment went up 1.1 per cent and more people joined the labour force. The unemployment rate in South Africa averaged 25.27 per cent from 2000 until 2015, reaching an all time high of 31.20 per cent in the first quarter of 2003 and a record low of 21.50 per cent in the fourth quarter of 2008. The unemployment rate data in South Africa is reported by Statistics South Africa.

Fire employees

Babalaza has grown with the programme. From her start as an ordinary fire fighter she became a crew leader, and then moved to become an administration assistant. Today she is a finance control officer in the programme in the Western Cape.

She admits the programme has greatly improved her life.

“Things are much better. I am able to at least support my family and I can pay my bills,” she said.

Babalaza’s story is one of many involved in the programme, Rensburg told IPS.

“Thousands of young people first found meaningful work opportunities in the programme and later on through the training and skills development aspects of WoF they were able to progress from being a fire fighter earning a stipend to being a salaried employee in WoF,” he said.

Take Justine Lekalakala’s story, for instance. Lekalakala, a former fire fighter at the Dinokeng Base in Hammanskraal North of Pretoria, now works in the South African National Defence Force.

“I was able to use the stipend I earned at WoF to apply for other jobs and educate myself by doing computer courses. It was easier for me to be absorbed into the military as I had the self-discipline and fitness which I acquired in WoF,” he said.

Christalene De Kella was clueless about what she wanted out of life after completing her secondary school in 2004. She grabbed the opportunity to become a fire fighter in her hometown, Uniondale. The single mother of a seven-year old daughter, she has since established a career path for development.

Starting as an entry level fire fighter, she attended several intensive fire management training courses and even participated in opening a new base. In 2005 she was promoted to a stock control officer for WoF.

In 2009 Kella became the media and community liaison officer in the Southern Cape Region and in 2013 she was given the opportunity of becoming a video journalist for the WoF video unit.

“Working on Fire has had a positive impact on my life,” she said, adding she currently travels across the country to interview and record stories for the WoF TV news as featured on You Tube.

The progression could not be sweeter for two former fire fighters who started two-year training in May last year to become spotter pilots at the Kishugu Aviation Academy in Mbombela, Mpumalanga.

Themba Maebela, 27, from Mpumalanga and Siyabonga Varasha, 26, from the Eastern Cape are employed as helicopter personal assistants.

“It was like I was dreaming, my family did not believe me when I told them that I will train to become a pilot,” said Maebela, who joined working for the fire unit in 2010.

South African youth who do not have this necessary diploma must excel in their work and employers will then recognise their talents and skills, he advised.

As Naome Nkoana patrols the streets as a metro police officer in Pretoria. She recalls how participation in the WoF programme, where she underwent advanced driver training in Nelspruit, helped her to not only pass the metro police fitness tests, but her advanced driving skills and made it easier to become a metro police officer.

Rensburg says since the Working on Fire Programme started, it has changed the lives of the 5,000 participants and indirectly benefited 25,000 other dependents.

A 2012 Social Impact Study on participants said that the training presented by WoF boosted beneficiaries’ knowledge and self-worth.

“Through the WoF programme, they were able to get to know their own weaknesses and strengths better,” the study concludes.

(End)

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.

Women join the struggle to board a bus near Hyderabad in India. Travelling by public transport presents a constant danger to women. Credit: Stella Paul/IPS.

By Stella Paul
HYDERABAD, India, Feb 28 2014 (IPS)

It was 8.45 pm, and a 22-year-old woman was looking for a cab to go home after a trip to a city mall in India’s Hyderabad city. A cab arrived, and the unsuspecting computer engineer got in, little knowing she was stepping into a trap.

Within minutes the driver, accompanied by another man, locked the door and sped towards a forest on the outskirts of the city. The men tied her hands and raped her for four hours. Then they dropped her at her place and left after threatening to hurt her family if she reported the crime late last year.“Our study shows that women do not trust the police well enough to call for help."

Nearly 25,000 rapes took place in India in 2012, according to the National Crime Records Bureau. About half of these sexual assaults took place in buses, taxis and three-wheeler autorickshaws. A month before the engineer was raped in Hyderabad, a court had sentenced four men to death for raping and murdering a 23-year-old woman in New Delhi, on Dec. 16, 2012.

A judicial committee assigned to recommend ways to curb violence against women in India suggested improvements in public transport vehicles after the Delhi incident.

Thirteen months and many more rapes later, the Indian government devised a plan in January to implement some of those recommendations. With an initial fund of 15 million dollars, the plan includes installing GPS trackers, closed circuit TV (CCTV) cameras and emergency phone call facilities in all public transport vehicles in 32 cities that have a population of one million or more.

According to the Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs (CCEA), the government proposes to “establish a unified system at the national level and state level in 32 cities of the country with a population of one million or more, over a period of two years.” The plan has been “formulated with the purpose of improving safety and protection of women from violence by using information technology.”

The government move is seen by many as a constructive step.

“This could be the first step towards making roads more secure for women,” Kirthi Jayakumar, a Chennai-based lawyer and founder of Red Elephant, a non-profit organisation raising awareness against gender violence, tells IPS. “It will benefit women in two ways – making their spaces safer and also making more jobs available for women – as surveillance will require a workforce in its own right.”

Jayakumar suggests that the government must create a strong workforce studying video feeds from these cameras.

Defunct surveillance gadgets and poor police vigilance has always been a security concern in India – one reason why some women’s rights activists are sceptical about the road safety scheme.

Rapid population growth and expansion of cities pose a big obstacle to the success of any vigilance and surveillance mechanism, says A.L. Sharada, programme director at Population First, one of the main partners of the United Nations Population Fund in India. Unless the government regulates urban development, violence against women on roads is unlikely to come down, she says.

“Road safety is not about making a few vehicles smart,” Sharada tells IPS. “It’s about making roads safe for women to go out at any time of day or night with confidence. To do that we need better governance, better policing and also a good community-based support system for women. Without these, you can’t change the scenario.”

Sharada cites the example of Mumbai, that has seen a spate of sexual assaults against women on the road of late. “The government has installed CCTVs at most crossroads. But most of these cameras are either defunct or of poor quality. Also, the police patrolling is so inadequate that women are molested and attacked even in broad daylight. Where is the mechanism to ensure that the gadgets are in working condition?”

Some also point to a “gaping hole” in the road safety plan such as the exclusion of trains, used by millions of women every month. There are widespread reports of women being molested, raped and even murdered on trains.

A recent victim was a 23-year-old engineer from Machlipatnam, a city 340 km from Hyderabad. On Jan. 16 her body was found by a road outside Mumbai where she worked for a leading software firm. She had reportedly boarded a train from Hyderabad to Mumbai 12 days earlier.

“Whether in city trains or metros, there are so many instances of horrific violence against women,” says Sandhya Pushppandit, a documentary filmmaker and activist at Akshara, a Mumbai-based NGO. In 2008, Akshara had co-launched India’s first emergency helpline for victims of gender violence aiming to provide an ambulance within 10 minutes of a call.

“But our trains have no helplines and emergency call buttons. One can pull a chain and bring the train to a halt, but this in itself doesn’t guarantee either the victim’s safety or the arrest of the criminal. Besides, in a small public transport vehicle like the auto-rickshaw, the emergency call button might well be deactivated by the rapist,” Pushppandit tells IPS.

One solution, says Anu Maheshwari of Young Leaders Think Tank, a New Delhi-based youth policy research group, is to address the factors that trigger fear among women on the move.

Maheshwari shares some insights from a recent survey that the think tank undertook in 18 Indian states: “From the data we collected, 90 percent of sexual assaults on public transport happen in poorly lit areas. In most cases, the driver of the public transport vehicle violates traffic rules such as jumping the signal or allowing more passengers than the law permits.

“Our study shows that women do not trust the police well enough to call for help. So improving road infrastructure, strict implementation of traffic laws, trust building and sensitisation of the police force have to be an integral part of any road safety scheme.”

But, says Sharada, while laws can only lay down rules, they can’t change mindsets. “To achieve the latter should be a matter of immediate concern for our thinkers.”