Al-Ahram Weekly 3 - 9 February 2000 Issue No. 467
Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875

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'A very normal incident'

By Fatemah Farag

It was around one o'clock on the morning of 16 January that an oven at a foundry factory in Helwan exploded after a faulty water pipe leaked water into two tons of molten iron, boiling at a temperature of over 4,000 degrees.

"The red hot metal surged up to the height of a three story building, immediately incinerating a man on top of the crane working the oven and then surging to engulf all those on the platform," said one factory worker who preferred to remain anonymous. Three men were killed immediately and two others died a couple of days later as a result of their burns. "If the accident had happened during a day shift many more would have died," added the worker.

"This is a very normal incident," claimed Abdel-Rahman Kheir, head of a committee at the General Federation of Trade Unions (GFTU).

"Accidents like this are common to this type of industry and industrial safety precautions can do nothing to stop them from happening."

The 3,000 factory workers beg to differ. During a meeting with Minister of Manpower and Training Ahmed El-Amawy, who arrived at the site at eight the following morning, workers complained that the head of the production section had been informed by the floor engineer that the oven was not safe and should be shut down a week before the accident took place. "Despite the warning, the head of the section insisted that the oven function. This is in addition to the fact that most ovens have not been upgraded since the sixties and are very rarely subject to maintenance," explained an administrator at the factory who also preferred to remain anonymous. This, in a factory which melts scrap metal, preparing it for use in other industries.

"Workers told El-Amawy they wanted the head of the company and the head of the production section to be removed from their posts, that compensations to the victim's families be increased from LE3,000 to LE35,000 [the sum being offered for early retirement] and that the annual incentives system be adjusted to affect a reasonable increase," recounted an eye-witness to the meeting.

The minister promised to look into the matter but after a week workers at the factory had heard nothing; a demonstration took place and the factory was shut down for one week.

"Work at the factory resumed last Saturday. We understand that it is normal that people's nerves should be a bit shaky after such an accident, especially given that the factory has a history of not compensating workers properly for work related injuries," GFTU's Kheir told Al-Ahram Weekly . "However, although compensation for death usually does not exceed LE5,000, I can confirm that the families involved will receive LE35,000 after inheritance papers are finalised. Also, the minister has promised to solve the problem of work related injury compensation at the factory."

Action cannot be taken too soon as far as workers are concerned. "People work under very harsh conditions. There is the high temperature as well as the fumes produced by the molten metal," explained the administrator. A list of common complaints includes kidney and liver failure, respiratory diseases and various cancers. Workers recounted an event which took place only a few months ago, when a colleague caught fire. Allegedly, none of the company ambulances worked and by the time he got to the hospital it was too late.

Other complaints involve the compensation system in general. "When we go to the committees responsible for evaluating our illnesses we find that officials are prone to find us, the victims, guilty," said the worker.

This is not a unique complaint to this factory. The general situation is explained by an environmental activist. "A worker will go to the committee with asthma, for example, and they will tell him the reason is that his house is not properly ventilated, when it is far more likely that his asthma is a result of working in a textile factory without a protective mask," explained Ashraf Ibrahim, coordinator of the Environment and Development Programme at the Association for Health and Environment Development (AHED).

Several months ago AHED began a campaign calling on relevant authorities, namely the minister of manpower and training, to take measures to improve industrial safety standards. "Since we began our campaign we have been running around trying to collect basic information which has proven in itself difficult," added Ibrahim.

"In general we believe that the Public Business Sector is the more dangerous because many factories use old technologies that have rarely been upgraded. That is not to say, however, that the private sector offers much safer working conditions," says Karam Saber, director of the Land Centre for Human Rights, which is involved in several injury related court cases.

In cases of work related injuries, workers submit their complaint to the Committee for Investigating Work Related Injury which compiles a report and sends the worker to the Social Insurance and Labour Office to complete procedures. Compensations for injury are covered by Social Insurance Law 79/1975. At this point, there is a gradation system which categorises the harm inflicted at between five to 100 per cent, each percentage point correlating a specific compensation plan.

"These bodies are for the most part ineffective, not only because of corruption, but also because of a lack of experience and inadequate resources to facilitate proper monitoring," complained Saber. "The law," he insists, "is also in need of amendment. For example, there is a clause under which plants with less that 50 workers do not have to have a committee for industrial safety despite the fact that smaller workshops tend to have very high accident rates."

Further, Ibrahim points out that if the report prepared initially does not prove the illness or injury is work related, workers are only entitled to medical insurance.

For its part, GFTU has called upon the government to increase the amounts paid as compensation in the case of injury, a request which is still being considered.

In the meantime, the three shifts that work the foundry factory 24 hours a day are back on schedule.

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