CHITTAGONG, Bangladesh, Sept. 2, 2007
The Ship Breakers Of Bangladesh
Ship Breaking Industry Arrived In Bangladesh By Accident, Literally
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Play CBS Video Video The Ship Breakers
In Full: Working for barely a dollar a day with little but their bare hands, the ship breakers of Bangladesh strip old ships in one of the world's most dangerous jobs. Bob Simon reports.
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Photo Essay The Ship Breakers See Cape Town-based photographer Mark Lewis' images of the ship breakers at Chittagong, Bangladesh.
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Fast Facts Bangladesh Learn about the people, economy and history.
Now and then 60 Minutes take viewers to places they’ve never been to before. They are exotic places, the stuff of dreams. This is a story about one of those places. But as Bob Simon reports, the ship breaking beaches of Bangladesh belong more in a nightmare.
We all know how ships are born, how majestic vessels are nudged into the ocean with a bottle of champagne. But few of us know how they die. And hundreds of ships meet their death every year. From five-star ocean liners, to grubby freighters, literally dumped with all their steel, their asbestos, their toxins on the beaches of some the poorest countries in the world, countries like Bangladesh.
You can’t really believe how bad it is here, until you see it. It could be as close as you’ll get to hell on earth, with the smoke, the fumes, and the heat. The men who labor here are the wretched of the earth, doing dirty, dangerous work, for little more than $1 a day.
It’s not much of a final resting place, this desolate beach near the city of Chittagong on the Bay of Bengal. Ships are lined up here as at any port, but they’ll never leave. Instead, they will be dissected, bolt by bolt, rivet by rivet, every piece of metal destined for the furnaces to be melted down and fashioned into steel rods. The ships don’t die easily - they are built to float, not to be ripped apart, spilling toxins, oil and sludge into the surrounding seas.
The men who work here are dwarfed by the ships they are destroying. And they dissect the ships by hand. The most sophisticated technology on the beach is a blowtorch. The men carry metal plates, each weighing more than a ton from the shoreline to waiting trucks, walking in step like pallbearers, or like members of a chain gang. They paint images of where they would like to be on the trucks - pictures of paradise far from this wasteland.
And when night falls, the work continues and the beach becomes an inferno of smoke and flames and filth.
This industry, which employs thousands and supplies Bangladesh with almost all its steel, began with an accident - a cyclone to be precise. In 1965, a violent storm left a giant cargo ship beached on what was then a pristine coastline. It didn’t take long before people began ripping the ship apart. They took everything and businessmen took note - perhaps they didn’t need a storm to bring ships onto this beach here.
Mohammed Mohsin’s family has become extremely wealthy bringing ships onto these beaches. He pays millions of dollars for each ship and makes his profit from the steel he sells. The name of his company is PHP, which stands for Peace, Happiness and Prosperity.
His latest acquisition is a ship weighing in at 4,000 tons but Mohsin tells Simon that's small by comparison to other vessels that have been gutted on the beaches. They have handled ships as large as 68,000 tons.
This the first time Mohsin has seen the 4,000 ton ship close up. In fact buying a ship is not at all like buying a car. He didn’t even need to see a picture before he bought it for $14 million. All he needed to know was its weight and how much the owners were charging for each ton of steel.
One of the single most valuable parts of the ship is the propeller. The "small" ships propeller is worth around $35,000 alone, Mohsin estimates.
It may be a small ship to Mohsin, but getting onto it from the beach is still a bit delicate.
Mohsin's ships don't have seafaring captains anymore - he is the captain now of dying ships and the captain of one of the largest of 30 shipyards on this 10-mile stretch of beach. Some 100 ships are ripped apart on the beach each year, most of them from the west.
"It is the west’s garbage dump," says Roland Buerk, who lives in Bangladesh. He spent a year in these yards, writing a book about the industry. 60 Minutes hired him to guide Simon through the tangled world of shipbreaking.
To do the same work in America or England would be very expensive.
"It would be because in Europe and America when they do this, they do it in dry docks," Buerk explains. "So in actual fact, the owners of these ships are selling them to the yard owners here to break up. If they had to do it in America, they’d have to pay for that process to be carried out. So you see it makes real economic sense to do it here."
"So old, out-dated ships that were previously a liability, are now an asset," Simon remarks.
"Exactly," Buerk agrees. "And that's why they end up on these shores."
Produced By Michael Gavshon
©MMVI, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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See all 31 Commentshttp://www.globalgayz.com/BDChittagongShipBreakingYard/index.html
But your slant is obviously in the direction of ''look at these poor downtrodden slaves''. These are not ''miserable'' people. Look closely at their faces and you don''t see the tension and anxiety of American corporate workers! They are workers who know nothing else and don''t particularly want anything else. They work 7AM to 11PM with a two hour mid-day break, get paid a low but reliable income; their kids go to school (I saw no child workers in the yard; upper teens yes, children no)--and many somewhat cheerful faces--not necessarily happy, but not miserable. They work with their friends; all feel equal. They have little and little to worry about.
The conditions are daunting but not wholly, the pace is calm and there are numerous periods of waiting during the day as the ship parts are taken apart.
It is not the horror show you portray. It''s dirty and rough but far from hell.
Yes, caring for the welfare of others. How sad.
You could be stripping ships.
Yet again you provide only the side of the story that attacks the greatest philosophy the world will ever know - Capitalism! Shame on you CBS, to propagate the Marxist view point to your American Capitalist audience! We too had child labor. We too had poor working conditions. We too had a low starting point. But it was the Capitalists, the entrepreneurs that saw the potential for the creation of wealth and risked everything to make a better world for themselves and as a byproduct, raise the standard of living for all of us!
It was President Kennedy that said, "...a rising tide lifts all boats". He was right then and now.
Yet again you provide only the side of the story that attacks the greatest philosophy the world will ever know - Capitalism! Shame on you CBS, to propagate the Marxist view point to your American Capitalist audience! We too had child labor. We too had poor working conditions. We too had a low starting point. But it was the Capitalists, the entrepreneurs that saw the potential for the creation of wealth and risked everything to make a better world for themselves and as a byproduct, raise the standard of living for all of us!
It was President Kennedy that said, "...a rising tide lifts all boats". He was right then and now.
Doug From Eagan
Ayn Rand Objectivist/Capitalist/American
ABeckmann
ABeckmann, Raleigh,NC
I wish I could travel there to experience their life first hand.
I'd love to talk to people further on this topic...message me on myspace, www.myspace.com/coreyjohn
I have met many Bangladeshi people and I can tell you that these people work so hard and are so very generous! They are the poorest country in the world and I know that they will give me the shirt off there back when I go there. (Even if it is there only shirt, and they will happily give it to me.) It saddens me so much to know that there are millions of these wonderful people that are put in such danger just to survive.
Wouldn't it be great if we sent all that wasted money spent on campaign adds over to Bangladesh. Do you have any idea what they would do with that money. The joy that money would bring. What a waste!!!! It infuriates me to see how we waste money, food, everything in this country.
These are real people over there! Kind, giving people! Is there nothing we can do to help??
Try to think about what they go through. Educate other Americans. Do not judge immigrants who come here. They just want a better life! They want the American DREAM!
Thank you!
If this were the case in Bangladesh, no one would be working because no entity would stay in business. If you think ship breaking is a tragedy, you should learn how much teachers make there. In some cases, they don't get paid at all. Women working in the garment industry are also underpaid and work in terrible conditions.
But Bangladesh must find reasonable alternatives for employment before they shut these entities down for not meeting minimum wage requirements. You certainly can't shut down an education system all together. And the garment factories have empowered the thousands of women working there. I think by implying that these measures SHOULD be taken--by the way, there are a lot of things the Bangladeshi government SHOULD do--she really meant "should" but "can't," at least not at the current moment.
Craig
You didn't produce any evidence for that claim.
You complain that the West is exploiting them when the West has nothing to do with these operations. You claim that Bangledash gains no advantage--tell that to the workers who otherwise wouldn't have a job.
"cutting torch"/"blow torch"
I think everyone gets the idea of what 60 minutes was talking about...I still occasionally refer to my refrigerator as an ice-box -- no one yet has had to pull out a dictionary to figure out what I'm talking about.
And, as primitive as these operations are - maybe they are using blow-torches.
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