Consumers of products that require hazardous work are often told that workers in that field are well paid, very well paid, for their labours. The tradeoff for known dangerous working conditions is a big paycheque, comfortable pensions, benefits for families when people die in accidents. These jobs, consumers are informed, are critically necessary, and workers are treated with the respect and sensitivity they deserve. To do anything else would be unreasonable, would be disrespectful, would create unacceptably hazardous situations.
Which is why it may surprise some consumers to learn that these dangerous jobs often don’t come with good pay, and come with unnecessarily hazardous working conditions. Take, for example, crab fishing. Crab crews at the start of the Dungeness season asked for better pay to compensate them for hazardous work in an extremely harsh environment. The Pacific in winter is not a pleasant place to be, and crews do endanger themselves to collect crab for people to merrily crack at butter-drenched feasts. Crews may also be trapped, unable to go out, when the weather is too bad to move, which means they lose income in storms. Two good reasons to provide good compensation, especially since they may have trouble working during the rest of the year.
The industry, of course, wanted nothing to do with this, and warned consumers that caving in to demands for fair wages would result in extremely high crab prices. Crab is already a fairly expensive food item, and this campaign was designed to encourage consumers to balk, to turn on fishing crews for asking for fair wages and a better chance at being able to save money and make lives for themselves. Some of the best Dungeness ports, after all, are in areas with a high cost of living, which requires members of crews to pour more and more funds each year into supporting themselves so they can go out.
Or oil workers—again, the general perception is that this is a high-paid population with lots of great benefits. Crew members on the Deepwater Horizon, however, sparked an argument when BP wanted to be as meagre as possible with death benefits, not even providing enough money for surviving family members to have a reasonable chance at paying for their funerals. So much for high pay and ridiculous benefits that allow people to live like kings, eh?
Loggers, fishers, miners, other people in dangerous occupations, may have an opportunity to access good salaries and reasonable benefits, especially when backed by a strong union. But they may not, and they may have to deal with extremely dangerous working conditions. Mines in the US are rife with safety violations, as illustrated by the dramatic disaster at a Massey Energy-run facility where, it’s clear, basic safety measures that could have saved lives weren’t in place because the mine’s owners felt they were too expensive, and thus shouldn’t be installed. Saving lives, in that metric, was more expensive than dealing with the fallout from a potentially serious mine disaster, so the company flirted with fate, and lost.
These workers are putting their lives on the line to provide goods and services, to power industries throughout the US, and many are well aware that their working conditions are not as safe as they could be, or as they should be. They’re also forced between a rock and a hard place. Reporting can expose people to retaliation, even with whistleblower protections, or might result in a facility closure, which would leave people without jobs. Asking on the job for safety might result in being labeled a troublemaker and a nuisance, which means fewer assignments and chances in the future. Working with workers to organise can be dangerous.
And switching careers may not be a ready option. In communities where fishing is a viable way to make a living, for example, there may be few alternatives. Someone who wants to stop fishing has no options; years of experience and training on fishing boats suits that person to work in fishing. Possibly a transition into sports fishing or whale watching, but this requires capital to buy a boat or willingness to join another crew, which isn’t always available. As for land-based jobs, they may be few and far between, and there may be no time to go through training in an attempt to develop a second career. So crew members stay with a boat, because the alternative is unpleasant to contemplate.
And consumers continue to use items produced by people who labour in danger, and may receive inadequate pay and working conditions. There are ways to address this. Consumers could be more aware, could look up reports on safety violations, could ask companies about their safety records, could provide evidence that they have a genuine interest in working conditions and company standards. They could make their preference for items produced in safe, healthy environments clear. This might have a side benefit for consumers themselves, not just workers; dangerous factories, for example, create hazards in the environment around them, too.
Consumers could also indicate that they are interested in the wages made by the people who produce their goods, and the kinds of benefits they access. Instead of accepting a price for crab at the market and calling it good, they could ask how much the store knows about the conditions for the crew and how much money they make. This sends a signal to retailers that consumers are concerned about these things and take an active interest. That consumers might find products more appealing if they were definitely produced in safe conditions by people making fair wages.
Better certification, too, could be a mechanism for increasing awareness and improving conditions. Fair Trade certification is used for products like chocolate and coffee; why not have a similar system for coal? Lumber? Fish? Why not inspect domestic working conditions and report on them as well as tackling sweatshops, slave labour, and child labour overseas?
