Comment by cconcepts | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cconcepts | Hacker News Reader

There is a lot not shown in this article. Ship breaking is extremely dangerous and thrives in these parts of the world because you don't need to provide safety equipment or procedures and when one of your employees gets killed/maimed in the process there is someone else eager to take his place and no lawsuit from the deceased's uneducated family.

If one country tightened controls on ship breaking then, by the laws of capitalism, the work would just go to the next country with the lowest labour costs who has less overheads so can pay more to buy the ship from its owners in the first place.

Global(ish) controls mean temporary disruption to the status quo but hopefully eventual improvement of working conditions for the people doing the grunt work at the bottom.

Obviously China can't keep producing dirt cheap steel forever so ship breaking will bounce back, hopefully with slightly less misery for its employees.

I'm not going to fully defend the practice but it's more complicated than you make out. These are societies that don't have natural resources in many cases. For a country like Bangladesh this is a source of Steel akin to an iron mine.the point is as long as we live in nation states with extraordinary in equality based on natural resources we will never avoid these kind of problems we can just put them under the rug and encouragement labor to do other things or do nothing at all and flounder in poverty. again it is not pretty and a brutal reality but I also have some level of respect for entrepreneurs or willing to deal with the situation that they have and try and turn it into something more.

remember that this is the country with half the population of the United States that's essentially locked into a place like Louisiana that doesn't control its own River resources

"Obviously China can't keep producing dirt cheap steel forever" - alternatively, perhaps they continue to drop the price of steel even lower.

The possibility of that is why people aren't purchasing these large ships to wait for the price of steel to rise.

Agreed - I'm sure they can drop the price of steel in the short term. But when they're eventually forced to go back to paying Australians $100/hour to dig the ore out of the ground for them, the economic prospects of pulling ships apart for recyclable steel will improve.

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