Much of the inexpensive jewelry in US
malls features polished “agate” stones, which are leaving a trail
of death in India.
By Jason Overdorf
(GlobalPost - March 21, 2013)
KHAMBHAT, India — A few years ago,
when occupational safety activists came to Hydersha Diwan's village
here, 300 miles north of Mumbai, he drove them away with threats and
bluster.
Today, he wishes that he'd listened.
Doctors say the 50-year-old is dying of
silicosis, a wasting lung disease that he contracted inhaling deadly
silica dust as a grinder of agates — colorful, semi-precious stones
exported to the United
States and other Western countries, and commonly used in
silver and brass jewelry, rosary beads and home decorations.
“I was a supervisor for a grinding
and polishing unit for 10 years or so,” says Diwan. “But when the
workers stopped coming, I did the grinding myself for three or four
years.”
Once a proud, muscular man, Diwan is
hollow-eyed and emaciated, unable to sleep and hardly able to eat
because of a relentless, hacking cough.
Throughout a GlobalPost interview with
his family members, he slumps on the stoop of his home and coughs.
The sound of it is horrible: a dry, futile rasp that yields no
relief. It goes on and on, forcing a listener to imagine the sand
that fills his lungs. Finally, he reels forward and spits a long,
viscous trail of saliva onto the pavement, making it clear why he has
positioned himself on the edge of the stoop.
Then the coughing overcomes him again.
Some may call it poetic justice, given
Diwan’s hostile reaction to the occupational safety activists.
Diwan's workers “stopped coming”
when the deaths of friends of co-workers made it impossible to deny
that their jobs were killing them. Some failed to show up because
they were dying themselves.
But silicosis is a fate too horrible to
wish on anyone, and Diwan only bears a small portion of the blame for
the disease that, mercifully, took his life as well, 10 days after he
met with GlobalPost.
Agates at a mall near you
An opaque, semi-precious stone, an
agate would be familiar to almost any American, even if the mineral’s
name isn’t.
Agates vary in color from bright blue
to glowing amber and deep black. They yield beautiful striped
patterns when cut and polished. In addition to jewelry and rosary
beads, they are used for decorative eggs, hearts and spheres and the
like. New Age merchants market them as having the power to protect
from stress, stomach pain, “energy drains” and even bad dreams.
“This is the stone that everyone should have,” asserts one web
retailer.
But the stone's silica content means
that grinders and polishers are highly susceptible to silicosis, or
“grinder's asthma” — an incurable, tuberculosis-like
occupational disease.
That's especially true in India, where agate
workers typically earn less than a dollar a day, and exploitative
employment conditions prevent them from adopting even basic safety
measures.
According to investigations by the
Vadodara-based People's
Training and Research Center(PTRC) and the
Ahmedabad-based National
Institute of Occupational Health (NIOH), agate grinding and
polishing here ranks among the world’s most dangerous work.
As many
as a third of Khambhat agate workers develop silicosis.
Since the grinding and polishing work
takes place in sheds and empty lots located in residential areas, it
also claims one out of ten of the workers’ children and family
members, who breathe the same deadly air.
Because of India's disastrous
preference for tiny, unregulated sweatshops over formal sector
industries, there's no visible target like Foxconn to shoulder the
blame — even though Khambhat exports hundreds of thousands of
pounds of polished agate to be sold by US retailers each year.
And virtually nobody in India or abroad
is doing anything to stop the killing of Khambhat's stone polishers.
“It's not exactly rocket science. The
cause of silicosis among gem cutters is known, and the means to
prevent it are readily accessible,” said Brian Leber, chief
executive of Chicago-based Leber Jeweler Inc. Leber has done
extensive advocacy work to eliminate dangerous and exploitative labor
practices in the colored gemstones industry worldwide.
An ancient trade
Once known as Cambay, Khambhat has been
an important center for gem and agate processing for hundreds of
years. Although the city's traders now source the raw stones from as
far away as Africa, and though silt has choked the local river,
closing the ancient port, in some ways the agate polishing industry
has hardly changed.
Instead of building factories here and
in other locations across the states of Gujarat and Rajasthan, agate
traders buy raw stones and supply them to so-called artisans who chip
them to size, cut and grind them into shape and polish them to a
smooth, shiny glow.
Exporters boast of modern manufacturing
methods on their websites, or on business-to-business portals like
Alibaba.com. But most, if not all of them, use this ancient system of
outsourcing.
This enables them to avoid implementing
safety standards that would be required under Indian law if they
located their equipment under one roof and hired their workers under
contract, according to Jagdish Patel, the occupational safety expert
who founded PTRC in 1992.
It’s a stretch to call these laborers
self-employed. PTRC's survey of nearly 5,000 agate workers found that
three-quarters do not own the machines they use. Fewer than one
percent buy their raw stones or sell the finished agate. And many
take advance payment, or “baki,” that effectively leaves them in
thrall to an agate trader, even though all forms of bonded labor are
illegal in India.
“Self-employment in agate work is a
deceit,” Sudarshan Iyengar, vice chancellor of Ahmedabad-based
Gujarat Vidyapith University wrote in a monograph to the PTRC study.
The result is disastrous.
To make agate grinding and polishing
safe, manufacturers need to use a combination of water and suction to
knock down the deadly silica dust and prevent workers from breathing
it.
Because Khambhat's workers are paid a
piece rate that averages about $1 a day, they're unable to buy basic
safety gear, such as a dust mask. The margins are so thin that even
middlemen who employ five or six workers cannot afford the
electricity for water pumps and exhaust systems.
“The relationship between traders and
workers is temporary,” said Khushman Patel, secretary of an area
traders' organization called the Cambay Agate Association. “But we
have made some recommendations to the workers about safety.”
According to the agate trader, it is
hard to find workers today. “Even the poor send their kids to
school and you can't find unskilled laborers,” he said. As a
result, local firms are shifting away from products such as rosary
beads that require a lot of grinding — the most dangerous process —
to more natural shapes that can be created by chipping and polishing.
Throughout Khambhat, however, workers
still grind stones into beads by the hundreds of thousands, by
pressing them against a clattering vertical wheel that produces a
cloud of silica dust. Sometimes they work without even a bandana over
their mouths for protection.
Conducting a house-to-house survey in
2010, PTRC identified nearly 5,000 of these cottage industry workers,
including around 1,200 workers drilling holes for stringing beads and
700 grinders — who run the highest risk of contracting silicosis.
When GlobalPost visited some of these
grinders, a snowy coat of silica dust covered the machines. We could
see and taste the silica in the air. Worse still, the processing was
being done amid villages where hundreds of people live, often just
outside workers' homes.
In one village, 50 paces from a house
where another grinder had recently died, two women were grinding
agate for beads without water or an exhaust system to collect the
dust. Dressed in cheap cotton saris and rubber flip-flops, all they
had for protection were the bandanas covering their noses and mouths.
A drum polisher, which tumbles the stones together with abrasive
materials, sat idle beside them. The air tasted of ozone, and a milky
cloud of silica dust caught the sunlight.
“My whole family is doing this work,”
one of the women said, desperately. “Do something for us.”
Industry apathy
Jagdish Patel, of PTRC, worked for
years to force local traders and government bodies like the Gems and
Jewelry Export Promotion Council (GJEPC) to acknowledge that the
industry was killing workers. (The secretary of the Cambay Agate
Association and the PTRC activist are not related; Patel is a common
surname here).
A balding chemical engineer whose
cherubic face belies the dogged temperament of a trade union
activist, Jagdish Patel traveled to Hong
Kong, Geneva and Basel, to protest at trade fairs and meet with
officials from the International Labor Organization (ILO) and World
Health Organization (WHO).
Only after a damning 2010
report on silicosis in the Indian agate industry by the
US-based National Labor Committee did the GJEPC finally visit
Khambhat to address the issue.
But when GJEPC finally organized a
public meeting to discuss silicosis, it was monopolized by traders
who refused to accept that their industry was causing the disease.
According to the activist, nothing
substantial has changed.
“We wanted the [gem] council to
shoulder some responsibility for this,” Jagdish Patel said. “You
do not have any moral right to promote the export of these products
unless you shoulder the responsibility for the death and disease. But
they are still not doing anything positive.”
A 2010 GJEPC plan to build a safe,
common facility for workers, funded by agate traders, could eliminate
the worst effects of the industry's loosely regulated outsourcing
practices.
But the PTRC activist laments that it
has not gotten off the drawing board.
GJEPC says work is progressing.
“The Council is sensitizing the
workers of Khambhat with the hazards of the technology which they are
using,” Sanjay Singh, regional director, GJEPC Jaipur, told
GlobalPost by email.
“A center of excellence is being set
up in Khambhat with the help of Government of India and State
Government of Gujarat where workers will be trained on machines of
non hazardous technology. At this center the workers will be allowed
to use the machines for manufacturing the agate gems of their own on
payment of nominal user charges. ... The land allotment is in
process. It is expected that it will start in a year’s time.”
For many workers and their family
members, that will be too late.
A deadly epidemic
Silicosis is
virtually inevitable after years of inhaling silica dust, which scars
and inflames the lungs. But as little as a few weeks of exposure to
high concentrations of silica dust can cause the disease. Once
contracted, silicosis itself is incurable and the acute form is
fatal.
Moreover, it has been shown to cause lung cancer and it makes
its sufferers three times more likely to contract tuberculosis, which
is endemic in India.
Since PTRC began screening agate
workers for silicosis in 2007 in conjunction with doctors at Karamsad
Medical College, the non-profit has documented about 200 cases of
silicosis among about 700 workers who submitted themselves for
testing. More than 70 of those 200 have already died of the disease,
forming the basis of an ongoing complaint to India's
National Human
Rights Commission (NHRC). But there has been little or no relief.
The anecdotal evidence is also grim.
In interviews with GlobalPost in
Khambat, agate polishers recounted an epidemic of death among their
families and co-workers — telling of manufacturing sites where as
many as 15 out of 20 workers employed over the years have died from
silicosis.
“Over 10 years, I might have employed
20 or 30 workers off and on,” said 43-year-old Karimsha Husseinsha
Diwan. “Most of them have died.”
“Maybe 100 of my colleagues and
relatives have died of this over the past 20 or 25 years,” said
51-year-old Bashir Nur Mohammed Malik, an agate grinder who was
diagnosed with silicosis in 2012. “Seven members of my immediate
family [who worked in the industry] have died — my father, my
mother, two brothers and both of their wives, and one sister.”
“Both my father and brother died of
silicosis, and my mother has been diagnosed,” said 35-year-old
Prakash. “At least 30 or 40 workers from the same 'factory' must
have died over the years.”
PTRC's research provides a depressing
explanation of why they keep coming back — sometimes even after
being diagnosed with silicosis. Almost all of the workers are Muslims
or Dalits (once known as “untouchables”) or hail from the
underprivileged castes known in Indian legalese as the “Other
Backward Classes.” Only 10 percent have any other skill, such as
driving a rickshaw or weaving.
Buyer beware
GJEPC's director in Jaipur concedes
that there is a problem in Khambhat. But he says that silicosis is
not a problem at “other centers” of manufacturing, which are
using “different technology.”
While it's impossible to say that there
are no safe facilities anywhere in India, activists say that they are
rare, at best. And no Indian agate manufacturer appears to be
claiming high safety standards for its workers in a bid to attract
business from Western companies that deal in “fair trade” or
“ethical” jewelry.
Jagdish Patel's PTRC has yet to
discover a facility in Khambhat that provides adequate safety
measures, after more than a decade of advocacy on behalf of agate
workers.
“I've been in the industry 37 years,
and to my knowledge there is no [Indian] factory in those beads and
cabochons and the type of products you're describing,” adds Eric
Braunwart, chief executive of Columbia Gems, who has investigated
shifting his production from China to India. “I could be wrong.
There might be one in India. But I would be surprised.”
That’s not to say all agate sold in
the West is suspect.
In China, Braunwart worked with his
Chinese manufacturing partner to develop a low-cost, wet-process
exhaust system to protect their grinders. And when Jagdish Patel
visited China to document the industry's best practices for traders
back home, he also witnessed large-scale agate polishing units that
have adopted wet-process grinding techniques and employed exhaust
systems to dispose of silica dust.
But agate and gem polishers at other
units from China to South
Africa are at grave risk of silicosis, according to reports
by organizations like Labor Action China, which won a 2.6 million
yuan (~ $419,000 USD) settlement
in 2010 for Chinese grinders.
Meanwhile, neither the gem nor the
agate industry has a mechanism like the Kimberly Process, which
certifies “conflict-free” diamonds, or Goodweave (formerly
Rugmark), which guarantees that carpets and other products have been
manufactured without child labor. So once those stones hit display
cases in stores across the US and Europe, it's “buyer beware.”
Exports to the West
Nobody keeps official statistics for
India's total agate exports. But a GlobalPost analysis of GJEPC
export statistics suggests that perhaps as much as $110 million worth
of colored gemstones were shipped to the US between April 2012 and
January 2013. By dollar value, the bulk of that comprised emeralds,
sapphires and rubies, according to a GJEPC official. But cheap,
semi-precious stones like agate may well have accounted for most of
the tonnage.
According to documents Patel obtained
from Piers Trade
Intelligence, a subscription-only database of US waterborne trade
activity, and showed to GlobalPost, US-based traders imported around
140,000 pounds of polished agate and similar semi-precious stones
from India over five months in 2009. This included nearly 50,000
pounds of polished stones from Khambhat-based Krishna Agate.
Those stones almost certainly end up in
malls across America. Some of the country’s biggest retailers, as
well as many online merchants and specialty shops, offer agate-based
products.
But consumers lack the information to
know if a polished agate has contributed to the painful death of
workers. Under US law, stores are required to label merchandise with
the country of manufacture. Those rules don’t require companies to
provide detailed information about where their immediate suppliers
source the materials they use in the manufacturing. And traders in
this competitive market keep their supply chains confidential. So a
product labeled “made in California” may well contain agate that
was processed in India.
GlobalPost requested supply chain and
safety information from online shops and major retailers selling
agate in the US. Some of these companies have strict internal
policies against the exploitation of workers, wherever they may live.
But most of them did not respond to repeated inquiries, and none
provided sufficient information to allow an outsider to verify that
they had eliminated dangerous practices from their supply chain.
“Even when it comes to finished
jewelry items that lay claims to being 'ethical', things aren't
always so cut-and-dry,” said Leber, the jeweler and advocate for
better labor conditions in the gem industry.
“For instance, we've seen items being
sold by a well-known 'fair trade' retailer that, while they may have
been made by a women's co-op in the developing world, utilize
gemstone beads that were almost certainly cut ... by cutters who in a
couple years will contract silicosis and likely die at a young age.”
