Sewer Manhole Covers -- Made in India
Sewer Manhole Covers -- Made in India
Date: Saturday, December 01, 2007 5:58 PM
<<<<< JOB DESTRUCTION NEWSLETTER No. 1791 -- 12/01/2007 >>>>>
Be sure to go to the NYT website in order to view the slide show. It's such a
disturbing story this might be easy to overlook:
Manhole covers manufactured in India can be anywhere from 20 to 60
percent cheaper than those made in the United States, said Alfred
Spada, the editor and publisher of Modern Casting magazine and the
spokesman for the American Foundry Society. Workers at foundries in
India are paid the equivalent of a few dollars a day, while foundry
workers in the United States earn about $25 an hour.
After viewing that slideshow, might you ask why those sewer covers are only
20-60% cheaper? Somebody is making a lot of money and it sure isn't those
laborers in India that handle molten metal with bare feet and no gloves.
According to this Forbes article, steel tycoon Lakshmi Mittal is the richest
Indian, and is valued at $51 billion.
http://www.forbes.com/business/2007/11/14/india-billionaires-richest-biz-07india-cx_nk_1114india_intro.html
India's 40 Richest
Just on a wild whim, I decided to do a google search on Mittal steel and sewer
manhole covers. The second article included below is from 2005.
Perhaps it explains who is getting rich. The cost of the steel for the manhole
covers is reduced even further by enriching it with calcium and phosphorus
from the crushed bones of dead humans. Yech! Hope none of that steel made it
to New York!
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/26/nyregion/26manhole.html
November 26, 2007
New York Manhole Covers, Forged Barefoot in India By HEATHER TIMMONS and J.
ADAM HUGGINS NEW DELHI -- Eight thousand miles from Manhattan, barefoot,
shirtless, whip-thin men rippled with muscle were forging prosaic pieces of
the urban jigsaw puzzle: manhole covers.
Seemingly impervious to the heat from the metal, the workers at one of West
Bengal s many foundries relied on strength and bare hands rather than
machinery. Safety precautions were barely in evidence; just a few pairs of eye
goggles were seen in use on a recent visit. The foundry, Shakti Industries in
Haora, produces manhole covers for Con Edison and New York City s Department
of Environmental Protection, as well as for departments in New Orleans and
Syracuse.
The scene was as spectacular as it was anachronistic: flames, sweat and liquid
iron mixing in the smoke like something from the Middle Ages.
That s what attracted the interest of a photographer who often works for The
New York Times -- images that practically radiate heat and illustrate where
New York s manhole covers are born.
When officials at Con Edison -- which buys a quarter of its manhole covers,
roughly 2,750 a year, from India -- were shown the pictures by the
photographer, they said they were surprised.
"We were disturbed by the photos," said Michael S. Clendenin, director of
media relations with Con Edison. "We take worker safety very seriously," he
said.
Now, the utility said, it is rewriting international contracts to include
safety requirements. Contracts will now require overseas manufacturers to
"take appropriate actions to provide a safe and healthy workplace," and to
follow local and federal guidelines in India, Mr. Clendenin said.
At Shakti, street grates, manhole covers and other castings were scattered
across the dusty yard. Inside, men wearing sandals and shorts carried coke and
iron ore piled high in baskets on their heads up stairs to the furnace feeding
room.
On the ground floor, other men, often shoeless and stripped to the waist,
waited with giant ladles, ready to catch the molten metal that came pouring
out of the furnace. A few women were working, but most of the heavy lifting
appeared to be left to the men.
The temperature outside the factory yard was more than 100 degrees on a
September visit. Several feet from where the metal was being poured, the area
felt like an oven, and the workers were slick with sweat.
Often, sparks flew from pots of the molten metal. In one instance they ignited
a worker s lungi, a skirtlike cloth wrap that is common men s wear in India.
He quickly, reflexively, doused the flames by rubbing the burning part of the
cloth against the rest of it with his hand, then continued to cart the metal
to a nearby mold.
Once the metal solidified and cooled, workers removed the manhole cover
casting from the mold and then, in the last step in the production process,
ground and polished the rough edges. Finally, the men stacked the covers and
bolted them together for shipping.
"We can t maintain the luxury of Europe and the United States, with all the
boots and all that," said Sunil Modi, director of Shakti Industries. He said,
however, that the foundry never had accidents. He was concerned about the
attention, afraid that contracts would be pulled and jobs lost.
New York City s Department of Environmental Protection gets most of its sewer
manhole covers from India. When asked in an e-mail message about the
department s source of covers, Mark Daly, director of communications for the
Department of Citywide Administrative Services, said that state law requires
the city to buy the lowest-priced products available that fit its
specifications.
Mr. Daly said the law forbids the city from excluding companies based on where
a product is manufactured.
Municipalities and utility companies often buy their manhole covers through
middlemen who contract with foreign foundries; New York City buys the sewer
covers through a company in Flushing, Queens.
Con Edison said it did not plan to cancel any of its contracts with Shakti
after seeing the photographs, though it has been phasing out Indian-made
manhole covers for several years because of changes in design specifications.
Manhole covers manufactured in India can be anywhere from 20 to 60 percent
cheaper than those made in the United States, said Alfred Spada, the editor
and publisher of Modern Casting magazine and the spokesman for the American
Foundry Society. Workers at foundries in India are paid the equivalent of a
few dollars a day, while foundry workers in the United States earn about
$25 an hour.
The men making New York City s manhole covers seemed proud of their work and
pleased to be photographed doing it. The production manager at the Shakti
Industries factory, A. Ahmed, was enthusiastic about the photographer s visit,
and gave a full tour of the facilities, stopping to measure the temperature of
the molten metal -- some 1,400 degrees Centigrade, or more than 2,500 degrees
Fahrenheit.
India s 1948 Factory Safety Act addresses cleanliness, ventilation, waste
treatment, overtime pay and fresh drinking water, but the only protective gear
it specifies is safety goggles.
Mr. Modi said that his factory followed basic safety regulations and that
workers should not be barefoot. "It must have been a very hot day" when the
photos were taken, he said.
Some labor activists in India say that injuries are far higher than figures
show. "Many accidents are not being reported," said H. Mahadevan, the deputy
general secretary for the All-India Trade Union Congress.
Safety, overall, is "not taken as a serious concern by employers or trade
unions," Mr. Mahadevan added.
A. K. Anand, the director of the Institute of Indian Foundrymen in New Delhi,
a trade association, said in a phone interview that foundry workers were "not
supposed to be working barefoot," but he could not answer questions about what
safety equipment they should be wearing.
At the Shakti Industries foundry, "there are no accidents, never ever.
Period," Mr. Modi said. "By God s will, it s all fine."
Heather Timmons reported from New Delhi and J. Adam Huggins from Haora, India.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
http://www.ex-yupress.com/dani/dani114.html
Scandal: Iron ore exploitation begins in New Mines Ljubija, even though they
still contain about 1,7000 corpses Iron Ore Enriched With Human Bones By
selling the majority stake in Ljubija Mines to the biggest steel producer in
the world - Indian Mittal Steel Company, the government of Srpska benefited in
two ways - it raked in money and raked over bones of innocent victims murdered
by its military and paramilitary formations in the spring of 1992. While the
world is excitedly discussing this scandal, Bosnia is silent by Snjezana MULIC
Dani, Sarajevo, Federation Bosnia-Hercegovina, B-H, April 15, 2005 On April 6
of this year, Jasmin Odobasic, the head of the Bosnia-Hercegovina Federal
Commission on Missing Persons, found a human skull - wedged between sparse
trees and stones - on the very surface of a strip mine in the New Mines
Ljubija area. Not far away from it, there were other skeleton parts.
For our state of affairs, unfortunately, one skeleton is nothing new,
especially in that particular area, but this very finding is a clear example
of bold lies of the new mines' owners, that there are "no remains of murdered
Bosniaks and Croats" in the area.
Welcome to Omarska!: Indeed, the world's biggest steel manufacturer Mittal
Steel Company, which precisely one year ago bought 51 percent ownership of the
Ljubija mines near Prijedor, is trying to suppress what cannot be suppressed -
that it bought the mines which, in their depths but also on the surface, hide
the truth about the crimes that the Serb military and paramilitary committed
against Bosniaks and Croats in July 1992. During
1992 more than three thousand non-Serbs were murdered in the Prijedor
municipality (3,227 names are recorded in the Book of the Missing, although
the suspected number is even higher), while in a single day, on July 25, 1992,
several hundred civilians were executed in the abandoned Omarska strip mine.
Simply, the mines had become the biggest concentration camps and execution
sites of the non-Serb population.
The mines' management fired all employed Bosniaks and Croats at the beginning
of the war, while the still-employed Serbs got a new task - instead of the
ore, they dug bodies of their co-workers and neighbors.
The truth about the mines was first exposed by Ed Vulliamy, reporter for The
Guardian, who published the images of the emaciated camp inmates. But even
though the images "shocked the world", that did not help the victims to find
their peace. On the contrary: the Republic of Srpska authorities became the
mines' owner after the war and still retain 49 percent ownership today; soon
after the end of the war they started to mine the ore. The first post-war iron
ore quantities shipped from the Ljubija mines, most probably "enriched" with
human calcium and phosphorus, were delivered to the Smederevo Steelworks in
Serbia.
While the executioners of the Prijedor municipality non-Serb population took
care of business, the Federal Commission on Missing Persons, led by Jasmin
Odobasic, searched for skeletons and struggled to reclaim some dignity for the
victims and "closure" for their surviving relatives.
Consequently, only two kilometers from what is today the entrance to the
central building of the Omarska mine, where one is greeted with a Cyrillic
"Welcome" sign, 456 bodies were recovered from the Stari Kevljani mass grave.
The Hrastova Glavica mass grave, also within the Omarska mine area, revealed
126 bodies, the Redak mass grave 74, Lisac 49, Pasinac 54, and the Jakarina
Kosa mass grave (in the mines at Ljubija) 373 bodies. According to the
Commission on Missing Persons records and the claims of the victims'
relatives, New Mines Ljubija still hold approximately 1,700 bodies!
However, that horrifying fact does not stop the new majority-owners of the
mines, nor the minority owner - the Republic of Srpska authorities - from
mining the ore. Conversely, Srpska authorities benefited from the involvement
of the Indian-British Mittal Steel Company, mainly in obtaining an opportunity
to at least partially cover up the extent of genocide against Bosniaks and
Croats.
The federal and state-level authorities likewise have voiced no protest
against these new mining operations undertaken before all victims' remains
have been exhumed and all execution sites have been marked. The only voice of
reason came from the camp survivors and victims' relatives, several non-
governmental organizations, the above-mentioned Federal Commission on Missing
Persons, and one foreigner - the journalist Ed Vulliamy.
Last year, just after Lakshmi Mittal took over the mines, The Society for
Threatened Peoples in Bosnia-Hercegovina organized a round-table discussion,
gathering representatives of the organizations of the missing persons'
families, representatives of the International Commission on Missing Persons
(ICMP), similar commissions from the Federation of Bosnia-Hercegovina and the
Republic of Srpska, local police and human rights organizations. From this
discussion, they requested that the High Representative in BH and Srpska
authorities put a halt to the privatization of the mines, expressing fear that
it will thwart further searches for the remains of the missing persons.
However, the president of the Society for Threatened Peoples in Bosnia-
Hercegovina Ms. Fadila Memisevic told Dani that no response to those requests
was ever received.
With the assistance of the journalist Ed Vulliamy, a similar protest was
directed to steel magnate Lakshmi Mittal's London office by the non-
governmental organizations Srcem do mira from Kozarac, the Association of Camp
Survivors from Prijedor Municipality, the Bosnian Network from Great Britain,
Izvor from Prijedor, and Optimisti 2004 from the Netherlands.
Sabahudin Garibovic, the spokesman for the Association of Camp Survivors from
Prijedor Municipality, who was imprisoned for 88 days in the Trnopolje camp
[in 1992], says that there was no response to that letter either. "But we rely
upon Ed. He will go to the end, just like he did in 1992, when he entered the
camps and showed those horrifying images to the world. Our request primarily
is for the infamous building called the White House, where people were held,
brutally tortured and murdered, and the space around it, to be excluded from
the mines and marked as a former execution ground. We want to put up a
commemorative inscription there, as we did in the former Keraterm camp. Our
second request is that the mining of ore be stopped until all victims have
been exhumed", says Garibovic.
He pointed out that these organizations sent letters of protest to former
Prijedor mayor Ms. Nada Sevo, who "agreed in principle that killing grounds
should be marked". But nothing further happened, since Ms. Sevo's mandate -
expired [after the recent local election]!
Unfulfilled promise: Last year, on June 9, the Helsinki Committee for Human
Rights in Bosnia-Hercegovina (HK BiH) wrote to Ms. Sevo as well. Stating that
the remains of approximately 1,500 bodies of victims are still hidden in the
mines area, Srdjan Dizdarevic, the president of the HK BiH, asked Ms. Sevo to
"use the power of her authority to do everything so that the fate of the
missing would be discovered". Nothing happened after this letter either.
Then, when one of the largest mass graves - Stari Kevljani - was discovered in
the area [in October 2004], Jasmin Odobasic invited Muraree Mukherjee, the
Indian who is presently in charge of the management of the New Mines Ljubija,
to come to the opening of the mass grave. "I brought him to the edge of the
pit and he saw hundreds of bodies with his own eyes. He personally promised to
me that he will do everything so that all the graves, collective and
individual, in the mines area are discovered", says Odobasic.
But Mukherjee lied. Not only did he do nothing concerning the exhumations of
the victims, but today he even denies that there are any mass graves in the
mines area!? For Dani he stated: "To this day (April 12, 2005) no bodies or
mass graves from the 1992 war have been found in Omarska, nor in any area
under the control of the New Mines Ljubija."
He also said that Mittal Steel Company controls only the Omarska and Drenovaca
mines in the Ljubija mines complex, which is not true. Otherwise, the official
Mittal company web site (www.mittalsteel.com) would not carry a text saying
that it owns 51 percent of the Ljubija mines complex. And that - as the Mittal
Company is well aware - includes Ljubija, Omarska and Tomasica as well. But,
the LNM Group, part of the Mittal Steel Company, provided the same response to
the reports in The Guardian either.
In December last year, they wrote an announcement stating that "the land that
LNM has purchased as part of its investment into Bosnia is not on the site of
any of the known mass graves in this region". They informed both The Guardian
and Dani that no remains have been found at the Omarska mines.
Unlike the Indian, who at least offered some kind of response, Mladen Jelaca,
the director of the mines' part controlled by Srpska authorities, has failed
to do even that much. After he refused to see us during our visit to Prijedor
(April 7 and 8, 2005), with the excuse that we "had not announced our visit",
he promised to respond in writing. Although he received questions along those
sent to Mukherjee, mainly concerning the bodies within the mines and the
ethnic composition of the work force (there are no Bosniaks or Croats
[presently] employed at the mines), he did not answer.
Fear for bones: Only a few days earlier, in Kozarski vijesnik, a magazine that
used to provide the main media logistics for the Chetnik "contractors"
during the war, Jelaca boasted that "the New Mines Ljubija plan to produce and
sell one million tons of the iron ore concentrate in 2005". The director also
stated: "The New Mines Ljubija is a big company, important and very
interesting to the public, especially now that it does business with the
world's biggest metallurgical company Mittal Steel." Jelaca, of course,
refused to answer the following question: how can the Ljubija mines' iron
foundry be operational when bones of the victims are still there?
Kemo Alagic, one of the Ljubija survivors, 70 members of whose family were
murdered, took us to the iron foundry at the very entrance to the Ljubija
mines, today used for production of sewer manholes. Next to the foundry is the
so-called crusher. That machine had been used to crush the iron ore, and - in
1992 - to crush the bodies of the murdered Bosniaks and Croats.
While he takes us up the hill, to the mine strips, Alagic points out the
locations where, in April 1992, "blood ran in streams".
"There are bodies in this place", says Kemo pointing his finger. "And here,
and here", he says and asks us not to take pictures, because: "They will
recognize where this is and move the bodies elsewhere, then nobody will be
able to find them again. The Serbs have already moved these bodies once
before. They threw them into these pits, previously stuffing the rocks with
industrial explosives. When that exploded, the bodies were blown to pieces,
and the earth and rocks covered them. They thought nobody would find that out.
Even today we come across some locations, sometimes even Serbs help us, and we
keep that secret until the Commission gets enough money to exhume the
victims."
The only thing that cannot be hidden, he says, are the small lakes, black from
the iron. "There are bodies in the lakes too, everybody knows that, but they
think that nobody will go into them because of the water."
And while he shows us the Jakarina Kosa mass grave site, where [the remains
of] 373 victims were recently exhumed within the Ljubija mines area, on the
edge of the pit we find a used condom.
"Enriched" iron: However, that explicit example of the Srpska attitude towards
crimes and innocent victims, horrible as it sounds, is easier to comprehend
than the attitude of those who represent Bosniaks and Croats at the state and
federal level. Those authorities have never raised this issue, in any form.
But, considering the fact that the Mittal Steel Company is also the majority-
owner of the Zenica steelworks, which formed one metallurgical enterprise with
the Ljubija mines before the war, and that the present owners are most
probably recreating that symbiosis, in the process assisting local politicians
in luring foreign investors, everything becomes much clearer.
Thus the silence of the local media about the fresh crime committed against
the victims of previous crimes in the Ljubija mines, and the loud praises of
the export successes of the Indian Mittal family. A particularly grotesque
example occurred within the last three weeks: on March 26, daily Dnevni Avaz
reported on the funerals in Prijedor of 126 victims [whose remains had been]
exhumed from the Jakarina Kosa mass grave within the Ljubija mines, with all
the SDA officials gathering there for that occasion, and Reisu-l-ulema Ceric
even saying that the sky itself had come down to look for those who suppressed
the truth about the crime.
But only ten days later, the same daily newspaper carried an interview with
Roeland Baan, the Mittal Steel Company's CEO for eastern and central Europe,
in which he praised the diligent Ljubija miners and the mines' new management.
He did not mention Omarska, Keraterm, Jakarina Kosa... or the camp survivors'
request to put up a memorial marker, nor did the Avaz journalist ask him about
that.
There are no questions from the media outlets, even less so from the various
Cerics, Tihics, Terzics or Hadzipasics, and the only ones concerned about the
human souls - unappeased in this and in the other world - are the non-
governmental organizations and victims' families.
On March 26 this year, the Helsinki Committee for Human Rights in Bosnia-
Hercegovina sent a letter to Carla Del Ponte, the chief prosecutor for the
ICTY, drawing attention to the "unreasonable decision on the Ljubija mines'
privatization" and asking her to do everything to stop the ore mining until
all victims are exhumed and to send forensic experts and investigators to the
mines. Del Ponte was the only person to act upon this matter so far, by
sending Jan Van Hecke, the Head of the ICTY Mission [in Bosnia], to Srdjan
Dizdarevic, the president of the Helsinki Committee.
However!
"Van Hecke asked me for the locations of the mass graves, which is
inexplicable. We do not have such information. I directed him to the
Commission on Missing Persons", says Dizdarevic. But, to this day, Van Hecke
has not contacted the Commission.
The New Mines Ljubija has exported 750 tons of the iron ore to the Czech
Republic and is planning to produce one million tons in this year, the mining
proceeds, the iron ore enriched with calcium and phosphorus from human bones
is traveling across Europe, the Mittal family gains new millions to pay for
their offspring's weddings... And the world is marking the 60th anniversary of
the Holocaust and repeating: "never again!"
Translated by Maja Lovrenovic
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