The shipbreakers do some of the most dangerous jobs in the world, toiling 12 hours a day, seven days a week, for wages of just 22 to 32 cents an hour, handling and breathing in dangerous toxic waste with no safeguards whatsoever and under conditions that violate every local and international labor law. Injuries happen every day—some are paralyzed for life—and a worker dies every three or four weeks.

Each ship contains an average of 15,000 pounds of asbestos and ten to one hundred tons of lead paint. This is not only a human rights violation, but environmentally devastating.

How is it that over the course of 30 years, the G-20 countries (and before that the G-7), the handful of powerful shipping nations and the companies that dominate global merchant cargo trade, the International Maritime Organization (IMO), the International Labor Organization (ILO) and the Bangladeshi government have not—individually and collectively—been able to implement a single improvement?

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