Dubai, like other Gulf States, is heavily dependent on foreign guest workers. Guest workers make up over 90% of the private sector workforce in the Gulf. They perform hard labor for low wages and have few rights in their host countries. Most hail from poor countries like Bangladesh and the Philippines. 

Nearly 500 guest workers are facing deportation after a strike in which they clashed with the Arabtec construction company, demanding to be paid their food allowance in cash instead of meals. “Paying” guest workers in overpriced food and housing instead of cash is a classic exploitative practice that crops up regularly in guest worker programs all over the world. The strike ended when police and immigration officials stormed the camp, handing out deportation notices. Both unions and strikes are illegal in Dubai.

If you designed a perfect scheme to exploit workers, it would look a lot like a guest worker program. These programs import workers to do a specific job, for a specific employer. Under the terms of their visas, guest workers can’t get another job in-country, even if they discover upon arrival that their job isn’t all they were promised. As you might expect, unscrupulous bosses and labor brokers exploit this leverage to the hilt. To make matters worse, workers often borrow to pay their labor brokers. If they don’t stay and work, they can’t keep up their payments to local loan sharks, who may threaten their families. It’s not clear whether the Dubai construction workers facing deportation were deceived, but these kinds of abuses are endemic in guest worker programs worldwide, including in the United States. 

[Photo credit: Dubai from the air, by Tom Olliver, Creative Commons.]

We are very proud to announce that Julfikar Ali Manik, Steven Greenhouse, and Jim Yardley of the New York Times have won this month’s Sidney Award for their compassionate, in-depth, well-contextualized coverage of the Rana Plaza factory collapse in Bangladesh and its impact on working conditions for garment workers. The building crumbled on April 24, burying over 1100 people, many of whom were garment workers sewing clothes for Western brands like Wal-Mart and Benetton. 

The three reporters began their coverage on the day the tower collapsed and they have since produced well over a dozen follow-up stories, exploring multiple aspects of the world’s worst industrial disaster. They covered the rescue effort, exposed the criminal past of the owner of Rana Plaza, and chronicled the negotiations between labor organizations and Western clothing brands to broker a historic safety accord that will dramatically improve working conditions for Bangladeshi garment workers. 

In my Backstory interview with Steven Greenhouse, we talk about the journalistic teamwork that made this coverage possible, the labor climate in Bangladesh, the mechanics of the safety accord, and more.

[Photo credit: This photo of the Rana Plaza disaster site is used with the kind permission of Claus of PhotoCPH, all rights reserved.] 

Generic drugs promise the same efficacy as their brand-name counterparts at a fraction of the price. That’s why 84% of the nation’s drug supply has gone generic. Unfortunately, as Katherine Eban reports in Fortune, the recent boom in overseas generic drug manufacturing has outstripped the U.S.’s regulatory capacity. FDA inspectors visit overseas generic drug factories but their inspections are neither as frequent nor as thorough as the checks performed on domestic pharmaceutical plants:

Fortune’s investigation yields the first comprehensive picture of how one under-policed and far-flung generics company operated. It is not a tale of cutting corners or lax manufacturing practices but one of outright fraud, in which the company knowingly sold substandard drugs around the world – including in the U.S. – while working to deceive regulators. The impact on patients will likely never be known. But it is clear that millions of people worldwide got medicine of dubious quality from Ranbaxy.

Ranbaxy was the first foreign company to export generic drugs to the U.S. and it quickly became the 6th-largest drug company in America. It has since been discovered that many of its products were sold as substitutes for branded drugs without being properly tested to ensure equivalency. Ranbaxy got caught mixing high-quality HIV medication with cheaper stuff in order to bring the drug’s purity scores up to a minimally acceptable level. Such adulteration may have harmed patients because the drug mixture can rapidly break down and become toxic. 

[Photo credit: Ess_JayNZ, Creative Commons.]

We aren’t accustomed to thinking of sewing as a death-defying trade, but as Hillman Judge Harold Meyerson explains in the Washington Post, garment workers in Bangladesh take their lives in their hands each day when they report to poorly built factories to stich cheap clothing for Western consumers.

On April 24, the Rana Plaza factory complex collapsed, killing over 1100 workers, but the Rana disaster was just the best known of a string of entirely preventable mass casualties. In the weeks since the collapse several fires have swept through garment factories in Bangladesh, the most recent of which killed eight people:

“That fire began on the lower floors, but people died on the floors above,” says Scott Nova, who heads the Workers Rights Consortium, the organization that has spearheaded the global fight to make garment factories safe. “Those people would have had no trouble getting out unharmed if they could have walked into stairwells protected by fire doors. But the factory had open staircases that became a chimney, funneling toxic smoke to the upper floors. And most of the factories in the country are similarly structured.” [WaPo]

These deaths reveal the inadequacy of the current regime of voluntary factory inspections that many Western companies use to put a figleaf on dismal working conditions. After Rana companies protested that their inspectors weren’t sent to inspect the physical integrity of the structure. Well, it doesn’t take a civil engineer to notice that a stairwell has no fire doors.

But there is cause for optimism. Rana may finally have shaken Western brands–and the Western consumers who buy their products–out of their complacency:

In the wake of Rana, that’s begun to change. Under pressure from unions and anti-sweatshop activists in their home countries, the European retailers and brands with the biggest presence in Bangladesh agreed this week to a plan under which they would pay for renovations to make their factories safe and independent inspections that would keep them that way. The retailers include H&M, which is the biggest buyer in Bangladesh, Carrefour and the British-based firms Tesco and Primark.

Thus far, most U.S. firms have declined to sign on. Holdouts include Wal-Mart, which ranks just behind H&M in the volume of clothing produced in Bangladesh; Gap; JC Penney and Sears. The only U.S. company to join the accord — and it signed on to a version that predated last month’s disaster outside the Bangladeshi capital — is PVH, the parent company of Tommy Hilfiger, Calvin Klein and Izod. [WaPo]

PVH had an extra push to do the right thing. The company decided to clean up its act after 2013 Hillman Prize-winner Brian Ross and his team at ABC News publicly shamed Tommy Hilfiger over factory deaths in Bangladesh in 2012. 

[Photo credit: jankie, Creative Commons.]