Sitting Targets: Negligence and Occupational Risk in Sri Lanka

A Brandix factory floor in Sri Lanka -- image via a Brandix corporate video screenshot

By Shiran Illanperuma

Sundays at Paramasivam Pushpalatha’s home used to be a much livelier affair. It was her only day off from the factory and so she would pack seven days of domesticity into one. Her husband, Govindasamy Sivakumar, would sometimes take walks to avoid the hustle and bustle of the house being turned upside down in a frenzy of cooking and cleaning.

“She had the strength of ten men”, Sivakumar says proudly, before turning melancholic. “Her death has devastated the whole family”, including her two school-going sons and elderly mother.

On the morning of 10 October, Pushpalatha took her usual one-hour bus ride from her home at the Kiriporuwa Estate in Sri Lanka’s Kegalle district, about 60 km east of the capital Colombo, to her job at an apparel factory in the Seethawaka Export Processing Zone. Early into her shift, she complained to factory management of dizziness, tightness in the chest, and numbness in the legs. She asked to be excused for the day, or at least for a half day. But factory orders took precedence, Pushpalatha was told to focus on finishing her targets.

Working through the discomfort, Pushpalatha finished her shift and was admitted to the emergency room at the nearby hospital in Avissawella at 6:30 pm. By 8 pm, Sivakumar arrived to find her on oxygen and saline. Her pulse weakened through the night and by around 11 pm she died.

Pushpalatha was a sewing machine operator at Brandix for over 13 years. The company, which reported a revenue of $820 million in 2021, is touted as Sri Lanka’s single-largest apparel exporter and supplies Western brands such as Gap, Marks & Spencer, Next, and Victoria’s Secret. Brandix has offered Sivakumar a compensation of 170,000 Sri Lankan rupees (around $552), close to what Pushpalatha would earn in three months.

The exact cause and circumstances surrounding Pushpalatha’s death are not clear. Sivakumar says the doctor told him she may have been saved if admitted earlier. What is clear is that Pushpalatha’s concerns and appeals to factory management were dismissed, thereby delaying her access to professional medical attention. “She should have been taken to the hospital when she first complained” says Sivakumar, “that they didn’t do it makes them culpable”.

Unions and Class Power

According to Sri Lanka’s Deputy Minister of Labour, Mahinda Jayasinghe, around 2000 non-fatal occupational accidents occur in the country every year, with an additional 60–80 fatal accidents. However, these numbers are a fraction of the reality, as one study suggests that the rate of accident reportage may be as low as 1 percent.

There are many underlying causes of occupational accidents; some are technical, such as poor maintenance and replacement of machines and their parts, lack of appropriate protective gear and equipment, and lack of proper occupational health and safety training. Pushpalatha’s case will likely not be recorded as an occupational accident, yet it points to negligence on the part of the factory owners, and the consequences of the pressure to meet production targets.

“We have consistently asked for unions to operate in factories,” says Swasthika Arulingam, President of the Ceylon Industrial Workers Union. “If there are no unions, there is nobody to look after the welfare of the workers.” But employers in Sri Lanka’s Free Trade Zones are hostile to the functioning of unions and workers themselves avoid formal union membership due to threats from factory management.

Various studies show that a high rate of unionisation helps to reduce the amount of fatal and non-fatal occupational injuries. This, in turn, benefits employers themselves through a reduction in time lost to injuries. In Sri Lanka, over 500,000 man-days are lost every year due to occupational injuries. Yet only about 9.5 percent of the country’s workforce is unionised, the majority being workers in the public sector.

Sri Lanka’s apparel sector contributes to approximately half of the country’s export earnings. However, it is dependent on upstream capital-intensive inputs (fabrics, dyes, accessories), while downstream design and market access are controlled by Western brands and retailers. Sandwiched between this value chain, the predominantly women workers are compelled to meet intense production targets to earn their wage.

Factories set production targets by taking the most efficient worker and calculating their output per hour. All other workers must then work to meet this output standard – a difficult prospect for those who are less experienced, older, or suffer from health conditions and disabilities.

Studies show that the intensity and duration of the work lead to a range of health issues, including musculoskeletal problems (such as lower-back aches from prolonged sitting), migraines and headaches (from poor ventilation and inhaling fabric particles), and puncture injuries (from sewing machine needles). The health issues are not only physical  —a recent study on apparel workers in the Hambantota district found that 35 percent of the workers suffered from a psychological morbidity, such as depression.

The study also linked payment structures to the prevalence of mental and psychological distress: “Garment factory workers that get paid daily or by the number of pieces they finish have 6.75 … times higher odds of having a psychological morbidity compared to those earning monthly or weekly salaries.” Precarious contracts heighten mental stress.

Plantation to Factory

Pushpalatha is from Sri Lanka’s ‘Malaiyaha Tamil’ community, descendants of South Indian indentured workers brought by the British to work on the plantations in Sri Lanka’s central highlands. Her mother used to work on the plantation. But with plantation wages being abysmal, Pushpalatha and most of her generation have tried their best to find employment elsewhere —women in the export processing zones and men as migrant workers in the Gulf states (Sivakumar worked in a packaging factory in the UAE for some years).

Yet there are families in Kiriporuwa Estate who still depend on selling their labour to the plantation. Less than a ten-minute walk from Pushpalatha’s home, down a slope, round a line of rubber trees, a hop over a stream, and a clamber up a dirt path, is the home of Pushpanayakam. Lying flat on his bed, he raises his sarong to knee level to reveal a fresh scar on his left shin and a thick bandage around his right shin.

On 2 November, there was an explosion in a rubber processing factory at Kiriporuwa Estate. Pushpanayakam was one of two workers lucky enough to escape with injuries. Their colleague, Rajnikantha, who was operating the machine that malfunctioned, died from the injuries. Pushpanayakam has received some compensation from the factory and will walk again in two months’ time. Until then, his wife —also a plantation worker— will have to forgo her own wages to feed, bathe, and nurse him back to health.

Back at Pushpalatha’s house, Sunday lunch is ready. A procession of steaming dishes are brought out of the kitchen and placed on the dining table: rice, lentils, bitter gourd, carrots, and tinned fish. At the far edge of the table, propped up against the inside corner of the din.

Shiran Illanperuma is a Sri Lankan journalist and political economist. He is a researcher at Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research and a co-editor of Wenhua Zongheng: A Journal of Contemporary Chinese Thought.

This article was produced by Globetrotter.