Homework 4
The Global Impact of Safety
Jonathan Shuty, Spenser Tripp, Caitlyn Hagarty, Yuliia Kapeliushna

Part 1:
In the modern Western style industrial setting, the culture has shifted from blind efficiency in production to putting major emphasis on safety and welfare of workers. The Industrial Revolution has long since passed. Manufacturing facilities have had plenty of time to stabilize their processes so that changing them to consider the safety of the worker would not cause an unacceptable drop in profits. Social pressure from the working class also contributed to this shift, as unsafe working conditions were no longer a necessary reality of the industry. Unfortunately, this emphasis on safe work practices is not a worldwide standard. Countries that have more recently started to become industrialized are trying to catch up, and this puts emphasis on production above all else. As a result, this can often lead to work environments that would be utterly unacceptable in the west. A good example of this lack of concern for worker safety is the Kader Toy Factory fire in May 1993. The Kader Toy Factory, located outside Bangkok, Thailand, manufactured toys and dolls, mostly made from plastic (ILO, 2011). Before the tragedy in 1993, the company experienced multiple, usually small fires. One fire, in 1989, completely demolished the facility. It didn’t reopen until 1990. The company was still repairing a building from fire damage when the May 1993 fire took 188 workers’ lives (ILO, 2011).
The cause of the fire is still unknown, but the lack of regulations in the building structure caused the fire the spread quickly. There were 4 buildings on site. The fire originated in Building 1, which was attached to Buildings 2 and 3. Building 4 was completely separate. None of the buildings were equipped with automatic sprinklers and none of the structural steel used in the