Trailer

Updated post for English subtitled trailer:

http://www.vimeo.com/2107099

Solidarity Statment

TO:

limteris@gmail.com

"limter-iş" (union of shipyard/dock workers)
www.limteris.net

Dear Brothers and Sisters,

On behalf of the Transport Workers Solidarity Committee TWSC www.transportworkers.org we give greetings and solidarity. Your battle to protect the lives and health and safety of your members is of importance to workers throughout the world. The world wide corporate drive for profits today knows no bounds. The death of 97 workers at your shipyard in the last 10 months is ample evidence that the owners of this company care not one iota about the lives of the workers who make them their profits. Longshore workers on the West Coast, maritime workers around the world are facing as well the brunt of this attack on health and safety. Ignoring health and safety laws and protections is costing the lives of tens of thousands of workers in the US and around the world.

We support your strike action to defend your members and will help publicize your important struggle. We are also supporting Laborfest www.laborfest.net here in San Francisco and will be screening the documentary film by Petra Holzer about your lives at the shipyard. We will work to get support resolutions from other maritime and transportation workers here and around the world. Please video tape interviews with striking workers about the issues you face and put that on youtube and we will help get it out internationally. You are not alone in your war for justice!

In Solidarity and Victory In Your Struggle,

Steve Zeltzer

Publicity Chair

Transport Workers Solidarity Committee

www.transportworkers.org

4857

documentary / 30' / 2008
Turkey (turkish / english subtitles)

Tuzla Cemetery overlooks Tuzla Shipyards. Now start walking down the cemetery slope. On your left is the military zone. Green and free of humans. Then all of a sudden you see nothing but concrete blocks of flats. The workers leave their homes around seven in the morning to work "outside", in the shipyards, in leather and side industries. Among the family flats you can also find bachelor apartments filled with beds and longing for the family. Keep walking down the slope: factories manufacturing small ship parts, the unceasing roar from the İçmeler Köprüsü on the E5 freeway, the never empty labor pick-up strip at the crossroads, the sound of the local express train. Walk pass the İçmeler stop, and here is Aydınlı Bay packed with almost all of Turkey's shipyards. The workers who go through forty eight different doors everyday, hundred men high cranes, steel sheets, the speed and sweat which merge them into one. The time unit in the shipyards is the fleeting instant a cigarette bud is dropped on the floor, the split second between making a living and death between hope and pain, their and ours. Tuzla Cemetery overlooks Tuzla Shipyards.

CAMERA

SELÇUK ERZURUMLU
ÖMER ÖZTÜRK
ETHEM ÖZGÜVEN

EDITING

SELÇUK ERZURUMLU
ÖMER ÖZTÜRK
PETRA HOLZER

SOUND

SERKAN ÇİFÇİ
BÜLENT ÖZCAN

TRANSLATION

ITIR ERHART
ASLI ODMAN

DIRECTOR

PETRA HOLZER
SELÇUK ERZURUMLU
ETHEM ÖZGÜVEN

Many Thanks to

OSMAN UMUROĞLU
NEVRA AKDEMİR
AYNUR ÖZBAKIR
ZAFER TOPALOĞLU
CAN AYDIN
MUSTAFA YAZICI
ULAŞ BEŞOKLAR
TOLGA KUTLUAY

eozguven@bilgi.edu.tr petramh@gmail.com selchook@yahoo.com

97th Occupational murder in the Tuzla Dockyards

Turkey/Tuzla / June 08, 2008

Another worker lost his life earning a living at the Selahattin Arslan Ship Building plant in Tuzla. Ihsan Turhan, 35, a father of 2, working as a pipe fitter was pronounced dead after a heavy lid fell on him.

Only last February another worker was murdered on the job in the same plant when the bosses refused to implement worker safety measures.

Ihsan Turan was employed by the contracting firm Bektaş Boru Turan becomes the 4th victim in Tuzla Shipyards this month alone.

A strong protest of these murders will come on June 16 ( the anniversary of the historic workers uprising against union rights) when workers in Tuzla shipyards will stop work led by ship builders union Limter-Iş. This latest occupational murder also disproved the lies repeated by the bosses and the government that all necessary precautions had been taken to ensure workers safety. The Labor Minster recently has admitted, “The deaths will continue” in this small town, home of many ship building enterprises. The house has formed an investigative group to research the unusual high levels of deaths in the Tuzla shipbuilding facilities.

http://www.sendika.org/english/yazi.php?yazi_no=17423

Shipbuilding "Success" Based on Human Sacrifice

The continuing deaths of shipyard builders in Tuzla, on the outskirts of Istanbul, are due to lack of security at the workplace.

Bıa news centre

13-02-2008

Asli Odman

Asli Odman, an academic at Bilgi University, Istanbul, is part of the Tuzla Shipyard Region Monitoring Committee. The committee has just published a report on the working conditions and preventable series of accidents at the workplace.

As the third death on a shipyard in Tuzla this year was announced yesterday, she wrote an article about the current situation in the shipbuilding industry for bianet, summarised here.

Growth industry, more deaths

Odman points out that the shipbuilding industry has grown internationally; in Turkey, the industry has trebled in size in the last three years, but at the same time, the number of workers dying per year has risen from five to fifteen. As Odman says, “this is no coincidence.”

The estimated fourty shipyards in the Tuzla region on the outskirts of Istanbul and on the Marmara Sea coast have managed to increase the size of their enterprises by increasing work hours and the work rhythm.

In a report in April 2007, the Ministry of Employment and Social Security noted that of 44 shipyards only two had taken all precautions prescribed by the law in order to ensure work safety, while the others were delaying.

Killed by haste, not lack of hard hats

The workers in Tuzla are not dying because they are not wearing hard hats or goggles; in the shipbuilding sector, weights are measured not in tons but in gross tons – a piece of metal falling onto a worker weighs 3.5 tons. When these parts are lifted from one place to the next in a hurry in order to keep up with the “success” of the industry, forklifts are used instead of cranes in the narrow confines of the yard. If it falls, it kills the worker, technician or engineer.

Workers also die from falling off insecure scaffolding on the outside of ships, put up in a hurry.

They die because their employers, the shipyard owners with a great profit margin, are not ensuring work place safety.

There have been cases where workers have fallen into the sea or into the ship without anyone noticing for hours, even days. If, in the hurry to finish a contract, oxygen hoses and electrical cables are not kept apart, a welder can die in an explosion.

It is incomprehensible how such neglect on the part of the shipyard owners has been tolerated.

Countless subcontractors will never ensure basic safety

Another factor is the subcontracting system, which has been encouraged by owners in order to increase competitiveness and flexible employment.
With the subcontracting system, the main job of building a ship is divided into between 30 and 50 smaller projects, all carried out in the same yard; it is impossible for all the subcontractors to collaborate and provide workplace safety.

Again, the main employers, the shipyard owners, are avoiding their duties to ensure a safe yard.

Most workers not part of permanent staff

Another issue is insecure employment. Of around 1,000 workers per shipyard, only around 100 are registered as permanent staff, which means that there are only medical provisions and safety officers calculated for 100 people.

It is not surprising that the Limter-Is trade union for shipyard builders has to fight for “the right to live” before any other rights. This is the shadow side of the industry’s “success.”

The report by the monitoring commission has suggested that shipyard owners must take responsibility for all their workers, not only 10 percent of them, insure them and register them in their workplace. This also means that the Ministry of Employment needs to do its duty of inspection.

As new shipyards are opening in Turkey, it is vital that action be taken. (AO/TK)

http://www.bianet.org/english/kategori/english/104881/shipbuilding-success-based-on-human-sacrifice