Kazak Builders Making Fatal Mistakes
Sloppy safety procedures are costing lives on Astana’s building sites.
Kazak Builders Making Fatal Mistakes
Sloppy safety procedures are costing lives on Astana’s building sites.
As Astana rises swiftly from the middle of the Kazak steppe, the workers building the country’s new capital are dying in growing numbers.
Serious injury and death is a fact of life on the city’s building sites as construction firms cut corners and ignore basic safety rules in their haste to turn this onetime provincial outpost into a gleaming and modern capital city.
Workers tell of scaling multi-storey buildings without proper equipment, of fires caused by lax safety procedures and terrible accidents like the December 21 collapse of a crane that claimed the life of one worker.
Last December, a housing complex located within 100 metres of parliament and the presidential residence partially collapsed. One person died and others were injured. Local journalists reported that it was a passer by that called for an ambulance and that doctors were kept waiting before being allowed on the site.
Kazbek, a builder, told IWPR that despite the danger most workers don’t complain for fear of losing their jobs.
“There are lots of people who would like to work here - they’re queuing up,” he said. “The message is clear here – if you don’t like it, leave. That’s why we all shut up. We’re afraid. It’s scary. We build 20-something storey buildings, and work at the very top without any safety equipment. Nobody cares about us.”
Nineteen-year-old Aleksei glazed a high-rise building with only minimal protection. “We worked with no more than our own climbing gear,” he said.
President Nursultan Nazarbaev named Astana as Kazakstan’s new capital in 1997 and since then the city of 300,000 has been a huge building site. Over 11 months in 2004, 359,600 square metres of housing went up, 63 per cent more than in the previous year.
With buildings go up at a startling pace - on average taking no more than one year to finish - basic safety techniques are often being ignored.
One striking example came on February 18 when during the president’s annual address to the nation from parliament, the lights went out. The live broadcast was stopped and Nazarbaev’s speech cut short. It later emerged that workers on a nearby building site had cut through an electricity cable while laying water pipes.
The country’s ministry of labour and social protection said the building trade has the second highest injury rate of all professions in Kazakstan. More than 3,000 workers were reported injured while working in industry in 2004, the majority of whom were builders. Around 5,000 fines for safety infringements were handed out to Kazak businesses, totalling 63.3 million tenge (500,000 US dollars).
In the first quarter of 2004, according to the ministry, 8,000 infringements of work safety laws were found during an inspection of the building trade. The most common was broken work contracts or the absence of a contract altogether. Also, normal working hours were breached and wages not paid on time, the ministry said.
However, Kazakstan’s state work safety inspectorate insists the situation is not as bad as some are making out, even blaming the workers themselves for breaking the safety rules.
“Injury levels in Astana over recent years have not changed, considering that the number of buildings, and therefore the number of workers, is increasing,” Erkyn Rakhimbergenov, a government inspector, told IWPR. “Yes, there are accidents. But a building site is a building site.”
He said the safety inspectorate in Astana regularly checks all building sites and factories. If evidence of infringements of work laws emerges, action is taken, he said, adding that 384 cases were opened against negligent employers in 2004.
Leonid Solomin, leader of the Kazakstan Conference of Independent Unions, is not convinced. He believes workers’ rights on building sites are being infringed more frequently than official figures suggest.
“The work inspectorate is not in a condition today to cover all firms and enterprises. If inspectors manage to visit twice a year, that’s really good,” Solomin said, adding the law must be changed to better protect builders.
He said most construction workers don’t know their rights and tells the story of builders on one site who were fired for attempting to create a union.
“The scariest thing is that the workers are not organised, and conditions have not been created so that workers understand that they are protected by their union,” Solomin said. “Nobody defends the workers’ rights. Employers exploit these problems with the law. Workers today do not know their rights. All that is important to them is earning enough for a crust of bread, and therefore they agree to any conditions and, in effect, make slaves of themselves.”
Alim Bekenov is the pseudonym of an IWPR correspondent in Astana.
