difference between oz and china, page-36

Grant

I do not recall referring to the US specifically the examples I used were UK coal mines and Australia.

But yes 100 to 120 years ago worker safety in the US and most other countries was very grim as is China now but the shere existance of the statistics I quoted earlier shows that many developed countries still were not properly addressing these issues in the first 75 years of the last century. Things may have been better then 120 years ago but there were still major issues.

What it does show is that many developed countries took around 150 years to develop the safe work practices we no have. Practices that have developed as we have become wealthier as nations and developed.

I do not see this a some sort of competition as to who has the worst record and when through stages of a countries development, most countries have a poor record albeit some worse than others.

Hopefully as China (and other developing countries) becomes more a part of the developed world so will the pressure increase on them to make improvements in these areas and hopefully it will not take then 150 years to reach the level we are currently at.

But we do have to bear in mind when being critical or applying pressure that it was not that long ago our record was not that great in this area either and that we still at times are the onesl exploiting the lower standards in these countries.

OK Tedi mine

Eveready Factory fire in India

Use of sweet shops by comapnies like Nike.

Just to mention 3 incidents hwere developed countries have recently benefited from much lower worker and environmnetal requirements in developing countries