Occupational Health and Safety Rights of E-Waste Management Workers In Bangladesh

Abstract

Bangladesh is facing a serious crisis of huge accumulation of discarded electronic equipment (popularly referred to as ‘e-wastes’) owing to indiscriminate dumping, fuelled by a booming consumer demand of electronics and mounting obsolescence of products due to increasing innovation. The presence of highly toxic substances within them has begotten tremendous challenges on their handling and disposal, exposing workers in the e-waste recycling sector to various life-threatening diseases and long term damages to the body through toxic exposure. In Bangladesh, there still has not been proper classification of e-wastes according to their danger levels and there are different socio-economic impediments to implementation of the existing workplace safety protocols in our legislation. This paper focuses on eliciting the expediency of legislations in Bangladesh in safeguarding the occupational health and safety rights of e-waste management workers. It is a purely qualitative research since it is an assessment of national and international legislations and a few distinguished articles authored by dedicated researchers illustrating the e-waste scenario in Bangladesh. It has been ascertained that although there are various provisions for worker safety the matter of e-wastes remain largely unaddressed for want of proper documentation, sufficient awareness, and procedural flaws, socio-economic and practical factors prompting lax implementation of the current worker safety provisions in the e-waste recycling factories and depriving them of access to proper juridical procedures.