A Company Made P.P.E. for the World. Now Its Workers Have the Virus.
Top
Glove, the world’s largest rubber glove maker, has enjoyed record
profits in the pandemic, even as thousands of its low-paid workers in
Malaysia suffer from a large outbreak of Covid-19.
BANGKOK — Day after day, as the pandemic gathered force, Yam Narayan Chaudhary stood sentry for 13.5-hour shifts at Top Glove, the Malaysian company that is the world’s largest disposable glove maker. Thousands of foreign workers, many from Nepal like Mr. Chaudhary, lined up as he checked their temperatures and waved them through to the factory.
Top Glove, which controls roughly a quarter of the global rubber glove market, was operating in overdrive, part of a frenzied effort to supply the world with protective equipment for the coronavirus. But as the company shipped gloves all over the world and enjoyed record profits, its low-paid workers in Malaysia began to suffer from a ferocious outbreak of Covid-19, the result of its own inadequate protections, critics say.
In interviews with The New York Times, five current and former Top Glove employees described working with masks soaked in sweat, sweltering in crowded hostels, taking Covid tests for which they were never given results and enduring week after week of overtime shifts that may have left them more vulnerable to the disease.
On Dec. 12, Mr. Chaudhary, 29, died of Covid-19 complications at a hospital in the Malaysian state of Selangor. His friends said he had to wait three days to be admitted to the hospital, even as his breathing deteriorated. The workers say the decision to check into a hospital depends on Top Glove management.
“Our
whole family was very much shocked when we heard my brother is no
more,” said Bhabindra Chaudhary, who lives in a village in western Nepal
where his family are subsistence farmers. “We feel it’s Top Glove’s
failure that they are not able to protect their workers.”
Manufacturers in Malaysia have provided essential products during the pandemic, supplying about 60 percent of the world’s disposable gloves. But these companies’ reliance on low-paid migrants laboring without proper protection means that the virus’s victims often come from their own ranks.
About 5,700 of Top Glove’s 11,215 employees in just one of its manufacturing complexes in Malaysia have tested positive for the coronavirus since November, making that cluster of factories the largest active Covid hot spot in Malaysia, according to Ministry of Health statistics.
The outbreak came even as workers and labor activists had warned for months that social distancing rules were not being followed. One whistle-blower said he was recently fired from Top Glove, creating a culture of fear in which few foreign workers dare come forward lest they share the same fate.
“Some challenges arise due to the surge of global demands on gloves considering the pandemic,” Top Glove said in a statement to The Times. “We have mitigation plans to address the challenges to ensure our employees can work in a safe working environment to deliver the lifesaving gloves to those who need it the most.”
The company said that more than 10,000 employees had been tested as of Dec. 16, and that 93 percent of those who had contracted the virus had recovered. Top Glove would not say how many of its workers had tested positive.
Across the world, frontline
workers such as meatpackers or farmers are often particularly exposed to
Covid-19, even as they are subjected to long hours and paltry
compensation.
In Singapore, which neighbors Malaysia, almost half of the city-state’s low-wage migrant workers living in high-density dormitories have been infected with the coronavirus, the government announced last week. While there have been few deaths from the virus in Singapore, nearly 153,000 foreign laborers contracted it, compared with fewer than 4,000 cases in the rest of the population, an indicator of how quickly the disease spreads in crowded quarters.
Touring Top Glove hostels last month, M. Saravanan, Malaysia’s minister of human resources, called the living conditions “terrible.”
“This is a matter of life and death of vulnerable workers,” he said.
This month, the Malaysian Labor Department opened 19 investigations to determine whether Top Glove had violated labor standards in five states. The Labor Department says it expects to file charges soon, and Top Glove was ordered to suspend operations in some of its factories for two weeks.
At Top Glove and other disposable glove makers in Malaysia, workers say their employers regularly ignore social distancing and other pandemic strictures even as these companies grow richer amid a production boom. From September to November, Top Glove’s net profits rose more than 20 times compared with the same period last year. - New York Times, 20/12/2020
see earlier post:
Top Glove worker who died ‘came to hospital too late’? Whose fault? Employer? Government?
***Note we are merely sharing MTUC-Penang's statement, and it does not mean we agree with its contents and/or positions taken
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