Unions, health & safety, and personal injury solicitors are things to celebrate.

Here in the UK, with our access to union representatives, health and safety laws, and personal injury solicitors, we sometimes hear that the 'blame and claim' culture is holding back the benefits of unrestrained business practices that would streamline an industry to the benefit of all its workers and customers. It is a point of view that can be put across with charm by well-spoken industrialists to sound entirely convincing.

However, one effect of this point of view can be found in the shipyards at Alang, in the Indian state of Gujarat. This is one of the world's sites where enormous ships are brought in to be decommissioned and recycled by workers with far too little protection.

Toward the end of 2007, workers at Alang began to work on disassembling the SS Blue Lady, after a court case to decide whether the ship was too toxic to be safely dismantled. Although the Indian Supreme Court finally decided that the breaking of the ship would be allowed, it imposed guidelines to ensure the ship was properly decontaminated and the workers appropriately trained.

Greenpeace insists that the ship, packed with substances including asbestos, PCBs and radioactive materials, is beyond the decontamination facilities available at Alang, and the fact that a large percentage of the shipbreakers there suffer with respiratory problems is a sign that training is either not reaching all the workers, or is ineffective.

A committee set up by the Indian Supreme Court has claimed that asbestosis has affected one in six workers at Alang, a disease for which compensation claims are regularly made under UK law. Arun Mehta, Gujarat State secretary of the Communist Party of India, has claimed that "at Alang, labour laws are not respected. If there are accidents, deaths, they go unreported. Sometimes, the families of victims are even not told about them."

Previous incidents at Alang include the asphyxiation of six workers as carbon dioxide was released during the breaking up of a Russian vessel. The local medical service is understaffed. It is in situations like this that the presence of Greenpeace, let alone of the union representatives and personal injury solicitors that could support the workers, would seem more than worthwhile.

Yet the workers that Greenpeace is attempting to protect have protested against the organisation's presence, as being protected from doing this life-threatening work is simultaneously being prevented from doing any work at all. In 2007, Reuters quoted one shipyard worker, Rafiq Sheikh, as saying "Forget toxic fumes and chemicals, I might die due to poverty."

Other voices have been raised saying that any intervention from the UK is laden with colonial intent, or just an example of liberal hand-wringing. There is also a widespread idea that, as UK industries worked through its industrial revolution and largely ceased forcing people into work-related injuries in the name of profit, shipyards like Alang will follow the same track and begin to protect its workers.

One sign that these voices could be correct is the existence within India of groups of civil rights activists such as the People's Union for Civil Liberties, and the Mumbai Port Trust, Dock and General Employees Union. The latter group recently visited the UK's GMB Union to gather information. Yet these groups face at least one challenge that the UK trade union movement did not, as they must fight for workers' rights even while the economies of other industrialised nations rely on shipyards like Alang.

These groups also face the same quandary - does hoping for anything for Sheikh mean having to choose between hoping that he can have a life curtailed by poverty, or hoping that he can have a life curtailed by chemicals? Is a hope that his life need not be curtailed at all simply nave and impossible? It is certainly impossible for anything to change if no-one hopes for it.

So whenever some smart industrialists begin to complain about the repressive culture holding back whichever UK industry is close to their heart, they are arguing for a move toward the situation in Alang. It is important to remember that the red tape that ties the hands of these CEOs is actually what protects the hands of their machine operators.

For this reason, perhaps it's time to be grateful for our health and safety executive, our union representatives, our personal injury solicitors, our third-party insurance; time to recognise them as the signs that locally, we can call our economy humane, which is something worth aspiring to. But if our economy is only humane within the UK's own borders, we have more to hope for.

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