LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

Malaysian lives are important

Posted

To the editor:

(re: “COVID shut down your Malaysian plant? Call Engel,” May 14)

I experienced feelings of deep dismay in reading your recent story in The Riverdale Press.

In a nutshell, the story describes the push in early April to secure a kind of disposable mask that would help keep COVID-affected patients’ airways open while they waited for scarce ventilators. A Florida company informed Albany that it could manufacture the masks and ship them to New York, but that the order could not be filled because a factory in Malaysia that made key components of the masks had shut down due to the coronavirus pandemic.

The head of the Florida company got his congressman to lean on the Malaysian government, which relented and opened the factory to 50 percent capacity. Not satisfied that that would result in sufficiently rapid supply of the needed parts, the Florida congressman asked House Foreign Affairs chair Eliot Engel to use his influence.

Engel, in turn, pressured the Malaysian government, leading to the factory being told to operate at 100 percent capacity. This, an Engel spokesperson conceded, required the Malaysian factory workers to work “in close conditions.”

Soon, the Florida factory received the parts it needed, completed the masks, shipped them to New York, where due to social distancing and other emergency measures, they were not as critically needed as they had been.

Gov. Cuomo thanked the Florida company anyway.

This tale is told as a happy one of American political influence leading to Asian workers helping to solve life-and-death health care shortages in New York. What is missing from the piece — and I find this chilling — is any account of the toll on the Malaysian factory workers forced, because of pressure from an American CEO and two American representatives, to work at full capacity “in close conditions” because their work was “essential” for New Yorkers.

New York’s needs led to the Malaysian workers being deemed essential. How nice. How important the Malaysian workers must have felt (sarcasm). But were they also deemed expendable?

What were the conditions in the plant? Did the workers have sufficient personal protective equipment and other physical and economic protection? Did the working conditions in the plant lead to an increase in COVID contagion in Kuala Lumpur and other parts of Malaysia?

The story contains a lot of self-congratulations and good feeling on the part of Engel and his aides, of Gov. Cuomo, and the CEO of the Florida medical plant. The headline speaks volumes: “COVID shut down your Malaysian plant? Call Engel.” To me, it displays a naked neo-colonialism and disregard for working people that is no less ugly for being unconscious.

In the United States, essential workers in industry after industry are rising up, striking, demanding hazard pay, paid sick leave, safe working conditions, and acknowledgement that if they are essential, they are not sacrificial. Let’s support those workers everywhere, including health care workers who are courageously protesting against the for-profit health care system that disregards their needs.

And let us not expert our peril to workers in other nations. A Malaysian life is as precious as American life, isn’t it?

Jennifer Scarlott

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Jennifer Scarlott,

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