safety..the most important!!!

Sad. Something is not quite right there.

I am not at all surprised. I've seen a video of a prominent Turkish factory and the workers were bare foot and had no air filters while laying up fiberglass. Such a total lack of concern for basic safety and health that, if I were considering a purchase, I would not, on those grounds alone.

I guess someone has to pay in the end, for a lower cost product. If one can afford to buy a yacht, shouldn't one be willing to pay enough to cover a worker's basic safety? OK, off of my soap box!

Makes you think of all the efforts to eliminate child labor in the carpet industry in various countries. I have to agree with you goplay.

Unfortunately, this is another classic example of destructive competition. In Turkey, the ship and yacht building industries have seen tremendous growth in the last 10 years. New merchant vessel construction, repair/dry-dock operations and scrap trade are going at full capacity along with the prices are flying through the air. It certainly is a good time for the shipyards. Their competitive advantage has always been their low price and their accessible geographical location. However, to keep this price advantage, they have to resort to unacceptable measures in their approaches to management.

On the yachting side, there is also quite a demand for cold-molded, especially for traditional wooden ketches known as ‘Gulets’. In the yacht builders’ yards, the workforce is quite happy and the labor turnover is very low. The 'good' builders (like Egemar) are ISO-9001 certified and fully comply with the OHSAS regulations. One example of these achievements is that the Vri-Pack owner’s order for a Vicem 92 Classic Cruiser.

However, many (although not all) ship yards who make cargo vessels and liquid tankers are run with a blind eye to their human resources, because of ferocious cost-cutting,; they keep their workers at minimum wage, hire them untrained from the countryside. The differences in standards between the yacht builders and the ship builders are easily seen. The commodity prices such as steel, sheet iron and petroleum-derived raw materials continue to increase the yards’ variable costs. The owners lower their costs from the wages. The working conditions are dangerous and many accidents have happened because of this. The labor force does not get adequate training, the shifts are over-worked and quality problems sometimes arise. I have seen one supervisor assigned to every worker, to constantly check his/her work to ensure the quality stays the same. This adds more costs and the attention that should be given to safety is overlooked. The number of orders are keeping the yards very busy, but causing them to neglect the most important aspect of a business: Its people.

There should be more local regulation to ensure that this does not happen again. For me, having someone die at your workplace is beyond any comprehension in this day and age. It represents a total failure in management.

I hope these ‘bad apples’ do not affect the majority who run their businesses very efficiently and humanly; who build beautiful vessels and yachts we can all appreciate.

the cheap labor is not the only factor at play in these low cost countries, Its that Human life is seen as being cheap as well, loose one worker today pic up another two tomorrow, I see it here in Asia as well as when I was in Africa, I own my own manufacturing outsourcing company and we deal with this type of thing all the time, but I must say it is slowly getting better then what it was 10 or even 5 years ago.

thanks, BTW great site good info here