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He is going to die.
He is very young. He was born in 1980.
This person is affected by silicosis.
He is a worker in the blue jean industry.
You don't know this, but in order for the jeans that you find in shops to be fashionable,
many people have probably lost their health.
For the first time in the world, silicosis has been detected in textile workers,
and it has been happening here in Turkey.
This is because of the products used for fading the clothes,
for example, permanganate.
Turkey is one of the world's main producers of jeans.
Here, as in other parts of the world, clothes are eroded with a sandblast stream
so that they appear to be used.
But this process is normally done in clandestine factories, without any security measures.
Many workers get silicosis.
This business is of a small nature,
and the people working there, they do it just for a short time.
After three months, they become unemployed and look for the same job in another place.
Ibrahim Yƶntem works for the Committee Against Kot Taslama,
- the erosion of clothes by sandblast as it is known in Turkey.
We wait for all of you to come to the documentary about silicosis!
We assisted the premiere of a documentary that criticizes the activity.
Most workers in this sector are rural migrants who go to the cities because of poverty.
In the village of Talischay, in Southeast Turkey, we met some of them.
After several years of working in the city of Karliova, all of them got silicosis.
You go there, it's a machine that works with sand,
it's a tube that throws sand and when it hits the trouser it goes everywhere.
This is a normal patient. This is one with silicosis.
See the difference.
We can't work in anything.
If you have worked in it, you can't work anymore.
Workers do at least 12 hours a day, six days a week.
Not a single cautionary measure is taken to avoid harming them.
Only in some factories were they given an inadequate white paper mask.
Did you know the risks?
We didn't know about them. Had we known, would we have done this?
Did you have insurance?
We did not.
When did you realize you were ill?
A friend from this village got sick and went to the doctor.
In fact, two people from this village have died.
This man went to the doctor and first they didn't know it was silicosis,
so they started to treat it as tuberculosis.
He quit his job, and finally died.
The other one found out it was silicosis, and went to many doctors trying to find a cure.
But he couldn't, because there is no cure for silicosis.
With another colleague, we tried to establish a case database,
and we diagnosed about 550 cases of workers affected by silicosis.
But we think there are around 3,500,
because there are 10,000 people working in this field
and, besides, most of them have no medical insurance.
In one single night just in Istanbul,
this sandblasting process can be applied to 500,000 jeans.
In Turkey, the activity is banned by the law, but nobody enforces it.
Many big companies, both Turkish and international, benefit from it.
They give the task to middlemen, who assign it to small, illegal factories,
which open only for a few months.
In some parts of this chain, there is no receipt,
and this is why it is very hard for us to follow this chain,
because there is no legal link between the small and the big companies.
Did you know the owner of the factory?
Of course, we knew him. I know his name and surname,
but if we tried to take him to the court, they'd change the name in the documents
and finally our comrades are fined for suing him for nothing.
If the big companies are sued, they will be discharged,
and this exoneration will even be good publicity for them, somehow.
We have the duty to start some cases and show that these people are getting harmed,
and to make the public aware of this process.
This is how you can punish these companies, by making people aware.
In the meantime, in Taslichay, as in many other villages in Turkey,
those affected by silicosis, whose health is harmed forever,
have no other choice but to wait.
People now just leave their house in the morning, come to the square, and go back home.
We don't have energy for anything more.