Not long after I began to take a professional interest in metalcasting, I started to get a steady delivery of e-mailed links to a series of articles in the New York Times. The messages were more or less in synch with the appearance of the stories documenting the environmental and workplace safety transgressions of a certain large manufacturer of ductile iron castings. The whole incident took on velocity when the same story was told in parallel outrage by the PBS documentary series, Frontline.

Of course, the details of the manufacturing process, indeed the specific importance of the metalcaster's products, was of no importance to the reporting. The point was to elaborate the malignant social effect of a particular company — and, by casual association, any company involved in a similar activity.

The reports had their intended effects: the metalcaster was brought low and made to pay lots of fines and settlement fees, and the authors, publishers, and customers of the New York Times were made to feel justified in their ignorant indignation about how the world works. The cast products remain as essential as ever to civilized society, and so the buyers of those products just looked for new supply sources.

Presumably, some of those sources are now overseas, perhaps in India, because the whole incident seems to be happening again.

For the past few days I've been getting a new stream of links in my e-mail, from people I know and don't know. The New York Times has posted a new report about the appalling origins of manhole covers sourced by a New York utility company from an Indian foundry, Shakti Industries. This time, the story is enhanced by a video illustrating the metalcasting techniques that still prevail in many parts of the world.

“At Shakti, street grates, manhole covers and other castings were scattered across the dusty yard. Inside, men wearing sandals and shorts carried coke and iron ore piled high in baskets on their heads up stairs to the furnace feeding room.
On the ground floor, other men, often shoeless and stripped to the waist, waited with giant ladles, ready to catch the molten metal that came pouring out of the furnace. A few women were working, but most of the heavy lifting appeared to be left to the men.”

The story continues in a predictable fashion. Anyone familiar with metalcasting will not be surprised that “sparks fly” or that the heat is intense. Anyone familiar with the journalistic technique will be ready for the implications of cruelty and greed. “We can’t maintain the luxury of Europe and the United States, with all the boots and all that,” a Shakti director concedes.

The point of the story really is delivered when a spokesmen for one of the utilities buying these castings is made to utter some assurances about their future purchasing policies. They are free to make decisions for themselves, even to discontinue buying from suppliers like Shakti if they choose. But where will this lead, I wonder. Working conditions are easy enough to monitor in a free country like India, but what about the conditions is less open societies?

I'm not indifferent to the pitiable working conditions in the world's emerging economies. Last year's outrage about Brazil's pig-iron industry centered on the deception and coercion used to recruit and keep workers, and the violations of national labor regulations, as much as on the actual conditions.

I've been a regular critic of the protectionist impulse in American industry, which finds evidence of its belief in virtually every bit of economic and business reporting — some of them sent me these links, too — but I think they have at least half of an argument to make in this case.

It's not enough to raise an outrage about the unsavory working conditions somewhere far away, and shame people of good conscience into dissociating from it. Nor is it enough to point to this situation as more proof of the victimization of American workers whose positions have been sacrificed to low-cost foreign labor.

If one is to be shocked into action about all this, then one is going to have to adopt a responsible understanding of how such industries operate, and how such products find their way to New York City or any other civilized society that generally overlooks the costs or origins of its manhole covers. And, one is going to have to agree that greater value must be placed on, and paid for, these essential articles.

Otherwise, the outrage is cheaper than the next available suppliers' quote for delivery.