Outdoor sweatshops
Ken MacDonald advocates for mountain porters.
U of T at Scarborough geographer Ken MacDonald went to the Karakoram Mountains in northern Pakistan as a graduate student in 1986 to measure the amount of water melting out of the glaciers surrounding K2, the world’s second-highest peak.
He returned three years later to do fieldwork for his PhD dissertation. But living in the mountain villages, he found something he wasn’t looking for.
Mountaineering, traditionally practiced only by elite climbers, had exploded and brought thousands of trekkers to the Karakorams and neighbouring Himalayas each year. “When these expeditions came through, men I knew from the village would go off as porters [known as “khurpas” in this region and “sherpas” in the Nepalese Himalayas], carrying the bags of the climbers. It is impossible to do these treks without hiring porters.”
While portering provided the subsistence farmers with much-needed revenue, MacDonald found they were treated horribly. “I was amazed at how the tourists were, like you and me, perfectly aware of human rights and social justice, but when they hit the ground in this place, those ideas went right out the window. There was something that allowed them to disregard these men and their rights. They would never think of treating a cab driver in Toronto this way.”
The porters were paid low wages and usually given sub-par equipment for trekking in freezing temperatures. “When they returned to the village, you could see the physical injuries. Chronic lacerations on their feet, bruises all over, burns and rope cuts on their shoulders, hernias and sheets of skin burned off their backs because they were carrying kerosene drums that had leaked. There was a physical toll that no one was paying attention to.”
MacDonald also began to notice that mountain trekking’s popularity had transformed it into a complex business, with local and foreign travel firms looking for a piece of the action. “They were trying to increase their own cut of the money, which left little for the porters.”
Dismayed, MacDonald did what he knew how – he launched a formal research study. Framing it as an investigation into the political economy of labour relations in mountaineering, he came to startling conclusions. One was that the bad labour practices in Pakistan were not unique. He found the same problems in other developing regions where adventure tourism is popular – Peru, Nepal and Africa.
“That says something important about the expansion of global capitalism and global tourism. The structures of labour exploitation in this industry are becoming standardized.”
As for the curiously nonchalant attitudes of trekkers and tour directors toward the porters’ lack of proper equipment and poor working conditions, MacDonald concluded that “they were able to justify this by way of expressions of difference and attitudes of ‘these people are different from us, they’re naturally stronger than we are, they were born here, so they don’t feel the pain that we do and they don’t need the equipment we need.’ These justifications have been around since British colonial rule and have been reproduced over time until they’ve become the accepted rationale of justifying a structure of exploitation.”
But when the research was completed, MacDonald felt the urge to act on it. So he formed Khurpa Care, an international not-for-profit organization aimed at improving the porters’ working conditions. While he is passionate about addressing the problems his research has highlighted, he is just as anxious to see Khurpa Care fold.
“My interest is in getting these conditions dealt with. Adventure tourism has good potential for the local people, but we need to change the ethos of the industry and get improved attitudes and conditions to spread to other places. And if we can do that, we can close up shop.”