TBILISI/July 16 (The Bulletin) — Another worker in Tbilisi died on a construction site, at least the 13th construction worker to die in Georgia this year.
Reports said that 16-year-old George Beshkenadze fell down the liftshaft of a 14-storey construction building that he had been working on in central Tbilisi.
Campaigners have said that safety measures on Georgian construction sites are notoriously slack. At least six construction workers in Tbilisi have already died this year on sites and in January, seven men were killed in their sleep at the apartment they shared in central Tbilisi by a carbon monoxide leak.
The authorities have said that they will also investigate how the company managing the site where Beshkenadze died was able to hire a teenager.
The law doesn’t ban companies from hiring 16-year-olds, but they are not allowed to do hard manual job
until they are 18.
ENDS
— This story was first published in issue 417 of the weekly Central Asia & South Caucasus Bulletin