When an old ship is broken apart for scrap, the workers inherit everything dangerous built into or left inside it: asbestos insulation, leftover explosive fuel vapours, and chemical waste. The job of taking a ship apart concentrates hazards that were spread across its whole working life onto the people doing the cutting.
In places where scrapping depends on a large supply of poor workers, each worker is easy to replace, so the work is organised as if their lives were expendable. Danger is accepted as a cost of business because losing a worker costs the operation little.
A scrapped ship is worth a great deal as steel and parts, but that value is captured by the merchants who bid on the salvaged materials, not by the laborers who risk their bodies to free it. The same ship produces comfortable profit at the top and danger and poverty at the bottom.