People rescue garment workers trapped at an eight-story building outside Dhaka, Bangladesh, on Thursday, April 25.

The death toll from the collapse of an eight-story building housing five garment factories in Bangladesh has surpassed 300 with an estimated 40 people still trapped beneath the rubble.

Am I the only one who gets the sense that poor brown workers are viewed as expendable by the hundreds? Matt Yglesias, who just yesterday argued that deadly workplace conditions in poor countries like Bangladesh are a good thing, seems to think so. And the world’s largest retailers, which continue to block industry-wide safety upgrades, seem to agree. Apparently sweatshops are more profitable when they function as death traps and no matter how many hundreds are killed, nothing changes.

The authorities have so far blamed the collapse on local politician and building owner Sohel Rana, who failed to obtain the necessary permits from the agency tasked with monitoring building safety. On top of that, Rana forced workers back to work a day after cracks were discovered in the building. A warrant has been issued for Rana’s arrest, though he is reportedly nowhere to be found.

This Rana guy sounds like a world-class asshole who should definitely be punished but to place all the blame on him or factory owners in general ignores the system that allows this stuff to happen. After all, over the last few years more than 700 people have died in factory fires in Bangladesh, not to mention the many building collapses that preceded Wednesday’s. As much as the Walmarts of the world want you to believe otherwise, these deaths were not the result of a few bad owners but rather a system created and maintained by the world’s largest retailers. And according to the Associated Press, a few hundred deaths every once and a while isn’t going to change the way they operate:

After a factory fire killed 112 garment workers in November, clothing brands and retailers continued to reject a union-sponsored proposal to improve safety throughout Bangladesh’s $20 billion garment industry. Instead, companies expanded a patchwork system of private audits and training that labor groups say improves very little in a country where official inspections are lax and factory owners have close relations with the government.

The labor groups were right; the private audits and corporate social responsibility programs did not prevent the latest building collapse or mitigate the death toll. According to the Wall Street Journal: 

Two Bangladeshi factories that were in the building, and suffered worker fatalities in its collapse, had cleared an audit by the Business Social Compliance Initiative, which was set up a decade ago by the Brussels-based Foreign Trade Association, a body that comprises some 1,000 European retailers such as Adidas, Esprit and Hugo Boss

The group said its auditors aren’t building engineers and didn’t take the state of the building into account when they conducted the checks. It is up to local authorities to ensure that construction and infrastructure are secure.

Of course it behooves retailers to leave the safety stuff up to the “local authorities” because it washes their hands of liability and practically guarantee that nothing will change since the “local authorities” are usually in bed with the retailers or they’re factory owners themselves. Just look at the way the “local authorities” have reacted to protests in recent days.

Police fired tear gas after relatives of the missing and dead burst into angry protests at the site of a building collapse on Friday in Savar, Bangladesh. (Munir Uz Zaman/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images)

Garment workers, who make as little as $38 a month under deadly conditions, are rightfully pissed at the callous disregard for their lives. That’s why hundreds of thousands went on strike Thursday “bringing production to a virtual standstill”, according to the Wall Street Journal. The “local authorities” response: Tear gas.

Meanwhile, labor groups have been calling for industry-wide safety improvements in Bangladesh garment factories for quite some time. What they’re proposing would cost retailers less than 10 cents more per garment. But this has been repeatedly rejected by major corporations like Walmart, which in 2011 argued it was not “financially feasible”. To be fair, Walmart only made $15 billion in profits that year, so a few extra pennies per garment was a lot to ask. (In case you missed it, I’m totally kidding)

Other companies that refuse to loosen their purse strings for safer conditions include Gap and the mother of all sweatshop exploiters, H&M, “which places the most apparel orders in Bangladesh and works with more than 200 factories there”, according to the AP. The New York Times reports that “labor activists have found labels inside the wreckage for clothes being made for JC Penney, Cato Fashions, the British retailer Primark, and other clothing brands.” I wonder if these companies also rejected the safety proposal?

What I found most striking is that, according to Reuters, “Sixty percent of Bangladesh’s garment exports go to Europe. The United States takes 23 percent and Canada takes 5 percent.”

That sounds an awful lot like neocolonialsim if you ask me, only the resource being exploited is actual people (poor brown people) and the exploiters are multi-national corporations instead of nation-states. That’s not to say that white workers aren’t exploited as well; they certainly are. But we seem to have accepted that poor brown workers, especially the kind that don’t speak English, are expendable by the hundreds. At this point, the West/global North (home to the exploiter class) barely bats an eyelash when hundreds if not thousands of brown people die easily preventable deaths. To function, Globalized corporatism depends on this racial indifference.

In a nutshell, retailers would be seriously fucked if everyone began to value brown as much as white. (An added bonus: Matt Yglesias would have nothing to write about.)