Exactly two weeks have passed since the Dhaka garment factory complex collapsed in Bangladesh, yet bodies are still being pulled from underneath the rubble.
As of this morning, the Bangladesh army has confirmed 804 deaths. That’s over 800 human beings crushed to death under the pressure of a globalized economy that exploits the world’s most vulnerable to further enrich Fortune 500s like Walmart and Disney.
But don’t blame the multinationals, we’re told, because this is the fault of the building owner who forced workers back inside the building after a cracks were discovered in the structure.
The mostly Western multinationals that profit from deadly sweatshop labor would like nothing more than for the world to blame the building owner and move on. That’s the reason they adopted this very system of subcontracting. It allows them to avoid liability when hundreds of people inevitably die in factory fires and building collapses, or when dozens of workers jump to their deaths because no life is a step up from the horrific working conditions they’re forced to endure.
Two days after the collapse, my older sister pointed to a picture of ill-equipped rescue workers helping survivors slide down bed sheets and she asked me why clothing brands and major retailers weren’t aiding in the rescue effort, which they could easily afford to do. I responded with laughter, not because it was funny, but because major retailers consistently refuse to spend a dime aiding people whose lives are shattered while making their products. And they actively block any and all efforts to improve safety standards for the sweatshop workers that manufacture their products. So the thought of Walmart or H&M suddenly caring about the the people their policies kill seemed like a joke.
Aside from the body count, the worst aspect of this latest workplace disaster is that its newsworthiness has faded, making the likelihood of some level of accountability for major retailers a distant fantasy.
As Michelle Chen explains at In These Times, future factory disasters are inevitable because multinationals remain unaccountable for their deadly policies:
While companies feign ignorance and puzzlement over “what went wrong” at Rana, they’ve already proven that they’re well aware of the root problem. They shipped their manufacturing overseas specifically to avoid protective regulations and thus keep overhead and labor costs unfathomably cheap. Conversely, corporations could reverse this vicious trade-off between rights and profits by investing heavily to improve working conditions and strengthen safety enforcement, as well as monitoring under a program like the Bangladesh safety agreement. But that would mean expending the very same resources that they’d worked so hard to hoard by contracting with the cheapest and most dangerous workplaces in the world.
So the market logic will continue as long as the cheap clothes keep flying off the rack. Whether or not the Rana incident ultimately shames multinationals to get serious about workplace safety, garment workers in Bangladesh are already wondering whether their factory will be the next disaster site.
So far as I can see, the only way to permanently end global exploitation of human beings is to destroy all immigration barrers between nations and create a free-flowing humanity. Not only would this measure stop the ability of global corporates to play the poor in one country off against the poor in another country, its would also strip governments of every excuse to wage war on each other , or to maintain a military at all. Plus- political despotism in every country would necessarily cease. If anyone thinks this idea is unrealistic, look at the alternativee. Absolute destruction for this planet.
May 8, 2013 at 1:51 pmOne man’s exploitation, is another man’s lifeline. Garments is, after all, a buyers’ market. And in this ‘profit-maximizing’ world we’ve chosen for ourselves – poor workers in (countries like) Bangladesh will favor a 1% probability of collapse over a 100% probability of starving.
May 8, 2013 at 8:01 pmSorry to tell it like it is,,,, but the “huddled masses waiting to breath free” are ALWAYS EXPENDABLE to the Slave empires of the day & another “military iindustrial complex”, looting & massacring “huddled masses waiting to breath free”
Too bad,,, The more things change, the more they stay the same.
May 8, 2013 at 11:16 pmLet’s not forget the subcontracting scapegoating that occurred after the BP oil spill and the pervasive expansion of subcontracting military contracts to independent multinational corporations that do not have to legally adhere to the laws of war as nations are subjected to internationally (although they are widely not enforced).
Free markets are a race to the bottom as told by left-leaning liberal institutions, and I haven’t seen a legitimate argument against this. Eventually, nations can become in tune with western ideological appeals to human rights and institutionalize regulations to ensure public safety and living wages, but multinational corporations can simply withdraw their financial support and move their industries to a different country that doesn’t have the lofty idealism to think humans should be afforded basic standards of living.
I guess Thomas Friedman’s argument is that eventually this process will happen so often, that every country will be ravished severely enough to build sovereign governmental institutions to prevent this type of malfeasance. But the fastest way to make this happen, is to continue exploiting indiscriminately through free market systems. At least that was my takeaway from The Lexus and the Olive Tree.
May 9, 2013 at 3:36 am“…but multinational corporations can simply withdraw their financial
support and move their industries to a different country…”
Exactly! If corporations are allowed the freedom to move to a different country, why arent the working people allowed the same freedom? Because then the corporations wouldnt be able to expoit them as prisoners within their own country with no legal rights to unionize or protest, as in Bangladesh and China. As a result the workers here are forced to compete with cheap prison slave labor abroad for a living wage. Just yesterday General Motors annouced that it is opening a new plant in China. This comes in the wake of their getting bailed out of total bankruptcy recently by U.S. taxpayerrs.
Those borders are there for one reason only. s
May 9, 2013 at 11:05 amLatest news from Bangladesh : 8 deaths in garment factory fire
DHAKA: A fire at a garment factory killed at least eight people Thursday in the latest disaster to hit Bangladesh’s textile industry, still reeling from the deaths of more than 900 people in a building collapse.
The cause of the fire was not known but authorities said it broke out during the night on the third floor of an 11-storey building housing two garment factories in the capital’s Darussalam district.
The owner of the Tung Hai sweater factory was among the victims, but there were no workers among the casualties as there was no overnight production, police and fire service officials said.
“It was a big fire but we managed to confine it on one floor,” Mahbubur Rahman, operations director of the nation’s fire service department, told AFP.
He said the victims died of suffocation after rushing into a stairwell and becoming overwhelmed by “toxic smoke from burnt acrylic clothing”.
http://www.thenews.com.pk/article-100212-8-dead-in-new-Bangladeshi-textile-tragedy—
May 9, 2013 at 4:55 amhttp://www.hindustantimes.com/world-news/Bangladesh/Bangladesh-building-collapse-death-toll-1-021/Article1-1057865.aspx
Bangladesh building collapse death toll 1,021
May 10, 2013 at 12:30 am