“These international, Western brands have a lot of responsibility for these fire issues,” labor leader Kalpona Akter told the New York Times. “In this factory, there was a pile of fabrics and yarn stored on the ground floor that caught fire. Workers couldn’t evacuate through the stairs. What does this say about compliance?”
Some years ago, two Bangladeshi garment workers and a union organizer from that country visited The Progressive offices here in Madison, Wisconsin, along with labor activist Charles Kernaghan. The workers, whose factories supplied a number of American companies, told of regularly working from 8 in the morning till 10 or 11 at night seven days a week. They also described physical abuse, such as being hit in the leg for standing up from their stools and slapped for talking on the job.
The fire in Bangladesh is far from an anomaly. More than 500 garment workers have died there in the past six years. Other countries in South Asia have suffered similar calamities in the recent past. In September, a factory fire in Pakistan claimed an astonishing toll of almost 300 workers. It was the same tale of a complete neglect of labor rights.
“Workers were said to be unable to escape because the doors were locked,” The Guardian reported. “Allegedly, there was no emergency exit, with other doors blocked by piles of finished clothes, workers had to smash iron bars on the windows to jump several storeys to escape the flames, and unsafe chemicals in the rickety building made the smoke even more toxic.”
Here, too, the factory was making clothes for Western retailers, in this case jeans for the German discount chain Kik. What we have here is the global race to the bottom in action.
