Al Jazeera: Reflections on the Bangladesh factory disaster

So today at Al Jazeera  there is a great post by Paula Chakravartty and Stephanie Luce echoing some of the thoughts that I had the other day only they say it better....


May Day: Reflecting on Bangladesh factory disaster and corporate terror

While garment manufacturing has led to impressive growth in Bangladesh's
overall GDP, profits from the industry go primarily to garment retailers
and brands in Europe and the US [AP]

How is it that we label some acts of violence with the brush of global terrorism while others are relegated to the more mundane category of everyday violence? Tsarnaev brothers were instantly characterised as terrorists, and Muslim terrorists at that, with a national and social media frenzy dissecting their crimes boosted by the live spectacle of the “manhunt” in Boston. Yet in the same week, an explosion in a fertiliser factory killed 14 people and caused enormous damage to a small town in West Texas - with little media attention. The Boston Bombings were deliberate acts of terror committed by villains targeting the innocent; the Texas explosion while tragic, was seen as accidental - as opposed to the outcome of the deregulation of industry and safety standards - and therefore easily forgotten. The horrific factory fire on April 24 outside of Dhaka, Bangladesh, that killed more than 400 people, mostly young Muslim women, and injured at least 1,000 more might conceivably also be understood as an example of globally networked violence. The eight-storeyed Rana Plaza complex, where the fire broke out, housed a variety of businesses, including a bank and five garment factories that employed 3,122 garment workers. Workers noticed a large crack in the building on April 23 and the building collapsed the next day. Police ordered it to be evacuated, and the bank on the second floor told its workers not to come in the next day. However, the garment factories decided to stay open for business, and the result was senseless and preventable tragedy. This was only the latest in a series of factory fires and collapsed buildings in Bangladesh that have killed over 900 workers since 2005 and injured thousands more.... 

Who is guilty?.....Continue Reading 

 In their conclusion, the authors provide an idea of what it would cost to implement safety measures. I have made them bold - I think we could all handle the few more cents that it would cost to keep these workes safe. Take a minute and visit the worker safety sites, particularly the Asian Floor Wage. I think that the only why the workers will be treated fairly is if they do establish some wage that is consistent across countries!

This May Day, we might want to return to the similarities between the acts of violence outside of Dhaka and in Boston, both events resulted in senseless bloodshed of innocent victims. While we might debate how to prevent tragedies like the Boston marathon bombings, it is abundantly clear that enforcement of safety standards and basic regulations would help prevent the sheer scale of terror and violence from being unleashed yet again in Bangladesh.

The International Labor Rights Forum, (ILRF) the Workers Rights Consortium (WRC) and the Asia Floor Wage campaign are making efforts to demand accountability in Bangladesh.

It would cost only a small fraction of the profits that this global industry aggressively extracts. Walmart, for example, would have to pay $500,000 a year for two years to fund the ILRF programme - or about 2 percent of their CEO salary in 2012.

The WRC estimates that the ILRF safety programme would cost only about 10 cents per garment if spread out over all the country’s exports - a small sum for corporations or even western consumers, who benefit from the violence that comes from an economic model that promotes profits over human life.