Sad but not surprising news out of Bangladesh:
MUMBAI — More than 100 people died Saturday and Sunday in a fire at a garment factory outside Dhaka, Bangladesh, in one of the worst industrial tragedies in that country.
It took firefighters all night to put out the blaze at the factory, Tazreen Fashions, after it started about 7 p.m. on Saturday, a retired fire official said by telephone from Dhaka, the capital. At least 111 people were killed, and scores of workers were taken to hospitals for treatment of burns and smoke inhalation.
“The main difficulty was to put out the fire; the sufficient approach road was not there,” said the retired official, Salim Nawaj Bhuiyan, who now runs a fire safety company in Dhaka. “The fire service had to take great trouble to approach the factory.”
Bangladesh’s garment industry, the second-largest exporter of clothing after China, has a notoriously poor fire safety record. Since 2006, more than 500 Bangladeshi workers have died in factory fires, according to Clean Clothes Campaign, an antisweatshop advocacy group in Amsterdam. Experts say many of the fires could have been easily avoided if the factories had taken the right precautions. Many factories are in cramped neighborhoods and have too few fire escapes, and they widely flout safety measures. The industry employs more than three million workers in Bangladesh, most of them women.
(via NYTimes.com)
It was just a little more than 100 years ago that more than a hundred workers, most if not all of them women, died in a fire at the Triangle Waistshirt Factory in New York City. The doors had been locked to discourage petty theft and unauthorized breaks. Many of them died using the on,y exit available: the window. Barbarous working conditions have now been exported to the third world, where they can be safely hidden away, and where events like this will pass largely unnoticed by the ultimate consumers and unopposed by pesky unions. Perhaps there’s some small amount of progress in the past hundred years; so far as we know these women weren’t locked in the factory as were the New York women, though little good that did them. Strange how in these days of globalization we have had no problem structuring treaties that more than amply protect the “rights” of capital, yet it is beyond our capacity to protect the rights of workers.
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