generalspeaking

Tuesday, November 27, 2012

Walmart, Carrefour, IKEA

"Oh, Allah, where's my soul? Where's my son?"
"I want the factory owner to be hanged. For him, many have died, many have gone."
Distraught mother, Sabina Yasmine, Dhaka, Bangladesh

The price is right. The salaries of workers whose workplace experience in the four thousand clothing manufacturing factories located within Bangladesh to provide the West with cheap clothing is sufficiently low that the clothing they produce and provide to big box stores like Walmart, can be offered to a wealthy-by-comparison Western public at a price they demand.

After the turn of the 20th Century in Canada and in the United States apparel manufacturers were notorious for paying pittances to women sitting long hours at sewing machines, kept virtual prisoners on the factory floor, unable to leave for bathroom breaks, unable to leave the locked-door premises until the floor supervisor gave the signal that would release them at the end of the day.

Their wages were low, their working conditions abysmal, their healthy and safety completely overlooked until there were too many incidents of fires raging through the fire-trap factories and young women dying because doors were locked and they were unable to escape. It was only when public dismay turned to anger and revolt that workplace laws were passed to prevent such carnage.

Bangladesh is a poor country of impoverished people, struggling to live out their lives as best they can. Their large and capable workforce of young, energetic people is deployed to produce inexpensive garments for the West, sold in those emporiums of cheap products at low prices like Walmart and other similar retailers.

But it isn't just the inexpensive garments that are produced in Bangladesh. Name-recognition and celebrity products are big business in the West, and so is profit. Which makes an alliance between name-brand entrepreneurs and the factories located in Bangladesh that will produce those expensive clothing lines at a price that guarantees the elite clothiers will make a tidy profit with every sale so essential to the bottom line.

Because of the advent of a Western social conscience and new demands protesting child labour and unsafe and unhealthy labour conditions, the buyers in the West have been made fully aware that more is expected of them if they are to defend themselves against charges of child- and slave-labour to produce their garments.

Over one hundred and twenty people, mostly women, died in the latest fire that took place in a multi-storey garment factory outside of the capital Dhaka. The eight-storey factory operated by Tazreen Fashions, a sub-group of the Tuba Group, started in the first-floor warehouse facilities of the factory. The fire swiftly spread upward to the eight floors above the warehouse.

Locked doors, narrow corridors and three staircases that led from the first floor where the fire raged, up to the succeeding floors meant that panic reigned and people fled to the roof of the building from where they were rescued. Those who remained trapped inside the building were in no need of rescue, they were dead, burned so badly as to be unrecognizable.

Sabina Yasmine saw the body of her daughter-in-law, dead in the fire, laid out among the neat rows of the dead, victims of unsafe working facilities whom an assessment labelled "high risk" for safety. She was unable to find out where her son, still missing, ended up; both he and his wife worked in the same factory, while Sabina Yasmine worked in another factory.

Fire Department operations director Major Mohammad Mahbub said most of the victims had been trapped inside the factory, with no emergency exits leading outside the building. They died in the inferno that took away their livelihood.

Labels: Culture, Economy, Human Rights, Marketing, Misadventure, Political Realities, Political Realities Middle East, Security, Tragedy