http://youtu.be/VSnodlIfzuw
Nothing’s ever going to be done about hazardous working conditions as long as Walmart and other American companies continue to places pennies of profit above human lives:
A fire in an 11-story garment factory in Bangladesh killed eight people, including a ruling party politician and a top official in the country’s powerful clothing manufacturers’ trade group, as the death toll from the collapse of another garment factory building passed 900 on Thursday.
The fire Wednesday night engulfed the lower floors of the Tung Hai Sweater Ltd. factory — which had closed for the day — said Mamun Mahmud, deputy director of the fire service. The blaze, fed by huge piles of acrylic products used to make sweaters, produced immense amounts of smoke, he said.
The victims died of suffocation as they ran down the stairs, Mahmud said.
`’Apparently they tried to flee the building through the stairwell in fear that the fire had engulfed the whole building,” he said.
Had they stayed on the upper floors they would likely have survived the slow spreading fire, he said.
“We found the roof open, but we did not find there anybody after the fire broke out. We recovered all of them on the stairwell on the ninth floor,” he said.The blaze comes just two weeks after the collapse of the eight-story Rana Plaza building, home to five garment factories, killed at least 930 people and became the worst tragedy in the history of the global garment manufacturing industry. The disaster has raised alarm about the often deadly working conditions in Bangladesh’s $20 billion garment industry, which provides clothing for major retailers around the globe.
The identities of the victims of Wednesday’s fire showed the entanglement of the industry and top Bangladeshi officials. The dead included the factory’s managing director, Mahbubur Rahman, who was also on the board of directors of the powerful Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association. Along with him was senior police official Z.A. Morshed and Sohel Mostafa Swapan, head of a local branch of the ruling party’s youth league.
Independent TV, a local station, reported that Rahman had plans to contest next year’s elections as a candidate for the ruling party and had been meeting friends to discuss his future when the fire broke out.
This is not the fault of Walmart and those of their ilk. This is ‘OUR’ fault because we demand cheap clothing. Cheap oil. Cheap food. Cheap everything. So we buy cheap crap made in foreign countries by children, women and men working for slave wages in unsafe factories. We buy it at Walmart, Kmart, Sams Club, etc. and we leave the store with a smile on our stupid faces and a silly song in our hearts because we “just got a deal.” As long as it’s ‘them’ over there who die in fires and who are killed by our bullets and not us, “Who gives a damn?” We all live in a very sick and twisted society which although we didn’t entirely create, we allowed to be created in our names. We need to fix the mess we’ve made. And violence is not the way to do it. Violence only makes things worse.
An import duty that was inversely proportioned to the production wage would do wonders.