One hundred years ago today, a fire broke out at the Triangle Shirtwaist factory in lower Manhattan. After locked doors made flight impossible, many workers leapt to their deaths to escape the flames. One hundred and forty-six people died, in a tragedy that helped catalyze a national movement for workplace reform.
Unfortunately, we do not need to look back a hundred years to contemplate the horror of garment workers falling from the high floors of a burning factory. The last such nightmare befell workers barely 100 days ago, on December 14, when thirty workers were killed and more than a hundred injured at a factory producing for Kohl's, JC Penney, Target, Wrangler, Phillips-Van Heusen, Oshkosh, Gap and others.
The sad irony on this centennial of the Triangle tragedy is that the abusive conditions, poverty wages and shoddy garment industry safety practices that unions and social reformers decried in 1911 have not been eliminated. They have been outsourced.
Faced with rising wages, strong unions and enforceable safety regulations in the United States, clothing brands and retailers have moved virtually all of their production overseas. Today, America's dresses, jeans and t-shirts are produced in the contract factories of the developing world, where lax regulation, microscopic wages, and the near total absence of unions and collective bargaining ensure the cheap and flexible production the industry craves.
The similarities between the fire at Triangle Shirtwaist and the recent disaster are eerie and instructive. As at Triangle, the December fire at That's It Sportswear, a large garment production facility in Bangladesh, swept rapidly through the ninth floor of the building. Survivors reported that locked doors impeded workers' escape. Many had no choice but to try to climb down ropes made of pieces of clothing hastily tied together. Some fell from the makeshift ropes; others, unable to reach the ropes, jumped to their demise.
This conflagration was only the most recent in a long series of mass fatalities in Bangladesh's burgeoning apparel sector. Nine months earlier, another contract factory, this one making clothes for H&M, caught fire. Twenty-one workers died, their exit reportedly blocked by padlocked doors.
It is no mystery why companies have been flocking to Bangladesh, which is now the world's fourth largest garment exporter. The apparel manufacturers of 1911 Manhattan did not waste time and money on niceties like workplace safety or tolerate the inconvenience of labor unions and neither do their modern day counterparts in Bangladesh. The country's weak safety protections are part of a rock-bottom cost structure that features wages of 20 cents an hour and implacable hostility to unions.
Brands and retailers have paid lip service to the need for reform in Bangladesh's factories, especially since a building collapse in 2005 that killed 64 workers, but the disasters keep happening and the orders for cheap clothes keep pouring in. Walmart alone now buys more than $1 billion worth of garments a year from Bangladesh.
This is the contradiction at the heart of the contemporary apparel industry: the brands and retailers say they want to eliminate sweatshop conditions, but demand prices from their contractors so low that the only way they can stay in business is to keep abusing their workers.
When the Bangladeshi labor movement called last year for a minimum wage of 35 cents an hour, the factory owners insisted, plausibly, that the brands and retailers would never accept the resulting price increases. Factory owners in Cambodia, where 200,000 workers recently struck for a minimum wage of 40 cents an hour, made the same claim, as have factory owners in India, another country where garment workers have died in multiple factory fires over the last year. Apparel brands now even complain that China is too expensive.
Global outsourcing has enabled apparel companies to escape the regulatory strictures imposed though half a century of labor reform in the US. At the same time, the companies have largely succeeded in evading moral accountability for the abuses committed by their overseas factories, even as they benefit from the low prices those factories provide. Protecting workers requires new mechanisms for holding corporations accountable.
One hopeful sign has been efforts of universities, spurred by student activists, to impose labor rights standards on their apparel industry partners: makers of university logo sweatshirts and t-shirts, like those selling briskly thanks to"March Madness." Students and universities have achieved remarkable labor rights breakthroughs involving workers producing overseas for Nike and Russell Athletic and have also helped facilitate the opening of a model garment factory in the Dominican Republic where workers have a living wage and union representation.
Meanwhile, labor rights organizations have called on the companies that do business with That's It Sportswear to accept an aggressive and independent fire safety inspection program at hundreds of their supplier factories in Bangladesh. Many of the companies have promised to do so; time will tell if they fulfill that pledge.
Broader accountability efforts along these lines are essential to achieving a new round of apparel industry reform that can finally protect the people who make our clothes from workplace horrors that should have been stamped out a century ago.
Scott Nova is Executive Director of the Worker Rights Consortium, a labor rights watchdog, with over 175 affiliated universities and colleges.
I don't buy products unless they are stamped MADE IN USA. US-made products are hard to come by, since our factories have all but disappeared. Look inside your Levi's for the "MADE IN" tag. I have many pairs of them. The oldest pairs, probably 10 years old, say MADE IN USA. After that, they are made everywhere BUT. The pair I have on right now, says MADE IN CHINA. In fact, it was my jeans discovery that made me a purist. No, I don't want to take food out of the mouth of babies in Bangladesh. But I don't want to take food out of my neighbors' mouths here, either.
I will let my clothing turn into strings before I will buy outsourced products ever again.
http://www.manufacturingnews.com/news/10/0518/chinadrugs.html
You Don't Know Where Your Drugs Come From And Neither Does The FDA; U.S. Imports 90 Percent Of Its Antibiotics (And Vitamin A) From China
"...The United States needs two tons of heparin per month. Seventy percent of that is sourced from China, says the study. Tainted Chinese heparin (made from pig intestines and used as a blood thinner) supplied to Baxter International caused the death of 81 Americans in early 2008. After a fall-off of heparin exports in 2008, "the situation has changed in 2009," says the study. "Heparin exports for the first quarter of 2009 increased 155 percent compared to the first quarter of 2008. The price of heparin also doubled (to $4,354 per kilogram) in the first quarter of 2009."
[snip]
In the United States, virtually all companies manufacturing pharmaceuticals are inspected by the Food and Drug Administration. But not imports, which freely enter the country from factories that will never see an American inspector. From 2002 until 2006, "an average of just 15 of the 714 Chinese drug plants that export to the U.S. were actually inspected by FDA," says the study entitled, "Potential Health and Safety Impacts from Pharmaceuticals and Supplements Containing Chinese-Sourced Raw Ingredients." "At this rate, it would take more than 50 years to inspect all of the plants..."
Debbie McPherson posted something about Barr/Teva being the largest manufacturer of generic drugs.
"Walmart’s bid to take control of Massmart, South Africa’s third largest retailer. In a surprising turn of events this week, the South African government’s Competition Tribunal ordered the hearing on the proposed merger delayed for almost two months ...
According to Bloomberg “the government told the court that the proposed purchase raised ‘very significant public interest issues, and might not be capable of being justified.’”
Workers, local suppliers, the small business community, and the South African government are now asking difficult questions about whether Walmart’s entry is really in the best interest of South Africa. Many are concerned that if Walmart is allowed to enter South Africa without making binding commitments, it will have the same devastating effect on workers, suppliers, and the economy in South Africa that it has had in the United States and other countries".
From Walmartwatch.org
The building owners, Max Blanck and Isaac Harris, were indicted for manslaughter because of the locked doors (illegal under section 80 of the Labor Code), but found not guilty (reportedly due to interference with the trial). Many civil suits were filed against them, and three years later, Blanck and Harris paid out a mere $75per life of the $400 they had received for each life lost, keeping the balance. They continued to defy regulations, opening other unsafe factories without fire escapes or exits.
Greed is always present. Those who are poor, uneducated and without skills will always need protection from the greed that is waiting just below the surface, held back only by regulations and strong enforcement.
For more on the story, the Cornell archives have amazing maps, oral histories of the survivors, photos of the bodies on the street after the fire (http://www.ilr.cornell.edu/trianglefire/primary/photosIllustrations/slideshow.html?image_id=743&sec_id=3#screen) and a sad and moving list of the victims: http://www.ilr.cornell.edu/trianglefire/victimsWitnesses/victimsList.html
PISSANT mentality at it's finest.
Chicken-processing plant Fire
"1991 September 3rd. USA, North Carolina, Hamlet, Imperial Food Products chicken-processing plant: 25 worker died in a fire; building was without fire alarms or sprinkler systems; many exit doors were locked to prevent employees from stealing
According to official reports, twenty-five (25) people died and another fourty-nine (49) were injuried as the result of afire in the Imperial chicken processing plant in Hamlet, North Carolina yesterday. Witnesses, at the scene, describedpanicked workers as screaming, "Let me out!....Let me out!", as they tried to kick open doors that were reportedly
padlocked by the plant management to prevent vandalism and theft. Footprint indentations were evident on the inside of at least one door, that was seen to be locked from the outside.
In the aftermath of the disaster, N.C. Asst. Commissioner of Labor Charles Jeffress, said that the eleven (11) year oldfood processing plant had not been subjected to state safety inspections due to a lack of inspectors in the state. Hestated that the Dept. of Labor primarily inspected buildings for which there had been complaints, and that none had been received in regard to the Imperial plant..."
If we bought American, ultimately, wages and conditions would HAVE to improve in 3rd World countries. It would take decades, but until then, the fires will continue and be blips on a newswire. These are people.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/triangle/player/
WGBH American Experience . Triangle Fire | PBS
I think the Cowboy Museum opened after I left Tulsa in 1964.
The Gilcrease Museim is wonderful.
Another reason to buy American. Perhaps the answer to this tragedy is to buy more expensive American-made goods, just fewer of them.
One route (importing textiles) may lead to higher economic growth for poor nations and the other route (buy American) means poor countries continue to suffer and Americans look the other way. Not to mention buying American means taxing the poor (the only way to keep imports out are through tariffs and quotas and those are taxes on poor Americans).
Bangladesh is very poor. It isn't poor because of multinational corporations. Every country at one point used to be poor. If we boycott a country then those people working in apparel will lose their jobs and have to work in lower paid domestic industry (or turn to prostitution). According to Jagdish Bhagwati of Columbia most multinationals pay workers higher than prevailing domestic wages.
If the world turned away from low cost labor (and the occasional tragedy) then countries like Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Malaysia, Chile, Taiwan, would be stuck in poverty much longer because at one time they all made cheap textiles for export. Hopefully as inflation and rising Yuan make labor more expensive in China some of that production will move to other poor countries. Development is not pretty or easy but there isn't much of a choice.