The gravitational pull of corporate greed makes clothing
factories prone to disasters like the recent tragedy in Bangladesh.
You see it in stores
across our country and around the world: colorful and stylish clothing with
happy-sounding brand names like Children’s Place, Papaya, Joe Fresh, and Mango.
But you don’t see the
factories where these cheerful garments are made. Nor are we shown the strained
faces of the impoverished workers who make them, paid little more than a dollar
a day for long, hard shifts. We only catch a glimpse of the grim reality sewn
into these happy brands when yet another factory is in the news for collapsing
or burning down, bringing a grotesque death to hapless workers trapped inside.
It’s a horror that keeps happening. And after each disaster, the brand-name marketers and retail profiteers cluck with sympathy for the families of the dead and decry the “tragic accident.”
As Scott Nova of the
Workers Rights Consortium put it after the most recent atrocity, when a
Bangladesh factory collapsed and crushed hundreds of garment workers, “The
response is always the same: vague promises and public relations dodges, while
the pile of corpses grows even higher.”
Is there something
about clothing factories that makes them disaster magnets? Yes — the massive
gravitational pull of corporate greed. Not merely the greed of sleazy factory
owners, but most significantly the greed of such “respectable” retailers as
Walmart, Benetton, Gap, and H&M.
The April collapse in
Bangladesh that killed more than 700 garment workers wasn’t an
“accident.” It was the inevitable result of a Western business model that
demands such low prices from offshore suppliers that worker safety is their
dead-last priority.
In the corporate
hierarchy, death is coldly built into the consumer price and routinely accepted
in the boardrooms as a justifiable means of adding another dime to the bottom
line. For information and action, go to WorkersRights.org.
OtherWords columnist Jim Hightower is
a radio commentator, writer, and public speaker. He's also editor of the
populist newsletter, The Hightower
Lowdown. OtherWords.org
