Retailers look away as the Bangladeshi government stalks, batters and kills seamstresses and labor activists.
By Adele M. Stan · 29 Nov 2012
A day after Walmart workers and their allies staged protests and rallies
outside the company’s stores across the U.S., a fire erupted in a
factory across the globe in Bangladesh, killing 112 workers who were
trapped inside, where they sewed jeans and other apparel for the retail
giant’s Faded Glory brand. Another 200 were injured in the fire. On
Monday, the streets of Dhaka, the capital city, were filled with thousands of garment workers, who demanded justice.The main doors of the factory were reportedly padlocked, according to the Christian Science Monitor, and many workers jumped to their deaths rather than be burned alive, according to the Associated Press, which also reported survivors saying that they were sent back to their sewing machines after the fire alarm went off. Others said the fire extinguishers didn’t work. A retired fire official told the New York Times that fire trucks were slow to arrive on the scene because there wasn’t a proper road for approaching the factory.
Your Job or Your Life
What do Walmart store “associates,” as the company likes to call its retail clerks, and Bangladeshi garment workers have in common? Both work in environments so hostile to labor unions that to undertake the work of organizing is a danger to one’s livelihood -- or in Bangladesh, one’s life.
As AlterNet reported last week, Walmart employees who got involved with OUR Walmart, a union-allied group that advocates for fair pay and working conditions, reportedly suffered retaliation. And for his groundbreaking documentary, Walmart: The High Price of Low Cost, filmmaker Robert Greenwald talked to a former Walmart manager (video) who told of how the company rigged a union election in an Annapolis, Md., store by temporarily transferring in workers from Arkansas who would vote against allowing the union to represent them.
In the apparel factories that supply Walmart and other U.S. retailers, an attempt to organize workers can land an employee in jail -- or even cost an organizer his life.
