Partial Readings: Collapsing Factories and the “End Death Traps” Tour
Tuesday, April 30, 2013
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As the death toll of Wednesday’s garment factory collapse in Savar, Bangladesh surpasses 320, the incident has become the most lethal disaster in garment industry history, one of the worst manufacturing disasters ever. The New York Times reports that more than one thousand of the Savar factory complex’s 2,500 workers have been injured, and hundreds remain trapped in the rubble. By comparison, the Triangle Shirtwaist fire of 1911, one of the most widely remembered disasters in industrial history, killed 146 and injured 71.
Like last week’s fertilizer plant blast in West, Texas, the collapse of Rana Plaza was preventable. A bank and other commercial establishments on the ground floor were reportedly closed after workers complained of a visible crack in the building on Tuesday, but managers of the factories on the upper levels of the five-story complex refused to follow suit. About an hour into the workday on Wednesday, the building collapsed; three days later, volunteers are still pulling survivors and corpses out of the rubble.
The names of international brands whose clothes were being produced in the Savar factory complex are beginning to surface: a range of U.S., European, and Canadian companies, they include the Children’s Place, Benetton, Cato Fashions, Mango, Joe Fresh, and BM Casual. Ether Tex, one of the factories destroyed in the collapse, listed Walmart as one of its customers on its website, but it remains unclear whether the U.S. retail giant was sourcing clothes from the factory at the time of the collapse.
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Like last week’s fertilizer plant blast in West, Texas, the collapse of Rana Plaza was preventable. A bank and other commercial establishments on the ground floor were reportedly closed after workers complained of a visible crack in the building on Tuesday, but managers of the factories on the upper levels of the five-story complex refused to follow suit. About an hour into the workday on Wednesday, the building collapsed; three days later, volunteers are still pulling survivors and corpses out of the rubble.
The names of international brands whose clothes were being produced in the Savar factory complex are beginning to surface: a range of U.S., European, and Canadian companies, they include the Children’s Place, Benetton, Cato Fashions, Mango, Joe Fresh, and BM Casual. Ether Tex, one of the factories destroyed in the collapse, listed Walmart as one of its customers on its website, but it remains unclear whether the U.S. retail giant was sourcing clothes from the factory at the time of the collapse.
read more >>
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