The death toll from the Rana Plaza collapse in Dhaka, Bangladesh is now 630 people, with hundreds of bodies not yet recovered from the debris. Photos of the rescue are gruesome showing people entombed in cement & the recovered bodies of small children. This woman is watching the rescue workers with hundreds of other family members & grieving for her daughter who has not yet been found.
There’s a thin line between grief & fury. The May Day protests in Dhaka brought thousands of irate workers into the streets demanding justice for the multitude of crimes committed here. The owner of the building has been arrested & will face prosecution although that one indictment is hardly justice.
Media is attempting to deflect condemnation of garment retailers with homiletics about consumer demand for cheap clothes. Of course we want cheap clothes! What’s the crime in that when most of us earn chump change from our jobs!? The criminal culprits are retailers who prowl the planet looking for cheap, non-union, exploitable, & child labor. They get clothes made for pennies & sell them for big bucks. That’s how capitalism works. And that’s why it stinks!
The retailers are going to try to ride out this embarrassment but they have no shame & no intention of reforming the sweatshop system. And that’s where consumers come in; that’s where our responsibility lies: to start organizing political action that exposes these retailers & challenges sweatshop & child labor.
This isn’t the time to go all xenophobic & start chanting stop outsourcing & “Buy American.” The peoples of other countries have as much right to jobs as we do. But we all have a right to work in safe conditions at decent wages. If capitalism can’t provide that then it’s time to take it down.
(Photo by Ismail Ferdous/AP)
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