On April 23, Kalpona Akter, a former child garment worker and executive director of the Bangladesh Center for Worker Solidarity, spoke out for increased oversight and accountability for factory building safety during a forum at the University of Washington called “End Death Trap Factories.” Akter’s organization plays a vital role in documenting labor violations in the apparel industry in Bangladesh, which has 3.6 million garment workers, the majority of whom are women. She also demanded fair compensation from Walmart for victims of the Tazreen Fashion factory fire in Bangladesh that killed 112 last November. Akter was joined by Sumi Abedin, a former Tazreen worker whose harrowing account of her escape from the fire stunned the audience.
The following day, co-sponsors of the forum, which included the Washington Fair Trade Coalition, United Students Against Sweatshops, Harry Bridges Center for Labor Studies at the University of Washington, OUR Walmart, and UFCW Local 21, held a special ceremony commemorating Worker Memorial Day. In a show of solidarity and support of Bangladeshi workers, they joined community leaders at a Walmart labor action in Renton. Part of the ceremony featured a makeshift memorial for victims of the Tazreen fire, but more supplies and flowers were needed for victims of another disaster.
At 8:45 a.m. on April 24 in Bangladesh (7:45 p.m. April 23, Seattle time), a massive eight-story garment factory collapsed due to substandard construction and lack of oversight. At least 1,127 people have been reported killed and over a thousand injured, making it the country’s worst tragedy tied to the global garment industry. Although 12 people have been arrested so far, nothing has been done to overhaul the global corporate system that has a single goal: to drive down costs by squeezing workers at every level of the supply chain except those at the top.
But you don’t have to travel halfway across the globe to see what happens when workers put their lives at risk for a job. In West, Texas, a week before the building collapse in Bangladesh, a devastating fertilizer plant explosion killed 15 people, injured more than 200 and damaged or destroyed more than 150 surrounding buildings.
Federal investigators still haven’t determined the cause, but it has come to light that the plant’s last Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) inspection occurred in 1985. The most recent partial inspection in 2011 led to a $5,200 fine for infractions, including failing to draft a safety plan for the transportation of large tanks of pressurized anhydrous ammonia. The nation’s most recent regulation legislation bill, introduced by Congress earlier this year, was endorsed by the Fertilizer Institute and weakened the Environmental Protection Agency’s regulatory authority over fertilizer plants.
The events in Bangladesh and Texas took place shortly after the bombings at the Boston Marathon, which claimed three lives and injured more than 250 people. While mainstream media’s coverage of these fatal industrial accidents pales in comparison to the bombings in Boston, industrial accidents pose an enormous risk to public safety. A 2013 AFL-CIO report called “Death on the Job” found there were 70,664 fatalities in U.S. workplaces from 2001 to 2011. In contrast, reason.com
reported that from Sept. 12, 2001 to September 2011, only 30 Americans were killed in terrorist attacks on U.S. soil. In other words: People in the U.S. are 2,355 times more likely to die on the job than from a terrorist attack.
Those statistics don’t translate to federal spending. From 2001 to 2013, the U.S. government spent $791.3 billion on homeland security, according to a National Priorities Project report. Another AFL-CIO report citing OSHA and Department of Labor records found that during the same time frame, the federal government spent $1.6 billion on worker health and safety training and federal and state employee compliance programs.
By keeping citizens in a state of fear about outside threats and dangers from terrorists, countless taxpayer dollars can more easily be diverted into homeland security. But a more efficient and responsible way to make everyone more secure would be to improve worker safety. According to an International Labour Organization report called “World Day For Safety and Health at Work 2013,” an estimated 2.34 million occupational fatalities occur every year, about 6,411 deaths a day. Stronger safety precautions could have prevented some of these deaths.
Until we get those precautions, as events and Bangladesh and Texas have shown, the true terror may not rise from outside our borders. Instead, it may begin the moment most workers punch the clock.