The Rana Plaza Building Collapse in Bangladesh

The other day I came across the lyrics to this corporate song for IBM.

It’s from 1937, and in reading it I was struck by how much it had in common with communist propaganda in its certainty and fealty to a cause. Possessed with a religious optimism, the corporate soldiers marched furiously into the future, ever forward, ever reaching.  Equilibrium is stasis, and if the corporation isn’t growing, it’s failing, and so almost by definition, the appetite is infinite.

Last week an eight-story building in Bangladesh collapsed killing at least 400 people (a number that may yet rise to 1,000), most of them low-paid (25-30 cents an hour) garment workers. It was the worst accident in the history of the garment industry.

One of the companies that were manufacturing clothes in the shoddily constructed building was Joe Fresh, a very successful and popular brand here in Canada. They’re inexpensive, yet their clothes still manage to exude the downtown hipster aesthetic. As my wife says, they’re like the Ikea of clothing, offering a gentle compromise for those belonging to a fashion conscious tribe but who really can’t afford extravagantly branded proofs of their tastes.

Joe Mimran, the head of Joe Fresh, explains on the company website that this “extreme pricing” is one of their premier selling points. I don’t think it’s being overly dogmatic to say that the real cost of “extreme pricing” are tragedies like the one in Bangladesh. People, abstracted by distance and circumstance, suffer immensely so that we can wear cheap, yet cool-looking, jeans.

In this particular case, it’s been reported the factories are policed by goons who threaten the employees, mostly young women, unless they work 13- or 14- hour shifts, often seven days a week. The building that collapsed apparently had deep cracks inside of it and the workers were actually scared to go in, but nonetheless, were driven in by men wielding clubs.

Can you imagine how it must feel to be terrorized and exploited like that?  I’m not sure that I can, and I take little comfort in the argument that western industry is building a middle-class in far away lands, and that workers like those who perished in Bangladesh are better off with low paying work than nothing at all. It doesn’t ring true to me, and it’s baldly self-serving. The corporations, and the systems that they function within, are clearly taking advantage of the workers, and this is clearly wrong, regardless of the benefit you might imagine blossoming from it. Think again, on the microscopic, empathetic level, of what it must be like to work in one of these cruel sweatshops.

Our lives of whimsy, comfort and petty complaint are built upon horrible deeds.  We need to remember that, and that we enable it each day with our entitled behaviour. We all know how we feel about the Boston Marathon Bombings, but do we really know how we feel about the Rana Plaza catastrophe?