Here's something you need to know about the fire at the Tazreen Fashions factory in Ashulia, Bangladesh where over 110 workers died and more were injured: as you can see in the picture, it burned like hell on earth. Many of the bodies were burned so badly that they could not be identified. It is that Third World nation's Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, and, like that horrific event in American history, it was merely the worst of a string of fires at garment factories, places where Americans get their cheap clothing made cheaply (and where they get their expensive clothes made cheaply, too).
While the Bangladesh factories have attempted to eliminate child labor, young (mostly) women still end up toiling in the slave-like conditions. And those conditions can include locked doors, no fire exits or extinguishers or sprinklers, and strict rules on leaving one's station, all for 21 cents an hour, which is up from what it was in 2010, greedy bastards. An executive at the Tuba Group, which owns the factory, claimed, "We are the sufferers. We are the victims." And how could you not agree when the company grudgingly agreed to pay the families of victims $1230 each in compensation for their loss? After all, that's over $130,000 and Tazreen Fashions exports only $36 million in garments each year. Fun fact: the fire killed over 1/12th of Tazreen's workforce.
On Fox "news" show Some Goddamn Thing with Neil Cavuto yesterday, a Wall Street analyst, Charles "Fat Cunt" Payne, said that the workers were grateful they have jobs: "Don’t think that the people in Bangladesh who perished didn’t want or need those jobs, as well," which would qualify as the most callous thing said publicly about the fire if the execs at Tuba weren't such shit sacks. And one might want to hold off on presuming that the dead would have chosen their jobs over avoiding horrible fire or jumping doom.
Of course, Charles "Fat Cunt" Payne also said, "I know we like to victimize everyone in this country, particularly when it comes to for-profit motivation, which is being assaulted. But, you know, it is a tragedy but I think it is a stretch, an amazing stretch, to sort of try to pin this on Walmart but, of course, the unions in this country are desperate." Yes, we certainly wouldn't want to blame any companies that ordered from or used others to order from a deathtrap factory. We certainly wouldn't want to blame our own demand for cheap shit, no matter how it gets made. We certainly wouldn't want to blame the globe for the detriments of globalization.
"Fat Cunt" Payne brings up unions. Oh, about that. Yeah, seems that "One labor organizer, Aminul Islam, was brutally murdered in April, with Bangladesh’s security forces allegedly involved in the crime." Islam, who had been imprisoned and tortured for his labor activism, got Tommy Hilfiger's parent company to improve conditions in the factories it uses after the last factory fire, one that killed 29 workers.
As for this latest awful event, "Fat Cunt" Payne assures us, "It is tragic. I don’t think something like this will happen again." No, of course not. Only a union-loving, anti-capitalist tool who wants to hamstring the job creators would think that barely regulated factories would be owned by greedy motherfuckers who force poor people to work in unsafe conditions for pennies so they can squeeze out an extra couple of bucks. Only Marxists would call that "exploitation."
