Just over a year ago, in the wake of Rana Plaza factory collapse in Bangladesh, retailers, unions and NGOs banded together in two separate efforts to ensure that such an event would never happen again. A little over 12 months later, the work of the Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh and the Alliance for Bangladeshi Worker Safety struggle to make sustained progress.
Police charged the owners of a Bangladeshi garment factory and 11 employees with culpable homicide Sunday for alleged negligence leading to the death of 112 workers in a raging fire that engulfed the factory last year.
A government-appointed panel in Bangladesh voted Monday to raise the minimum wage for millions of garment workers to about $66 a month — still the lowest in the world and well below what workers have been seeking.
Bangladesh's garment factories have been in the news as saddening examples of globalism's worst throughout 2013, but a story from one Bangladesh factory is finally yielding some feel-good news — even if it took a kidnapping. Reuters is reporting that workers at a garment factory released their boss after holding him for 18 hours in his office and their promised bonuses were finally paid.
In what has become an all-too-familiar news story, another deadly fire has broken out at a garment factory in Bangladesh on Tuesday. At least 10 people were killed and scores were injured from the blaze at a factory in Gazipur, near the capital of Dhaka.
Business outsourcing is like Performance-Enhancing Drugs (PEDs), the much-balleyhooed substances that turn athletes into freaks of human strength and speed. Companies in America had to get on the juice, too, just to keep up with their competitors who outsourced jobs for an unfair advantage.
We all enjoy the cheap prices we play for stuff here in the U.S., while remaining completley oblivious to where they are produced and by whom. You probably even read about the factory collapse and fire of five clothing factories in Bangladesh on your sweatshop-produced iPhones.
A clothing factory fire in Bangladesh has killed over 100 people. The factory has ties to Walmart and the retailer is doing everything in it's power to distance itself from taking any responsibility.
