ONE more horrific fire incident at a garment factory on the outskirts of Dhaka on Saturday killed at least 112 persons and injured several others who jumped out of the building for safety. As I write this letter, there is news of another fire breaking out in another factory in Bangladesh, though, no deaths reported yet. That ghastly accident and several others including the horrifying one at the garment factory in Karachi a few months ago had one thing in common.
There were no escape routes in cases of such emergencies. In fact, the most common thing, which runs across such factories in the whole of the Asian subcontinent, is the exploitation of human beings to maximize the profits. In view of stringent laws related to workers’ safety, higher scale of compensation, inability to employ child labor and of course high cost of labor, the Western businesses have found a cheaper alternative in outsourcing these types of laborious works to the establishments in the Third World countries.
As Walmart did over this incident, the companies cannot shed away their responsibility toward the loss of life by just expressing a few words of condolence or reiterating their own policies about safety standards and procedures. Ironically, the assessor for Walmart had given a “high risk” rating for the factory in May 2011. Was it then not the responsibility of Walmart to immediately terminate its contract with that company until it fulfilled the required safety standards?
What really pains me is that when the lives can be saved and protected by applying the widely accepted safety norms and procedures, why should companies continuously ignore them to save costs and put at risk the lives of thousands of people? — Safi H. Jannaty, Dammam
