Could Karachi factory tragedy reform safety measures in Pakistan?

On Sept. 12, a fire swept the Ali Enterprise clothing factory in Karachi, Pakistan, killing nearly 300 workers, making it the worst industrial disaster in Pakistan’s history.
To put the incident in perspective, the toll from the Karachi fire is almost twice as high as the well-known Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire of 1911 in New York, from where I am writing this article this week. That New York fire, which has been the deadliest industrial disaster in its history, led to an overhaul of safety regulations that have made New York one of the safest industrial environments in the world. Will the Karachi tragedy lead to a similar outcome, or would Pakistan return to business as usual after international spotlight is turned away from workers’ conditions there?
The Karachi fire has exposed serious shortcomings in both the national and international oversight procedures that were supposed to prevent such disaster.
At the national level, it has become clear that there was almost complete lack of enforcement of safety procedures, relying instead on self-monitoring by the industry and international private auditing arrangements. Last Monday, Pakistan’s government appointed a two-person commission of inquiry to investigate the fire and conditions at the factory. The commission has reportedly already uncovered serious shortcomings in Pakistan’s regulatory system.
During one hearing before the commission last week, electrical safety inspectors said that they had formally stopped doing factory inspections in 2003! It was clear from the hearing that there was quite a bit of confusion about the safety rules and regulations, including monitoring and accountability.
It has also turned out that the Ali Enterprises factory had officially registered only 250 workers, while in fact as many as 1,000 people worked there, according to senior Pakistan’s officials cited by the New York Times. It has been reported by other sources that the factory was overworked because its German clients needed extra shipments of jeans for the Christmas shopping season, where demand for their clothing rises.
The three owners of the Ali Enterprises factory fled Karachi immediately after the fire, but were brought before a judge last week in Larkana, 300 km to the northeast. Pakistan’s central bank has already frozen their bank accounts held by them and holding some $ 5 million, according to press reports, which is a pittance considering the enormity of the incident. Their passports have been confiscated.
On Sept. 15, a minister in Pakistan’s Sindh province resigned in protest. He said that he found out that he had “no authority to move against the people responsible.” The Minister for Industries Abdul Rauf Siddiqi resigned from the provincial Cabinet Friday after he found himself “helpless and with no authority to move against the people responsible for the deadly Karachi factory fire.”
Since Pakistan has apparently delegated monitoring to the industry itself, let us see what safeguards are there at both the national and international levels. The owners of the factory appeared to have done little. In case, they seemed to flout existing safety regulations in many respects. As for their international clients, mainly European and American designers and high-end department stores, have outsourced monitoring to a private auditing company. They have established the Social Accountability International, a nonprofit monitoring group based in New York, but gets much of its financing from corporations and relies on affiliates around the world to do most of its inspections. Western clothing and electronics companies rely on such auditing groups to provide certification for their suppliers in developing countries.
Just prior to that fateful fire on Sept. 12, that international monitoring group, SAI, inspected the Ali Enterprises factory and gave it a clean bill of health and gave it the much sought after SA8000 certification. That certification meant that the plant had met international standards in nine areas detailed on the group’s website, including fire and safety measures.
Thus the Karachi fire is a not only an embarrassment for local safety systems, but to the international self-monitoring systems as well.
The fire in Karachi recalls a similar incident that took place in New York City about a hundred years ago, which left its mark on safety systems in New York and much of the industrialized world. Those strict safety requirements are one reason, beside low labor cost, why Western companies have shifted production to poor countries, where they assumed that safety measures are more lax.
The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York City on March 25, 1911, was the deadliest industrial disaster in the history of the city and resulted in the fourth highest loss of life from an industrial accident in US history. The fire caused the deaths of 146 garment workers, 129 of whom were young immigrant women, who died from the fire, smoke inhalation, or falling to their deaths.
Because Triangle owners had locked the doors and exits, a common practice at the time, many of the workers who could not escape the burning building jumped from the building to their deaths.
The New York fire led to legislation requiring improved factory safety standards. The New York State Legislature then created the Factory Investigating Commission to “investigate factory conditions in this and other cities and to report remedial measures of legislation to prevent hazard or loss of life among employees through fire, unsanitary conditions, and occupational diseases.”
The commission held public hearings in major New York cities and hired field agents to do on-site inspections of factories. Some 200 factories were found at risk in New City alone, making a fire like that at the Triangle Factory possible at any of them.
The incident helped modernize New York safety and labor laws. Between 1911 and 1913, sixty new laws were passed by the State’s legislature. In the same year of the fire, the American Society of Safety Engineers was founded in New York City on Oct. 14, 1911, pioneering efforts in the US and elsewhere to develop and streamline safety measures on sound scientific foundations.
Could Pakistan do the same? Could it snap from the jaws of tragedy a new system of monitoring and accountability that could make a repetition of the Karachi fire more remote? Or would it return to business as usual, where profits take precedent over preservation of human life?