At least 22 people have died, with over a 100 injured in a garments factory gone ablaze. The Daily Star reports that many other factory workers remained trapped in the factory located in the outskirts of Dhaka.
This news comes at the heels of new deadly protests and street fights over the implementation of the government regulated minimum wage increase that was hard won earlier this year. This news reifies and re-injects the debate on humane working conditions in the garments industry — an industry that serves as a principal engine of economic growth in Bangladesh. No doubt due to the import of that industry, asset holders have tried to squeeze out the marginal product of workers at the lowest feasible wage, in the least comfortable, passably humane working conditions.
Now there’s this news of dozens of human beings broiled alive in a fire, set plausibly by some mechanical misfiring. It is almost certainly the case that stricter rules and regulations could have prevented much of the costs borne and the casualties suffered. Garment ministers in charge of industrial policy and asset holders might stop to think that economic value is not commensurate with the value of a life. Increased economic growth and rising manufacturing indices do not, cannot, require that human beings be used as mechanical means to financial, profit-engineering ends.
The government and industrial asset owners in Bangladesh must accede to the fact that labor laws and living wages are more than enforceable mechanism of state regulations. These regulations stem from human rights doctrines that value each individual person as an autonomous person who merits the respect of all other persons in the domain of economic and political equality. In that domain, apart from justifiable models of labor remuneration, all individuals are to be treated with dignity. That is categorically not the case in the garments sector.
It is beyond reproach that so far asset holders have been dragged to regulate their industries, kicking and screaming. It is now obvious–it has always been so–that the left-leaning Awami League government must do more to protect garments workers.
