ANOTHER TRAGIC FACTORY FIRE IN BANGLADESH: WHAT HATH GLOBALIZATION WROUGHT?

4/27/13

As you know, there has been another horrific factory fire in Bangladesh, this one killing at least 300 people.   My post on the now defunct Rant Finance of 11/26/12, only a few months ago, written on the occasion of the last horrific factory fire in what is becoming the garment factory for the world, bears repeating:

 

A TRAGEDY IN BANGLADESH…AND A REEXAMINATION OF GLOBALIZATION

11/26/12

A fire tore through a clothing factory, in Dhaka, Bangladesh over the weekend, killing, last I heard, 140 people.   The building had few working fire escapes and those on the top floors were forced to choose between dying from the direct impact of the fire (burning or smoke inhalation) or from the impact of the dive from the window necessary to escape those impacts.   Those who somehow made it to the factory’s gate discovered that the guards hired by the factory’s operator kept the gate locked.   It is standard practice to keep such gates locked in Bangladesh both to keep workers in and people who want work out.   This factory produced garments under contract for Li & Fung, a buying agent for, among others, American retailers.  Unbeknownst to most of us, Bangladesh is more than an object of pity, a perennial recipient of foreign aid, and the subject of a passable rock song from the ‘60s; it is the world’s second largest exporter of clothing.   Check the labels on your shirts.

The scope of this tragedy is horrendous for the workers killed and injured and for their families, but it seems the scope of the tragedy, as with any such occurrences, wanes as the geographic and ethnic distances from the immediate subjects increase.   But, in addition to being such a horror for those directly involved, this nightmare ought to lead us to think a bit about the global economy we have built.

How in the world are American workers supposed to compete with people who work under such horrendous (Blind eyed cheerleaders for “global free markets” would say “low cost” rather than “horrendous.”) conditions for such little money?   The minimum wage for garment workers in Bangladesh is the equivalent of $38 per month.   Only two years ago, that minimum was $21.00; it was raised in a gesture of goodwill from the government and from the factory owners. 

The argument, of course, is that Americans aren’t supposed to be engaged in such menial tasks as garment manufacturing, which was the mainstay of many communities, especially in the South, only a few decades ago.   And it’s easy to sympathize with this argument; more advanced economies, such as ours, should be engaged in more advanced endeavors, leaving the simpler tasks to the developing economies such as that of Bangladesh.   The argument sounds good until one stops to think that, according to this logic, vast segments of the world’s output, under this design, would be assigned to virtual slave labor.   It’s as if we are saying “Let the real people do the work that is fitting for them; leave the scut work to those who are willing to be paid, and treated, like slaves.”

On the other hand….

The people who worked in that factory, and in many other factories just like it, in Bangladesh and throughout the developing world were and are happy to have those jobs; again, the gates are locked to keep people out as well as in.   Can we deny them this first step on the first rung of the ladder to something resembling prosperity by shutting out the products of their labor?   And if we are to impose some kind of world working standards, would those factories stay in Bangladesh and places like it?   By refusing to buy such products, or by imposing anything like Western labor standards on such factories, we might salve our consciences while at the same time emptying the bellies, and squashing the aspirations, of those at the bottom of the economic food chain who’d like to move up and are willing to bear with horrendous conditions to do so.

And yet…

There are legions of people throughout the world who fit the description in the last paragraph.   They are hungry, desperate and/or ambitious, and are willing to put up with just about anything to ameliorate their situations.   They are certainly more than willing to work under conditions that Americans and other Westerners would consider barbaric for pay that we would deem criminal.   The full implication of the complete globalization that gormless, unquestioning free marketeers ceaselessly cheer for is that, until the supply of people in such situations is exhausted (never, for all practical purposes), all workers will be racing toward those conditions…all in the interest of “efficient, low cost production,” of course.

The answer from the pure free marketeers comfortably ensconced on Wall Street or in academia will be, of course, that we can compete due to our superior “productivity.”   But how much productivity will be needed to compete with $38 a month?   And considering that most of our productivity edge comes from the factories, machines, and processes developed by industrial engineers and others in the business of improving production, what edge do we realistically have if such factories and processes can be built and implemented anywhere in the world?   If we can build an efficient factory here, we could just about as easily build it anywhere, including Bangladesh, Vietnam, or anyplace else where people are willing to work as productively as possible in order to make as much in a month as our workers would demand, and expect, to make in half a day.    

Again, the work done in that Bangladeshi factory is probably not the work that would be done by American workers; we don’t make many shirts and pants and dresses here any more.   That work is somehow beneath us…but only because people elsewhere are willing to produce those types of things under horrible conditions for less than peanuts.   We’ve decided we should be doing only “higher value added” types of things, but our kids can’t do math any more and, even if they could, would it make any difference?  The people who now, and soon used to, make shirts and dresses are more than willing to learn the math and other skills necessary for “higher value added” endeavors…and to work at them for slave labor hours and wages.

There are, of course, lots of winners from unchecked globalization…shoppers, shareholders, moguls and captains of industry, maybe retail workers.   But manufacturing workers, whether in Bangladesh or North Carolina, aren’t among them.