Working Life

In the annals of “this is no surprise” let me chalk up yet another example of the immoral behavior of the Wal-Mart family: it is not interested in signing on to a broadly accepted new safety code of practice in Bangladesh. No–the greed and avarice of the five Walton heirs, each of whom is worth around $20 billion, has no upper limit. Even if it means people get killed — though I guess if they aren’t white people and they are far away in another land, the Waltons just don’t care.

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The ghastly industrial killing field in the garment factory in Bangladesh has now claimed over 1,100 lives. Hard to even fathom. But, there is a sliver of hope that out of this massacre of workers will come a little improvement.

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The toll has risen to more than 800 in Bangladesh. I suppose that must be a threshold of human death and suffering that even Wal-Mart can’t ignore. So, the Beast of Bentonville and some of its sidekicks are getting together to set, uh, labor standards.

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Bodies. More bodies. More horror.

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I’m not sure what the ILO has in mind or can do — it is hostage to the politics of inertia. But, at least there is a chance this will keep the pressure on.

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In the horror of the collapse of the garment factory building in Bangladesh, I’m left to thinking how many people have died over many years of exploitation in garment factories and others factories in places like Bangladesh — and the unfortunate reality that the people most responsible for those deaths will never be held accountable: CEOs of U.S. corporations.

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When I first read about the horrendous fire in Bangladesh, I immediately thought of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire in New York in 1911 — more than 100 years ago. In many ways, nothing has changed. In some ways, somethings have changed.

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   I recently wrote about the revolt against poverty wages around the world. Some good news–which is so rare in international labor work–via our friends from the National Labor Committee: Mr. Montu Ghosh, an important progressive trade union leader and lawyer in Bangladesh was released an hour ago on bail, after having spent 73 days [...]

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Yesterday, I wrote about how the decline of U.S. wages has made workers here cheaper to hire than workers in India, at least in the call center industry. Today, the news hails from Asia where workers are rising up against poverty-level wages.   From the Financial Times (and, as a side observation, the FT gives [...]

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   I don’t have much to add on the extremely disappointing and inadequate health care bill that passed the Senate yesterday–it’s been said by others–so I turned my attention to a couple of international developments.    Every so often, when I discuss trade, here or in debates elsewhere, people say: well, we live in a [...]

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