I’m typically quite critical of the traditional media’s refusal to write about workers’ struggles on a regular basis, and without the “free market” spin. But this is an example of a strong story.

True, it comes to late to save the lives of hundreds of people killed in the Rana Plaza garment factory. And it will probably be a one-off. But, it’s still a solid treatment of the exploitation of women. I’ll give you the beginning of The Wall Street Journal story (subscription needed to read it all):

Five weeks after Mahinur Akhter was dragged, bloody and barely conscious, from the broken concrete of the collapsed Rana Plaza garment-factory building, the teenage girl was back in her hometown, trapped between duty and fear.

In the shade of her family’s mud-walled house, Ms. Akhter weighed the $90 to $100 a month she could earn as a seamstress against long hours, harsh supervisors and the terror she endured in the rubble.

“Many nights, I dream that I am still stuck in the debris,” she said. “I think I will always be afraid.”

But Ms. Akhter is under pressure to support her widowed mother and pay for her two younger brothers to attend school. The boys dropped out after their father, a night watchman at a saw mill, was killed last year in a traffic accident.

“Without my salary, I don’t know how my family could survive,” said Ms. Akhter, who put her age at 15 or 16. Even her mother isn’t exactly sure.

For millions of young women working on the front lines of Bangladesh’s industrial revolution, global demand for cheap garments provides a chance to lift their families from destitution.

Rapid expansion of the garment business has helped drive up income in a country that ranks among the world’s poorest nations. The number of Bangladeshis living in poverty has dropped by more than 25% since 2000, according to the World Bank. Growth in per-capita GDP averaged about 2.7% a year in the 1990s, compared with about 4.4% annually in the 2000s.

And:

Ms. Akhter and other workers at the two factories in Rana Plaza where she worked in recent years said male managers sometimes hit them and used abusive and profane language. She and others also said workers suffered sexual harassment.

Physical abuse, including hitting, took place on the factory floor and verbal abuse was common, said Sabiha Sultana Mukta, a compliance executive at the factory where Ms. Akhter worked when the building collapsed, Phantom Apparels Ltd. She said she had no direct knowledge of sexual harassment: “When the workers told me about abuses, I took it up with the production manager and line chiefs. I was told to mind my own business.”