I disagree with the article's assertion that we are to blame for the deaths of garment laborers. They are more at the mercy of their employers, who consistently fail to offer favorable working circumstances. For instance, the working conditions in the factory described in the Doug Saunders piece were hazardous, and despite the factory owners receiving warnings about the safety of the employees, nothing was done to better the situation. On the outskirts of Dhaka, a similar incident occurred when a building collapsed because its owners disregarded warnings about potentially hazardous internal fractures. Most of the garment factories are highly packed with labor and employees work long hours for meagre wages (Raziq & Maulabakhsh, 2015).It is, in my opinion, wrong to conclude that our clothing bargains lead to misery, poverty as well as deaths of the workers in the garment factories.
Taking into consideration that there have been complaints of verbal abuse, physical assault, unsanitary conditions as well as forced overtime in Dhaka's garment mill, all this possibly contribute to the high death toll within the factory. It has also been proven that most of the clothing industries fail to meet the required standards of building (Raziq & Maulabakhsh, 2015). For instance, during the Triangle Fire in North America there were no fire-escape stairs as well as sprinklers. This may account for the high number of people who perished during the tragedy.
However, despite the fact that the many garment factories endangers the lives of its workers, the clothing industry has, in fact, raised the living standards in Bangladesh through employing millions of people, thus reducing poverty. There is a need to improve the working conditions as well as the safety of the workers to decrease the number of deaths within the garment factories. We can, therefore, conclude that the deaths of garment workers are in the hands of their employers and our bargaining are not the cause of workers' misery.
Reference
Raziq, A., & Maulabakhsh, R. (2015). Impact of working environment on job satisfaction. Procedia Economics and Finance, 23, 717-725.
