Failing to
protect employees from
fires
There have been far too many instances when employers have failed to
protect their employees from fires in their buildings. The recent example of
this is the fire in the Tazreen clothing
factory in Bangladesh that took place on November 24, 2012. Smoke and screams
rose from the lower floor of the eight-story building and then the power went
out in the building.
There was a host of safety violations that contributed
to the severity of the disaster. These included managers closing collapsible
gates to prevent workers using stairways to escape, managers telling their
employees that they should not be alarmed and return to their work stations. Nine mid-level managers and
supervisors prevented employees from leaving their sewing machines even after the
fire alarm sounded saying that it was a merely a false fire alarm. The time needed to
escape the deadly fire was subsequently lost. Also, the absence of a required
closed-circuit camera system, and an illegal ground-floor warehouse contributed
to the loss of life. And to make matters worse, fire extinguishers were not
used once the blaze broke out. The factory did not have a sprinkler system or a
fire escape, forcing workers to descend an internal staircase after the blaze
began, or jump out of windows. Fire investigators discovered that if the yarn
and fabric that caught fire had been stored in a fireproofed storage place as
required by law, the fire could have been contained. Instead the fire spread
quickly spreading toxic fumes from burning acrylic and pushing those fumes up
the stairs to the upper floors. As a result of these acts of stupidity, at
least 112 employees died as a direct result of the fire of which 58 bodies
couldn’t be identified. Such conditions however are the norm in Bangladesh, not
the exception. Since 2006, at least 500 Bangladeshi workers have died in similar
factory fires.
The claim of “sabotage” by the owner of the
factory and also by the government of Bangladesh was an attempt to cover up the
responsibility of the owner and the government which obviously didn`t adhere to
the fire safety laws of Bangladesh. In the days following the fire, Prime
Minister Sheikh Hasina Wajed claimed that the disaster had been “pre-planned by
vested interests.” Her unsubstantiated allegations were an apparent attempt to
cover up her mistakes when addressing opposition parties by implying they were
seeking to destabilize the government thereby justifying her order to deploy
police and troops against distraught and angry relatives at the scene and
subsequent protests by workers.
The garment industry in Bangladesh is crucial
for the government and the rich owners as a source of foreign currency and
profit, all resting on the four million workers, many of them young women, who
toil in about 4,500 garment factories for around $US37 a month. The owners
don’t really care about their employees because they really care about
cost-saving measures that will bring about the inflation of their own personal
income.
There could have been ways to prevent this loss
of life in the Tazreen clothing factory. First, there should have been a
sprinkler system in all the floors of the building. Second, the fire
extinguishers should have been used. Third, there should have been fire hoses
on every floor. Fourth, there should
have been an outside fire escape built—a measure that could
have provided an escape route free of the flames and the toxic smoke that
choked victims trying to flee. Fifth, there should not have been locked iron gates
in the stairwells separating the floors. Sixth, the fire exits should not have
been locked. Seventh, there should have been managers in the factory that have
fire-safety training and eighth, when a fire alarm goes off, no one should
remain in the building.
With respect to leaving the building, this brings to mind of the 9/11
catastrophe when an announcement was made that everyone should return to their
offices. Over a thousand employees died when the buildings collapsed as a
direct result of that stupid blunder.
The company which owned the factory, the Tuba Group, is said to have been repeatedly cited for infractions
of worker protection rules and thusly is culpable for the loss of so many lives
in that building. Further, responsibility also has to be borne by the
Bangladeshi government officials for failure to ensure those rules of fires
safety were enforced. Probably the reason why the government failed in its duty
to protect the workers in that factory is because corruption is rampant in Bangladesh
governments. Allegations
have been made that someone or some people in the government were paid off by allowing
the factory to stay open despite its repeated infractions. Of course, they are
only allegations but if they are true, then the people of Bangladesh have
reason to be really concerned about their welfare.
An example of this kind of corruption took place in Sichuan
China when many children died in
2008 when their schools collapsed on top of them during an earthquake because
local officials corruptly colluded with contractors in their shoddy
construction of the schools.
Establishing the rule of law and eradicating deeply
entrenched corruption in places such as Bangladesh are extraordinarily difficult
to bring to an end. The primary onus to effect such changes is on the
governmental, political and professional institutions in those countries but
corruption is so engrained in these governments and institutions; it may take
years for them to be reformed.
However, western companies such as Walmart and other clothing outlets doing business abroad also have
to take responsibility for the actions of owners of clothing factories such as
the Tazreen clothing factory. The best way
to deal with such factories is to send fire inspectors to these factories and
if the necessary changes aren’t made, then the clothing stores should stop
doing business with these factories until they meet proper fire protection
standards. A Montreal company stopped importing from the Tuba Group’s
Tazreen factory earlier in 2012 because the company failed an ethical-sourcing
audit. What the Montreal company should have also done was to inspect the
factory’s fire safety program; which obviously it didn’t do. It would appear that
the Montreal company was more concerned about the ethical treatment of the
workers employed by the factory than their protection from fires. As a result of clothing stores not doing
business with factories such as the Tazreen factory, Bangladeshi women may lose
their garment industry jobs but if the Tazreen factory had been closed down,
112 who were working in it on November 24, wouldn’t have died in the fire.
One of the things that concerns me greatly is that during an
April 2011 meeting between the clothing factory owners in Bangladesh and Walmart, indications are that Walmart
was unwilling to pay higher prices for the clothing made by those factories and
if Walmart had paid the prices asked by the factory owners, the owners would have
been able to make their factories safer. Labour groups have said that if Walmart had paid roughly a 3% annual
increase in prices paid to the factories, it would be sufficient to make the
needed safety improvements. Of course considering the corruption going in
Bangladesh, there is no way of knowing for sure whether or not that the extra
monies paid to the owners of the factories wouldn’t end up in their personal
bank accounts.
Walmart now says
that it has stopped ordering clothing from the Tazreen factory because of its
safety violations but they still get clothes indirectly from that factory
through subcontractors who get the clothes from the Tazreen factory. Gap announced last October that it would
start a fire-safety program with the garment factories in Bangladesh and help
them get $20 million and also another $2 million in grants to pay the workers
who are laid off while their garment factories are closed for the necessary
renovations.
What is really needed in Bangladesh is an honest and
independent inspection system that has the authority to close down factories
that are not up to scratch and punish owners who have failed to bring about
safety measures in their factories.
Speaking of punishment, there is no doubt in my mind that the
owners and nine managers of the Tazreen factory should be severely punished.
Here is what I have in mind.
The owners should be sentenced to life in prison with hard
labour. All of their personal assets should be forfeited and the monies given
to the families of the victims. The nine managers should be sentenced to prison
for twenty-five years and all their assets to be forfeited and given to the
families of the victims.
But knowing that the government in Bangladesh is corrupt, it
is conceivable that the owners will probably get a slap on their wrists and the
nine managers will get a kiss on their butts.
If you think that isn’t possible, consider what happened to
the owners after the Triangle
Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York City on March 25, that 1911 killed 146 employees—129 women and 17
men. Under the ownership of Max Blanck and Isaac Harris, the factory produced
women's blouses, known as shirtwaists. The factory normally employed about 500 workers,
mostly young immigrant
women—the two youngest being only 14 who worked
nine hours a day on weekdays plus seven hours on Saturdays, earning between $7
and $12 a week. Because the managers had locked the doors to the stairwells and
exits which was a common practice at that time to prevent pilferage and
unauthorized breaks, many of
the workers who could not escape the burning building jumped from the eighth,
ninth, and tenth floors to the streets below and were instantly killed. Although
one of the floors had a number of exits, including two freight elevators, a
fire escape, and stairways down to Greene Street and Washington Place, flames
prevented workers from descending the Greene Street stairway, and the door to
the Washington Place stairway was locked so that managers could check the
women's purses. The foreman who
held the stairway door key had already escaped by another route without first
unlocking the door. Terrified employees crowded onto the single exterior fire escape, a flimsy and poorly anchored iron
structure which may have been broken before the fire. It soon twisted and
collapsed from the heat and overload, spilling about 20 victims nearly 100 feet
(30 metres) to their deaths on the concrete pavement below.
The Fire Marshal concluded that the likely cause
of the fire was the disposal of an unextinguished match or cigarette butt in
the scrap bin, which held two months' worth of accumulated cuttings by the time
of the fire. Needless to say, the bin was not in a secured enclosed place. A
bookkeeper on the eighth floor was able to warn employees on the tenth floor
via telephone, but there was no audible alarm and no way to contact staff on
the ninth floor that the fire was working its way up to their floor.
The company's owners, Max Blanck and Isaac Harris, who
survived the fire by fleeing to the building's roof when the fire began, were
indicted on charges of first- and second-degree manslaughter in mid-April; the pair's trial began on December 4,
1911. Max
Steuer, counsel for the defendants,
managed to destroy the credibility of one of the survivors, Kate Alterman, by
asking her to repeat her testimony a number of times, which she did without
altering key phrases. Steuer argued to the jury that Alterman and possibly
other witnesses had memorized their statements, and might even have been told
what to say by the prosecutors. The defense also stressed that the prosecution
had failed to prove that the owners knew the exit doors were locked at the time
in question. The jury acquitted the two men, but they lost a subsequent civil
suit in 1913 in which plaintiffs won compensation in the amount of $75 per
deceased victim. The insurance company paid Blanck and Harris about $60,000
more than the reported losses, or about $400 per casualty. In 1913, Blanck was
once again arrested for locking the door in his factory during working hours.
He was fined $20.
There you have it. Injustice reigns supreme when it involves
the rich owners of factories where employees are killed because of a lack of
safety precautions.
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