Global retailers look to cover their asses in wake of Bangladesh disaster

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1100 dead, worst industrial disaster since Bhopal

by Richard Mellor

The deaths of more than 1100 workers has brought the usual limp cover-our-asses response from the global retailers that have their products made in Bangladesh. Many of these firms are deciding its time to get on board the proposal from the Workers Rights Consortium, an NGO made up of liberal academia, the trade Union bureaucracy (US AFL-CIO that refuses to defend its own members), and some student groups. The AFL-CIO officialdom is a bit embarrassed at their impotence in the face of this capitalist brutality and indifference when it comes to human life. The Rana Plaza collapse is the worst industrial accident since the Bhopal disaster.

Prior to the Rana Plaza collapse only two firms had signed on to what is a toothless proposal anyway despite it being referred to as an “ambitious” proposal in the big business media.  For these corporations toilet breaks are ambitious proposals when it comes to workers’ rights in impoverished countries like Bangladesh.

As I pointed out in a previous blog with regards to this “ambitious” effort on the part of corporations to protect workers lives and rights:

“To ensure effectiveness, the program advises, the agreement would "establish" a chief inspector.  This inspector would be, and here's why Business Week is OK with it, "independent of companies, trade unions and factories to execute a safety program."

Here's how BW describes the process:
"Audits of hazards would be made public. Corrective actions recommended by the inspector would be mandatory. Retailers would agree to pay factories enough so that they could afford renovations, and retailers would be forbidden from doing business with noncompliant facilities.”

This would all be enforced through the courts in "retailers home countries" which means here in the US or in Europe for most of them.”

The idea that an individual like the program's inspector is actually independent is nonsense.  The whole idea is to strengthen the control of the capitalist class.  The only independence this individual will have is from the influence of the workers and our organization while representing the interests of the capitalist class.   Workers cannot rely on bourgeois justice, legal system or political parties to defend our interests. 

1100 deaths does put a little pressure on the coupon clippers who profit from the workers of Bangladesh, many of them women and children, and anyone with a brain knows that despite the factory owners in Bangladesh being corrupt thugs and the government with them, the real power lies in the board rooms of Wall Street and other financial centers. They want to ensure they have some cover when the next disaster hits. 

Despite more retailers finally jumping on board the WRC’s proposal, companies like Abercrombie and Fitch, Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger; the Gap and WalMart have declined to do so.  The Gap says it leaves it open to litigation and WalMart claims it will be upgrading its own plan it initiated after earlier disasters.

The Workers Rights Consortium opposes WalMart’s plan because, “unlike its plan, it contains no binding commitment to help fund improvements to make factories safe.” according to the British bourgeois journal The Economist. WalMart doesn’t agree and claims its plan will result in faster closures of unsafe factories than the WRC’s plan.

All this petty bickering between would be reformers as workers die like flies, never mind living in squalor, misses the point. Neither WalMart nor any of these giant multinationals will be bound by such an agreement.  The WalMart family heirs are worth about $100 billion.  The GDP of Bangladesh is about three times that.  It’s worth noting that in a country whose industry is dominated by huge global corporations, 31.5% of the population is below the poverty line according to the CIA World Fact Book data. This is how wealth is made.

Naturally, the trade Union bureaucracy welcomes the WRC proposal as a significant victory which is no surprise as they are a part of it. But as I wrote in previous comments on this issue, only workers self organization and workers ownership and control of society’s dominant industries including the finance industry both in Bangladesh and throughout the world, will prevent catastrophe’s like the deaths of 1100 of us in the Rana Plaza disaster.

Read earlier blogs on this subject hereand here.

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800 dead in Bangladesh: Fight global capitalism with international working class unity

by Richard Mellor
Afscme Local 444, retired

I’m having a hard time figuring out where to start this morning.  I need to control my anger after reading the introductory paragraph to this article in BloombergBusinessweek, a major journal of the US capitalist class.

“Bangladesh’s billion dollar garment industry provides opportunities for millions of poor, illiterate women.”,BW writes.  Indeed it does.  The death toll from last month’s catastrophe when a building housing several factories collapsed has topped 800. When opportunity knocks it knocks hard in Bangladesh. (see previous blogpost)
It also has its dangers the article confesses.  The nation is a "paradox" BW  argues. Is that what you call it?

Bangladesh has some 5000 garment factories that supply clothing to retailers like Wal Mart, Target and other western giants.  These exports tripled between 2005 and 2010 and are estimated to triple again by 2020. The preponderance of textile manufacturing in Bangladesh is due to one reason and one reason only----profits.  A human being’s labor power can be bought for about $50 a month in Bangladesh compared to $235 in Shenzhen China.  Even the use of a lowly Vietnamese worker’s Labor power is too costly for the heads of the retail giants coming in at $100 a month by comparison.  Yes indeed, Bangladesh has been a boon for the 1%. Steve Jobs, the Waltons, the heads of Nike, Puma and the tech giants and other characters that purchase $100 million yachts do so on the backs of workers like the Bangladeshi women that died in last month’s tragedy.

But what am I saying?  We should thank these people; laud the productive power of the capitalist mode of production for giving these poor illiterate women a chance to better themselves.  “If you look at industrial history, for better or worse, this is what an early industrial revolution looks like.”,  says Pietra Rivoli, an author and professor at Georgetown University. This is a profound statement if there ever was one.  In order for capitalism to develop in Bangladesh it must go through its Dickensian period. So much for progress. I wish I’d have gone to university it might have learned me something. Bangladesh is “…still a desperately poor country We shouldn’t minimize what a job with a steady paycheck means to a poor woman”says Rivoli.

They should think themselves lucky these Bangladeshi’s.

The mass murderer and war criminal Henry Kissinger who has found a safe haven on American soil, once referred to Cambodia, where 600,000 or so were slaughtered by US capitalism’s carpet bombing strategy he helped orchestrate, as a “Sideshow”* (when he compared it to Vietnam where three million were slaughtered).  He has a knack for using such colorful phrases to describe regions with rich and centuries old culture and his one for Bangladesh is that it’s a ” basket case”.  British colonialism’s role in the creation of the country and partition of the Indian sub continent and western capitalists support for repressive regimes are absent of course.

We will find the issue of real profits missing from all the post catastrophe analysis of the building collapse at Rana Plaza.  There is no such thing as democracy when it comes to these matters.  Business practices, profits, these are protected and the business of the owners of capital, not workers, but we can see it in the form of yachts and luxuries and the obscene living standards and Forbes.com’s figures on the coupon clippers’ net worth.

More so than the owners of that building, or of Ether Textiles that was housed in the building and that employed many of the dead; responsibility for the disaster falls at the feet of the western based coupon clippers, bankers, investors, hedge fund managers and private equity thugs whose riches are dependent on the Dickensian world of global manufacturing and who turn a blind eye to the horror.

Workers, mostly women and children, are bent over sewing machines for 14 or more hours a day making jeans and other apparel with fancy exotic sexy names. Women are preferred for these jobs as they are considered better sewers and more importantly, as Business Week points out, “more compliant”.

Another component of these working conditions, much akin to Dickens’ time in England,  is physical/sexual violence. In a recent survey of workers there done by Britain's War on Want, 70% of them interviewed said they had been verbally abused and 40% of them physically beaten. Sexual harassment, from inappropriate touching to rape is commonplace.  Then there is the punishment for not producing or meeting quotas.  These include being forced to stand on tables for hours on end and having to undress in front of your co-workers.  Regulations or workers rights were simply ignored with pregnant women being forced to work until the final days or weeks of pregnancy and often fired after birthing.

As of this writing the names of the customers, the retailers for whom the clothes at Ether Textiles were being produced have not been named.  It doesn’t amount to much if they are especially if they are US based as US corporations have personhood so no human is guilty.

The sheer numbers in this particular disaster does have the heads of western companies like the Gap, Wal-Mart and European concerns worried.  Not so much about the lives of Bangladeshi men women and children, but the loss of business and profits that could be brought about if pressure comes from US and European activist groups or social upheaval in the source country itself that could put and end to the profit taking.  The Bangladeshi government has now agreed to the UN’s International Labor Organization’s proposals that “include worker protections and the right to unions” says BW.  Good luck with that.

Capitalism cannot advance humanity.  It does not take rocket science to figure that out. Here in the US, US capitalism, the most powerful capitalist economy of all and headed by the same folks that get rich from our Bangladeshi brothers and sisters and are responsible for their conditions and this catastrophe, are driving US workers down to third world conditions.  I pointed this out recently with regard to the shutting down of the Caterpillar factory in London Ontario and transplanting it to LaGrange Illinois where wages are 50% lower   The US “has become much more efficient, making it more attractive for global manufacturers.” , the Wall Street Journal reported  Things are looking good for the US capitalist class back at home as far as productivity is concerned. US bosses get almost 25% more goods and services out of us than they did in 1999 with the same number of workers and as wages have declined.  “It’s as if $2.5 trillion worth of stuff---the equivalent of the entire U.S. economy circa 1958—materialized out of thin air” Business Week wrote in January. An “attractive” workforce is always a cheaper and more compliant workforce.

The orchestrators of this savage attack on the living standards of American workers have a mantra for us when it suits them, “United We Stand”.  We have no say in the allocation of capital in society, whether it is used here or in Bangladesh.  We have no say in foreign policy and when their phony diplomacy is revealed to us by a heroic figure like Bradley Manning, the messenger faces life imprisonment. And who is in Guantanamo? We have no idea. When foreign victims of their policy resist, we are supposed to forget about what they are doing to us domestically and rally round the flag to protect not “our” but “their” freedom which amounts to freedom to accumulate wealth at the expense of others.

Capitalism will produce more disasters like the one in Bangladesh. More environmental catastrophe like the BP oil spill, more destruction like that which just occurred in West Texas.  These events will receive no serious analysis, no deep insight in to the system and why it allows such easily preventable disasters. The system must not come under scrutiny. 

The International Labor Organization is an arm of the United Nations which is simply a capitalist club.  Only a global movement, a united global working class movement can begin to reverse course, prevent environmental disaster which at some point will be irreversible or change the horrific conditions that exist in workplaces that lead to events like the catastrophe in Bangladesh. The increased regional warfare is also a product of the global struggle between nations for domination of the world market. The hunger and disease in Africa and elsewhere is not caused by lack of funds or technical/medical knowledge. It is the lack of social infrastructure and capital will not flow in to this arena if it doesn’t produce the right return on investment. We cannot solve our problems within the framework of the profit system.

It is not a moral issue in the sense that we can convince capitalists to be nice people, or change their ways.  They are driven to act the way they do by the laws of the market and it is these laws we have to challenge.

The production of human needs must be a collective venture.  The ownership and allocation of capital, a crucial aspect of production must be a collective process owned and managed not by individuals for profit but by those whose labor power produces that capital; capital is a collective product.

I anticipate the response from fellow workers. “That’s a nice idea but it’ll never work”. Who says that? Every ruling class teaches that their system of production is the only system of production, is the apex of human civilization. The dominant ideology in society is the ideology of the class that rules. The class that owns the means of production also owns the means of communication, the schools the universities the media.

It is not an easy process. But if we take the time to look at our own history as workers; not just as American workers but as world workers.  The revolutions and great strikes that have occurred, Spain, Chile, China, and the most important of all, the Russian revolution of 1917.  Not just for its initial success, but also why it degenerated with the rise of Stalinism.

Is it an accident that the Seattle general strike of 1919 is almost unknown to us?**   
Why is this kept from us?  It is kept from us because it is an example of how workers can govern society. It is an embrionic look at what a society might look like beyond capitalism and its brutal profit motive. Working people controlled Seattle for almost a week before being defeated. Workers formed a General Strike committee of 300 members with many sub committees.  In the course of the strike, these workers committees, or councils ran essential services that were exempted from the strikes, from garbage collection to milk deliveries and hospitals.  Here is a short excerpt from the minutes of this committee:

“King County commissioners ask for exemption of janitors to care for City-County building. Not granted.”

“F.A. Rust asks for janitors for Labor Temple. Not granted. (The committee was playing no favorites: it is worth noting, however, that a few days later, when the Co-operative Market asked for additional janitor help because of the large amounts of food handles for the strikers’ kitchens, their request was allowed.)

“Teamsters’ Union asks permission to carry oil for Swedish hospital during strike. Referred to transportation committee. Approved.”

“Port of Seattle asks to be allowed men to load a governmental vessel, pointing out that no private profits are involved and that an emergency exists. Granted.” (Note: This was on a later date.)

“Garbage Wagon Drivers ask for instructions. Referred to public welfare committee, which recommends that such garbage as tends to create an epidemic of disease be collected, but no ashes or papers. Garbage wagons were seen on the streets after this with the sign, ‘Exempt by Strike Committee.”

Drug Stores—Prescriptions Only

“The retail drug clerks sent in statement of the health needs of the city. Referred to public welfare committee, which recommends that prescription counters only be left open, and that in front of every drug store which is thus allowed to open a sign be placed with the words, ‘No goods sold during general strike, Orders for prescriptions only will be filled. Signed by general strike committee.’

“Communication from House of Good Shepherd. Permission granted by transportation committee to haul food and provisions only.”

I am only drifting in to this arena as I often raise the issue of workers’ ownership and control of society’s means of production, distribution and exchange of goods and have many times been told it is utopian, an impossibility.  But it is through studying our own history that we can see the general trend toward such a society when workers move in to struggle, and not just through a historical event like the Russian revolution, but here in America we have great examples and the Seattle General Strike is a great example which is why it is practically airbrushed from history. 

Society needs new managers.

* For more information read "Sideshow" by William Shawcross and The Trial of Henry Kissinger by Christopher Hitchens
** See "Strike" by Jeremy Brecher for more on Seattle 1919

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600 Bangladeshi workers killed by capitalism. Only workers control will prevent further catastrophe.

Profit comes first

by Richard Mellor
Afscme Local 444, retired

By all accounts the number of workers killed when a building housing garment factories collapsed in Bangladesh has topped 600.  The decrepit building had the charming name of Rana Plaza. The feudal working conditions for Bangladesh garment workers is widely known and workers, mostly women but including children, have waged pitched battles with police and company thugs over the years. 

Western capitalists like the Wal Mart heirs have done very well out of the Bangladeshi workers.  These six wasters accumulated more wealth than the bottom 41.5% of American families as of 2010, more than 100 million Americans.  This breed of do nothings are all on the Forbes 400 of richest individuals and earned their money the hard way as Alter Net put it, "They inherited it."

Forbes 400
No 6 Christy Walton $25.3 billion
No. 9: Jim Walton, $23.7 billion
No. 10: Alice Walton, $23.3 billion
No. 11: S. Robson Walton, oldest son of Sam Walton, $23.1 billion
No. 103: Ann Walton Kroenke, $3.9 billion
No. 139: Nancy Walton Laurie, $3.4 billion

Coupon Clippers like the Walton's don't invest money in places like Bangladesh or China to improve living standards in these countries. Like all big capitalists, they have no allegiance to any country, they are global predators and it is the cheap price of doing business, especially the low cost of and limited rights of labor power.

The death toll in Bangladesh has caused some concern among the wealthy US elite whose existence is dependent on driving down the living standards of US workers and in the meantime turning a blind eye to the 18th century conditions that exist in the factories of their suppliers. Profit is the great persuader.

There is a need now to appear to be doing something in the aftermath of this horrific catastrophe where 600 or more workers have lost their lives on the altar of profit. The NGO's and other so-called non-profits want some standards put in place and demand some improvements. It's likely after this that the real power behind the process, the western multinationals, will be open to some new ideas. After all, the non profits won't deny the Waltons their blood money.

From what we read in the corporate media raising prices seem the way to go. Americans have benefited from the super exploitation of Bangladeshi women and children in the form of cheap prices for what we wear. We import more than 97% of what we wear according to Bloomberg Businessweek pointing out that in the era of increased capitalist globalization women's clothing costs have fallen 7% and men's 8%.  In the UK apparel prices have fallen 20% in the last 8 years.

Businessweek points out that the "Worker Rights Consortium", described as an "independent" labor rights monitoring group estimates it would cost $600,000 to bring Bangladesh's 5000 factories up to western safety standards for a total cost of $3 billion.  According to WRC, this would add less than 10c to the price of the 7 billion garments the country sells to the western retailers.  Business Week likes that idea confident that the Bangladeshi factory owner could pass that on to the retailer and the retailer to the US consumer adding only 25c to the cost of an item.

Problem solved? I don't think so.

Possible obstacles to such a revolutionary solution to the plight of the Bangladeshi worker like market forces, supply and demand and a brutal police state, are absent.  But an even more important omission is profits.  Profits are always absent.  They just seem to forget about this aspect of production.  I am not questioning the cost estimates of making a factory"western" grade when it comes to safety, feeding the world's people would be easily accomplished were it not for the capitalist economic system that directs the production of human needs and I should add that western grade is nothing to boast about, I've worked in factories.   The UN's World Health Organization itself estimates that access for all to improved water and sanitation services would cost around US$22.6 billion per year.  This is a paltry sum in the overall sphere of things and only 25% of the Walton family's total wealth. It is a drop in the ocean when compared to the $26 to $32 trillion believed to be stashed in offshore accounts by the richest percentage of the global population. We must abandon this Neo Malthusian nonsense that hunger and starvation is a product of overpopulation as opposed to the system of production where food is a commodity, if you can pay for it you eat, if you can't you starve.

To ensure these "upgrades" are met, BusinessWeek suggests  factory owners can "sign on" to the "Bangladesh Fire and Safety Agreement" which is a program the Workers' Rights Advocates promote.  To ensure effectiveness,  the program advises, the agreement would "establish" a chief inspector.  This inspector would be, and here's why Business Week is OK with it, "independent of companies, trade unions and factories to execute a safety program."

Here's how BW describes the process:
"Audits of hazards would be made public. Corrective actions recommended by the inspector would be mandatory. Retailers would agree to pay factories enough so that they could afford renovations, and retailers would be forbidden from doing business with noncompliant facilities."

This would all be enforced through the courts in "retailers home countries" which means here in the US or in Europe for most of them.

Coupon clippers like the Waltons and the other heads of the major players among the western retailers are very happy with such a toothless agreement that may cost them a few cents and rid them of negative publicity like the deaths of 600 workers. 

It is the same old story.  Eliminate any indication of workers control at the shop floor and rank and file level.  The idea that an individual like the program's inspector is actually independent is nonsense.  The whole idea is to strengthen the control of the capitalists class.  The only independence this individual will have is from the influence of the workers and our organization while representing the interests of the capitalist class.   Workers cannot rely on bourgeois justice, legal system or political parties to defend our interests. 

This attempt to pacify the giant multinationals and weaken the independence of workers organizations should come as no surprise. The Worker Rights Consortium is composed of liberal representatives from academia, including students and the trade Union bureaucracy that is cooperating hand over fist with the coupon clippers in their efforts to drive US workers living standards down to the levels of Mexico and China.  The trade Union leadership's behavior in the face of the vicious and brutal attacks is nothing less than criminal. They are completely wedded to the market and the profit system.

What will eliminate prevent events like the Bangladesh tragedy from happening in the future is a global united movement of the working class coordinating unity in action, mass industrial and political action against the capitalist offensive.

We cannot make production safe until we control production.

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A small reminder; who are our friends and who are our enemies.

Just a short contribution to remind us who US politicians, representing the interests of the giant US multinationals, meet with when they visit other countries.  Here's an example from their travels in Central and South Asia:

Those they meet with:

Enemies: Reagan and the Mujahadeen

Who they avoid

Brother and sisters: two of more than 250 Bangladeshi Factory workers crushed this week. 

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Capitalism at work: More Bangladeshi workers die as factory collapses

Workers mourn the death of their comrades

by Richard Mellor

As I write, Bangladeshi authorities are trying to figure out how many workers have been killed in the latest factory disaster there.  So far, the death toll as a building housing workers collapsed according to the Wall Street Journal is 145, but it is expected to climb much higher. 700 workers have been killed in factory fires in the last decade in this Dickensian world of manufacture and mass mayhem.

Most of the workers are women according to reports and this catastrophe comes on the heels of the Tazreen factory fire last year where 100 workers died. This is capitalism at work. These killings are not accidents and the guilty are not simply the small fry that run these outfits but the executives in the board rooms of Wall Street and the western retailers that demand cheap labor to keep the profits rolling in. These workers have died so that consumers in the west can purchase items under such colorful brand names as "Joe Fresh" or from the the likes of Spanish apparel giant "Mango."

Like electricity that seeks the line of least resistance so do capitalists in their rapacious quest for profits.  As if Chinese wages and conditions aren't abysmal enough, as Chinese workers have fought to raise wages foreign manufacturers flee in search of human beings more desperate for work and survival and preferably living under more repressive conditions.  Vietnam and Bangladesh have become more lucrative markets for human Labor power, "Foreign companies have flooded in to Bangladesh in recent years..." to escape the higher cost of Chinese workers the WSJ points out.  This is as natural to the capitalist mode of production as the air we breath is to life, no amount of regulation will stop it. 

If we should learn one thing as workers it is the need to build international solidarity with all workers, those that make the decisions at US corporations don't move production to low wage countries to improve living standards, just the opposite.  We must reject the idea that we should compete with foreign workers that the bosses claim are "willing" to work for less and under more inhumane conditions.  Acceding to one's oppressor under coercion is not being a "willing" partner in the arrangement. We must not blame them and be driven in to competition with them for the necessities of life.  Our allegiance must be not to a nation state but to our class across such national boundary's. The existence of low waged areas is a threat to all of us, whether in Mississippi or Bangladesh, the bosses will always be drawn to them.  The way to combat it is to build international working class solidarity against international capitalism.

The investors and other thugs that run the likes of Wal Mart and Nike cry crocodile tears for the dead and throw a million bucks here and a million bucks there to satisfy western non profits and human rights groups who are constantly raising the conditions in these factories.  After the last fire, Wal Mart has been paying for fire inspections at the factories that supply it with cheap goods and has donated $1.6 million for training in fire safety according to the Journal.  We should remind ourselves that the Wal Mart heirs are worth some $100 billion, made off the backs of these women in Bangladesh, many of whom now lay dead.

A huge crack was seen in the building a day before the collapse and workers were evacuated. The bosses had a meeting that evening and the owner of the factory told workers that "The building will stand for another hundred years", according to Selina Aktar, a 24 year old worker who survived.  She told the WSJ that as workers were gathered outside the next day, bosses through megaphones warned them that if they didn't return to work their pay would be docked. Shortly after they did, the place collapsed. "I was trapped in the darkness" she told the Journal, "There was choking dust. There was a big slab of concrete. I couldn't get out."

Bosses coerced workers in to returning after defects were found

according to reports.

No amount of regulation or intervention on the part of western non-profits will prevent the continued savagery of capitalist production.  As I pointed out in recent commentaries, US capitalism has driven wages and conditions in the US to such a low level that this country is becoming an attractive place to do business as it already has fairly decent infrastructure compared to many other countries.  Caterpillar shifted production from its London Ontario plant to Indiana where wages are 50% lower and the Union leaders more cooperative.  As Marx once said, workers have no country.

The same forces that we bailed out to the tune of trillions of dollars are at work here.  Capitalism was saved from collapse through the intervention of public funds.  We should have helped it over the cliff.  The austerity agenda that is being imposed on workers here in the US, the savage conditions imposed on workers and peasants throughout the Third (former colonial) World is the natural order of things for the so-called free market.  Workers can only rely on our own strength, our own organizations, both economic and political.  The women and men, and children that die everyday as a result of business decisions are our brothers and sisters.

At the 1994 California State Labor Federation Convention to which I was a delegate, then Executive Director, Jack Henning stated in his opening address: "There should originate, in the leadership of the AFL-CIO, a call to the unions for the only answer that is noble: global unionism is the answer to global capitalism."

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Although Henning had no intention of using his office to fight for such a development, it is advice we can all agree with.  Only a united global movement of workers can drive back the global capitalist offensive and would be a step to preventing disasters like yesterday's factory collapse in Bangladesh. We must break the barrier in our own minds of nationalism and patriotism and build such global solidarity among workers, not motivated by some notion of morality in defense of those less fortunate than ourselves, but to defend out own class interests.   "United We Stand" is a good slogan.  Who we unite and stand with is the crux of the matter.  The coupon clippers that have driven Americans from our homes, denied our youth education, our sick health care are as responsible for the deaths of our class brothers and sisters in Bangladesh.  They call themselves Americans too, but we must not be fooled by that, there are Americans and Americans.

There will be no manhunt in the offices or board rooms of Wall Street for these criminals, just like those whose decisions led to the deaths in West Texas. They know too well the conditions that are necessary for them to make their millions and they make their choices accordingly. 

Such a movement is necessary, but what we stand for is crucial.  Taking in to public ownership the finance industry and banks is crucial because workers cannot change this situation if we don't own capital and control its allocation in society, not the individual savings of workers and the middle class, but a collective accounting of how this capital is used in  production.  Taking under workers control and management  the dominant sectors of the economy is what will change this situation, not having illusions in capitalism regulating itself.

The usual crocodile tears will flow for these victims of the market from the apologists of capital.  The US capitalist class will blame it on their junior partners in Bangladesh.  We will hear their usual arguments that it is "crony capitalism" that is at fault as if the US isn't the home of "crony capitalism".

Our future can only be guaranteed if we end this madness, end capitalism as a means of producing human needs and replace it with a world federation of democratic socialist states.

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Bangladeshi workers brutal conditions: The market at work

garment workers in Bangladesh

by Richard Mellor

If there is one simple thing we should think about when some workers attack Chinese workers or any workers in other countries for taking “our “ jobs it should be that the US corporations that shift production abroad don’t do it to raise the wages of workers in other countries but to brutally exploit them.    So obviously we have a lot in common with these workers; our problems are the same no matter what language they speak, what their religion is how they look or what food they eat.  It’s just a matter of degree and in most cases they receive far worse treatment than we do.  No dictator or regime is unacceptable to the global capitalists as long as Labor comes cheap and Unions are out of the picture and profit margins high.

Chinese workers have fought huge battlers of late, which have resulted in surging wages.  Couple this with inflation and that hurts profits.  Consequently, factories like Foxconn are shifting production to Vietnam.  Militarized borders and 20-foot walls don’t stop capital from traversing the globe.

Escaping rising costs, much of the apparel manufacturing industry has pulled up roots and landed in Bangladesh.  As I write this I can’t help thinking of the Caterpillar plant in London Ontario that did the same thing when the workers refused a 50% pay cut.  The plant moved abroad where wages were half what they were in Ontario and Unions were more cooperative, Joliet Indiana in the good old USA.

So Bangladesh now has an $18 billion apparel manufacturing industry that has “sprung up” says Bloomberg Business Week.  The problem with the “sprung up” method of producing human needs is that the facilities and structure for absorbing all this labor power is inadequate. It is not unlike the development of capitalism in Britain when the peasantry were thrown off the land but industrial society was not yet mature enough to absorb them.

More than 700 Bangladehsi garment workers have died since 2005according to the Labor Rights Forum.  There have been some horrendous factory fires, 112 workers died in a garment factory fire in Bangladesh in November last year and 262 workers died in a garment factory fire in Pakistan last September. A recent ILRF report also claims that these apparel companies are, “Putting workers’ lives at risk by covering up fire safety hazards and other dangerous working conditions using confidential audits and ignoring known solutions.”  The truth is that these workers were murdered.  Then we have the workers that have been shot on picket lines and during protests about the inhumane conditions in these plants.

And it is not simply the suppliers.  The western retailers are also murderers.  Because corporations have the same rights of people here in the US we hear only that Wal Mart said this or Target says that.  Caterpillar says it had to move the plant etc. etc.  The human element is removed, there’s never a guilty party.

One of the ways the western retailers add to the problems the suppliers complain is the demands the retailers pout on them.  They often change the design or request changes to their orders with very short notice forcing the suppliers, with already antiquated infrastructure, no meddling Unions and generally a repressive regime in power, to intensify already brutal working conditions.  The problem is that, “The American consumer wants the widest variety possible and they want it now”, Nate Herman, VP of the Association that represents the interests of the apparel capitalists.  The retailers are only responding to consumer demand.  So it’s our fault. The Walton family that runs Wal-Mart and has more wealth than 90 million Americans is in business out of their humane desire to clothe the masses in the way we want to be clothed.

I watched about two hours of TV this evening and I faced an assault of advertisements reminding me what I need to do on February 14^th to show my partner how much I love her.  It was nonstop and will get even worse the closer we get to Valentine’s Day.  I urge people not to buy any of their stuff on Valentine’s Day.  Don’t let an advertising pimp determine when and how you show your partner you love them. In addition, I was told a few times to call my doctor and ask him if “Crestor” is right for me, that I can be happy if I buy a Honda and other useless bits of information.

So I challenge the executive who is head of the group that represents apparel capitalists.  I do not believe that the consumer drives this train. The owner of capital does. Scott Nova, CEO of the Worker Rights Consortium agrees, it’s not that the consumer is hooked,  “It’s an expectation retailers have created”, he tells BW.  The way young people dress, what we buy and what we think we need, is very much influenced by the media through ads, shows that are directed at young men and women, and movies. And the reason fashion is what it is and the consumer “wants it now” or is convinced to think they need it now or need it at all, is that wealth is created through the process of producing these items, added value above that spent on their production but only realized through their sale.  The producer needs the consumption, it cannot slow, and it cannot cease otherwise society for them ceases also.  Chaos ensues.

The piece in Bloomberg BW that spurred me to write about this points out that the largest of the buyers of Bangladeshi garments “posted” margins of 50% for the past ten years. The Gap and Urban Outfitters posted margins of 40%. I am not familiar with this economic term to explain what it means, all I know is that it puts a lot of money in some coupon clippers’ bank account, probably part of that more than $26 trillion stashed away in tax havens.

There are numerous non-profits and social justice organizations like the ones referred to here that speak out against these injustices and the inhuman conditions that people work under.  But their approach is to appeal to the retailers, the Wal-Marts and Targets and other global giants to change their behavior, to be nice. “If they can allow some sort of margin (added payments) for the improvement of working conditions and some other things, maybe that can help us.” says Bangladesh Commerce Minister, Ghulam Muhammed Quader.

The worker advocate groups may be full of well-intentioned people and their cause just.  But the road to hell is paved with good intentions. It is interesting that Unions are not mentioned in this article in BW. Independent Unions are the first step in changing these conditions and Bangladesh and there are Unions there but Union leaders risk their lives and have lost them.   Workers on strike have been shot and killed including children. The minimum wage for a garment worker in Bangladesh is $37 a month it is no wonder they fall prey to labor traffickers and end up doing slave labor under even worse conditions in places like Dubai as we pointed out in a previous blog.  Appealing to the suppliers and more so the retailers to change this situation is pointless. These conditions are not a product of bad individuals but a rotten social system.  Caterpillar moved to Joliet Indiana, GM moves to China and FoxConn moves to Vietnam because they are driven to by the laws of the system, it is a market necessity----it is capitalism. 

It is in all workers’ interests to build links with workers in Bangladesh, Bolivia and throughout the world.  To compete with each other in order to assist our own bosses’ drive their rivals from the global marketplace is against our self-interest, makes solidarity virtually impossible and is a race to the bottom.

Socialist globalization is what will change these conditions

Global Unionism to fight global capitalism. Divided we fall, united we stand it’s that simple. 

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Bangladeshi workers and Palestinians don't merit Obama's tears

In the aftermath of the Connecticut massacre and the tearful Obama revealing in the US mass media how much he cares about human life, lets not forget what happened recently in Bangladesh, something that has happened repeatedly in these places.  Workers, many of them women and children have struck for better conditions in these places and have also been shot for doing so by forces allied to the US and the global corporations. The heads of US corpoirations and their representatives in the US Congress and the Pentagon, knew about the conditions that allowed this to happen, workers locked in unsafe factories unable to escape a fire. The author of the piece below is Adrian Salbuchi, an Argentinian writer. He wrote this piece for Russia Today.  We reprint this for our readers' interest not as an endorsement for Mr. Salbuchi or his political views.

'Human price' in the capitalist equation (Op-Ed)

Published: 15 December, 2012, 21:07

The human price of a recent fire at a Bangladeshi factory was over a hundred lives, reminding the world that for “western free-market democracy,” the words “human price” have another, very direct meaning.

­
On November 24, a horrific flash fire broke out in a 9-floor sweatshop in Dakha, Bangladesh, belonging to Tazreen Fashions Ltd., killing 117 and injuring 200 of its 1600 workers manufacturing garments for prestigious global brands like Wal-Mart, C&A, Sears and others.  This tragedy shows yet again just how much multinational companies profit from the Third World’s quasi-slave labor exploitation system, marked by a total disdain for human life, dignity and justice. 
But Tazreen was just the first link in the global supply chain delivering clothes “Made in Bangladesh” to stores in Europe and the US.   Clearly, the factory was not a safe place to work and its fire safety readiness was appalling. The fire broke out in mounds of highly flammable yarn and fabric illegally stored on the ground floor near electrical generators.

Once the fire was put out, capitalist profit greed carried on in its “business-as-usual” mode.  You see, Bangladesh has grown to become the world’s second largest apparel exporter after China, which is no longer the cheapest place to manufacture.  Many of the Tazreen factory’s victims were rural young women earning as little as $ 45 a month in what has become a 19 billion dollar export industry for the impoverished country. Bangladesh dubiously ranks as global leader in paying its garment workers the very lowest wages in the world.

In an article published on December 7, The New York Times newspaper reported that the dead workers show a “glaring disconnect among global clothing brands, the monitoring system used to protect workers and the factories actually filling the orders. After the fire, Wal-Mart, Sears and other retailers made the same startling admission: They say they did not know that Tazreen Fashions was making their clothing.”  
“We didn’t know!”, is certainly a line that rings a bell…

Bangladeshi fire-men extinguish a fire in the nine-storey Tazreen Fashion plant in Savar, about 30 kilometres north of Dhaka on November 25, 2012.(AFP Photo / Stringer)

The truth is that the long chain running from the sweatshops of Dahka to C&A and Sears outlet stores in the US and European cities has many, many links; more than just a supply-chain, it often looks like a Gordian Knot.

The many middle-men, contractors, sub-contractors, distributors, suppliers, outsourcers and sub-outsourcers serve many purposes.  Some are financial, such as using dirt cheap slave labour countries. Others are legal, to ensure that reasonable safety buffers are always in place between C&A’s and Wal-Mart’s top-brass and corporate legal liability at one end of that chain, and some 19 year old working woman whose life was just snuffed out in a blaze in cheery Bangladesh, at the other end.

If anybody will finally be made “responsible”, it’ll surely be some scapegoat middle-man five, maybe ten, links down the supply-and-demand chain, as far away from C&A’s and Wal-Mart’s and Sears’ sensitivities as possible.

The New York Times adds, “Big brands demand that factories be inspected by accredited auditing firms so that the brands can control quality… Tazreen Fashions was one of many clothing factories that exist on the margins of this system. Factory bosses had been faulted for violations during inspections conducted on behalf of Wal-Mart… Yet Tazreen Fashions received orders anyway, slipping through the gaps in the system by delivering the low costs and quick turnarounds that buyers and consumers demand.  C&A, the European retailer, has confirmed ordering 220,000 sweaters from the factory. But much of the factory’s business came through opaque networks of subcontracts with suppliers or local buying houses.”

They also quote Richard M. Locke, deputy dean of M.I.T.’s Sloan School of Management saying, “We as consumers like to be able to buy ever-greater quantities of ever-cheaper goods, every year… Somebody is bearing the cost of it, and we don’t want to know about it. The people bearing the cost were in this fire.” Not great comfort for the dead workers’ families, I suppose… But it is a revealing definition that exploitation, not democracy; that greed, not human rights is what really drives “Western free-market democracy”.

A Bangladeshi woman mourns as she holds the body of a relative who died in a fire in the nine-storey Tazreen Fashion plant in Savar, about 30 kilometres north of Dhaka on November 25, 2012.(AFP Photo / Stringer)

The Human Price

It’s when catastrophes like these occur that the masks of Greed Capitalism fall and its multiple ugly Medusa-like heads stare threateningly at the whole world. The same thing happened in 1984 with the chemical mass poisoning by Union Carbide’s Bhopal plant in India.

Naturally, the global media help with the Corporate Over-world’s damage control with the usual “What a tragedy!”, “Oh, the humanity!”, and “Why didn’t anybody prevent this?” type commentary for the requisite number of days, shedding an alligator’s tear or two. However, they know – we all know – what the truth really is.

Because these dreadful events happen in far-off lands like Bangladesh and India, and since inhuman sweatshop conditions are the norm in “underdeveloped markets” like Mexico, Africa, India and South East Asia, it doesn’t really mean much to the West.  Sure, the workers who are its victims have little or no legal or social security protection, pension funds, workers compensation insurance, health benefits or employer liability insurance protecting them. But then again, they are swarthy folk with impossible to pronounce names living in those ghastly lands.

They’re all on their own, because they are “owned” by a Behemoth “labour market” that calls the shots, all in the name of “supply-and-demand.” That same market awards a C&A CEO or Goldman Sachs trader or Wal-Mart shareholder tens, even hundreds of millions of dollars in dividends, bonuses and salaries at the top end of the chain, then gets away with paying hundreds of millions of super-poor workers $45, maybe $50 a month as “salary”.
Interestingly, the Times’ article carried as a subtitle, “The Human Price” which, more than they can imagine, can actually help put things in their proper perspective.

Perhaps the western media should start quoting “The Human Price” in nitty-gritty real numbers, just as they quote the New York, London and Frankfurt stock exchanges, or the cost of a barrel of Brent oil, or gold and silver prices. Conceptually, the closest applicable metric to measure “The Human Price” are the Foreign Exchange markets quoting national currencies.

So here’s an idea: just as every day CNN, Bloomberg, Fox, BBC and all the western global mainstream media hammer into our brains how many Euros, Yens, Mexican Pesos or Indian Pounds it takes to buy One US Dollar and vice versa, wouldn’t it help promote a more honest view of “capitalist democracy” if they began quoting the ”exchange rates” in the “Human Market”?
Just how much are the citizens of different countries and regions really worth from the viewpoint of Greed Capitalism’s Weltanschauung – its world view, so to speak?

This picture taken on 24 November, 2012 shows Bangladeshi people and firefighters trying to extinguish a fire in a garment factory in Savar, 30 kilometres north of Dhaka. The death toll from a fire at a Bangladeshi factory soared to at least 121 as rescue workers recovered 112 bodies on November 25, the national fire chief told AFP.(AFP Photo / Palash Khan)

For instance, we all know quite well that “a US Citizen” has one of the very highest values of all of the world’s citizens; that the United States stands ever ready to invade entire countries “to protect American citizens.” British, European Union and Israeli citizens are also “HVH’s” (High Value Humans).

Now, let’s be honest.  Most Western countries’ constitutions poetically state that “all men are created equal”, and have certain “inalienable rights”, etc., etc., which may look nice on paper… but when reality hits, things look mighty different!

So, let’s begin with the Value of ‘One US Citizen’ and then work our way through the values of citizens of our planet’s one hundred and ninety odd nations, to see what “rates of exchange” we get.

Let’s try out a few:

One US Citizen = 2 Brits; or 4 Canadians (sounds just about right); 
One US Citizen = 10 Germans (Yep!  Germany lost the War); 
One US Citizen = 100 Egyptians; or 1,000 Mexicans; or 10,000 Iraqis, or God only knows how many Libyans, Syrians or Iranians (hundreds of thousands, surely!) 
Such a rating scale could go up or down depending on how angry the White House, Congress and AIPAC are on a particular day.

Then there would be: One Israeli Citizen or “One US-Israeli Dual Nationality Bi-Citizen” would probably be worth 10 or more US Citizens.

On “The Human Price” scale, Israeli’s are tops! They are Gold; Platinum, even.  
Israelis have the absolutely highest value of them all.  Maybe that’s because of “supply-and-demand”; I mean there are less than 7 million Israelis out of a total global population of 7 billion; that’s 0.01per cent of mankind!

In numbers they are so, so very scarce that one would expect to never ever even hear about Israel and the Israelis, and yet…Sorry, Americans: you guys are definitely NOT tops… 

One Israeli = 10 Americans at least… 
The point is that under US/UK/Israeli “Corporate democracy”, “all men are equal” but – as George Orwell aptly observed in “Animal Farm” – “some men are much more equal than others…”.
So try asking C&A, Wal-Mart, Sears how much a Bangladeshi rural young woman working 12-hour-a-day-7-days-a-week shifts to meet those huge garment orders is worth.  The obvious reply will be: 45 bucks a month, take it or leave it! Why, that’s about 1% of what she’d be “worth” if she were working in New York, Chicago or London!

One final rather sobering thought just went through my mind: can any of you RT readers imagine what the “Rate of Exchange” would be between One Israeli Citizen and One Palestinian “Non-Member, Observer Non-State” Living Entity? Oh dear, my calculator just went dead…!

­Adrian Salbuchi for RT

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Fire horror kills workers in Bangladesh. Big corporations are murderers.

A few days ago we published an article on the 112 workers burnt to death in the garment factory in Bangladesh. More information has come out on this. It shows two things. One is that capitalism is a murderous system, or as we say it is much worse than we imagine. And the other is that the US and world corporations base themselves on this murderous system.

When the fire started the sirens went off.  The women workers ran to get out. But two managers blocked the way and told them it was only a test. Then the smoke began to rise and the women were trapped. The two managers had disappeared.

The murderous outfit in which these women were burnt to death is called Tazreen Fashions. Women work, or rather worked, at extremely high speed with all the consequent damage to their joints and bodies and minds. They were expected to stitch a hood to a jacket in 90 seconds, and do this every 90 seconds.

Who was collaborating with this murderous outfit? Some of the world's top outfitters. On the third floor where 69 bodies were found burnt to death jackets were being sewed for C and A, a European chain. On the fifth floor where workers were making Faded Glory shorts for Walmart ten bodies were found. On the sixth floor True Desire nighties were being made for Sears. Inside one office a licensee of the United States Marine Corps who made commercial apparel with the Marines logo was found.

One worker, a Mr. Rahman, rushed from his workplace and into the fire and helped save many workers. To do so he had to fight his way past a manager. The factory spent money on these thug managers. But it did not have fire sprinklers nor an outdoor fire escape.

These are some of the horrors of capitalism and the relatively cheap clothes they sell in the advanced capitalist countries and the huge profits that are made. Capitalism is a mad profit addicted system, frothing at the mouth with this addiction.

There is a huge change taking place in the workforce of the world. Half the factory workers in the world today are women. Most of these women workers are in the poor countries such as Bangladesh. The leaders of the labor movement in advanced capitalist countries such as the US are a disgrace. Not only will they not defend their own members, but they will not go out and organize the new workforces that are developing like these women workers in Bangladesh. So they are left to be burnt to death.

These trade union and labor leaders have to be removed. Their capitalist ideas have to be removed. Fighting international opposition movements must be built in the workplaces and union rank and files, in the communities, schools and colleges. These must link together to build a democratic socialist world.  Capitalism collaborates internationally on an economic, political and military basis. The working class must do the same. We have to mourn our sisters in Bangladesh. But we also have to organize internationally in their memory to end capitalism the murderous system which murdered them.

Sean.

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Bangladesh- 100 plus workers burnt to death. Walmart again?

Murdered in the quest for profits

Over 100 people died in a fire in a garment factory in Bangladesh over the weekend. At least 111 people died and scores of others are missing or injured. Bangladesh is the second largest exporter of clothing after China. Since 2006 more than 500 workers have died in fires in Bangladesh according to Clean Clothes Campaign an anti-sweat shop group based in Amsterdam. The industry employs more than three million workers in Bangladesh, most of them women.

Outfits like Walmart, Tommy Hilfiger and Gap get clothing produced in these sweat shop death traps. A spokesperson for the Clean Clothes Campaign says that these profit addicted companies "have known for years that many of the factories they choose to work with are death traps. "Their failure to take action amounts to criminal negligence."

This factory where all these workers died had sales of $35 million a year. Fire officials said they were killed because there were not enough fire exits. The managing director of the Tuba Group, which ran Tazreen Fashions which ran the factory, said he was too busy to comment. Then in an astounding statement he said: "Pray for me," and hung up. Not pray  for the dead workers, not for the burnt and suffering workers, but pray for him the managing director. As we say on this blog again and again capitalism and its dirty profit addicted degenerates are much worse than you could ever imagine. Yes pray for him. It is something else he needs.

But these degenerates are not only owners of Bangladeshi factories. Documents found at the site showed that the factory produced clothing for Walmarts Faded Glory line. The dirty degenerate Walton family have their fingers in this too. As the drive to organize Walmart develops in the US links must be built with workers in other countries who are working in sweat shop conditions and death traps over seas. The Walton family which has wealth equal to at least the lower income 30% of the US population are making their billions off the US low paid workers and also the even lower paid Bangladeshi workers. A united drive to bring this Walmart and its poverty wages to its knees must be launched.

The workers, mainly women, in the Bangladesh factory were getting $37 a month. They have been demanding an increase. A union organizer, Aminul Islam, who campaigned for better working conditions and higher wages, was found tortured and killed outside Dhaka last year. Sweat shop conditions, mass deaths by burning because of lack of safety conditions, the torture and murder of organizers fighting for better wages and safety. This is what lies at the heart of the US clothing industry and its cheap clothes in its garish malls.

Sean

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