Abstract
The response to the disaster of the clothing factories’ collapse in Savar, just outside Dhaka, in April 2013 with the loss of over 1,100 young lives, echoes the reaction to the greatest industrial calamity ever to have occurred in Britain. This took place in 1913, exactly one hundred years earlier – the Senghenydd pit disaster, which claimed the lives of 439 miners. Predictably, in the West in 2013, the conscience of the penitent cheaply clad took precedence over the actual lives of the producers of their apparel. The ‘humanitarian’ hand-wringing hides a deeper assumption, namely, that since ‘we’ have known such disasters on our journey towards prosperity, ‘they’ too, must expect a similar experience; built, as it is, into the nature of progress.
The collapse of the eight-storey Rana Plaza at Savar just outside Dhaka in April 2013 was one of the worst industrial accidents the world has ever seen, although it was accidental only in the way many catastrophes called ‘natural’ are, since they are attributable to human activity. The 2,000 factories of Dhaka have been thrown up in great haste to cash in on the garments gold-rush of the past twenty years.
The site of the ruined building was described by many as a ‘war-zone’; and it was indeed a battleground, site of the ubiquitous Third World War, the global war of attrition of rich against poor, a conflict between limitless greed and the exhaustible energy of flesh and blood. The costs of this are borne by ill-paid workers with their ruined eyesight, spinal injuries, absorption of dust and lint by the lungs, and, as in the case of the more than 1,100 victims at Savar, with life itself. Who would have thought that young women and men, setting out in the humid early morning for another day’s labour, would have any inkling that their rendez-vous was not with their employer, not with an order urgently awaiting completion, not with the comradely consolation of friends and colleagues, but with death, violent and avoidable?
Those who were there tell of a sound like thunder as the building folded in upon itself. The air was filled with choking dust that darkened the sky and hung like fog over fallen concrete and masonry. Inside, survivors speak of a sudden nightfall, the shuddering of concrete before it buckled and pinned them to the ground by legs, arms or feet. Outside, there was a moment of bewilderment, then as soon as people realised what had happened, a spontaneous rush to the site – workers left nearby factories, homes and shops, as the screams of those caught in the tangle tore through the afternoon. Crowds clawed away at the girders, concrete and rubble, since no cutting equipment was immediately available. The fragility of the hands of rescuers against the unyielding stone suggested how little chance unprotected workers had of withstanding fatal damage from falling masonry and debris.
Savar
Savar is the site of the national monument to the martyrs of the liberation war of Bangladesh. This commemorates the hundreds of thousands who perished in the fight for Bangladesh to be free of Pakistan, the eastern province of which it had become in 1948. That this should also have been the location of the greatest industrial disaster in the country’s history is a bitter irony. It was one not lost on the fighters for freedom, elderly now, who are no longer at the heart of the urgencies of a Bangladesh, which – even as crushed bodies were removed from the crumpled Rana Plaza – was engaged in a confrontation over who owns the country. Not, of course, its two thousand garment factories – the proprietorship of these is plain – but its animating spirit.
On 5 May, only a few days after the tragedy, activists of the recently formed – by students of unregistered madrasas – Hefazat-e-Islam (Defenders of Islam) blockaded the city, while the Opposition, in alliance with them, had brought Dhaka to a halt three days earlier. During the ‘siege’ by the Islamists, who were calling for laws against blasphemy and for the segregation of men and women (which would wreck Bangladesh’s garments industry), at least thirty people were killed in confrontations with the police. The commercial district of Motijheel became another war-zone – burnt-out cars, fires, smouldering wreckage of buildings, and streets littered with rocks and missiles, even as the toll from the ruins of the eight-storey block mounted towards one thousand. The Opposition, which had declared a hartal (shutdown) of the city for 26 April, re-scheduled its planned action for 2 May, in order to inflict maximum damage on the government, which it blamed for incompetence and inhumanity in permitting such a tragedy to occur. The political parties were unable to set aside the fierce political resentments that rage in Bangladesh more than forty years after the war of Independence, a war far from finished today, since it, too, continues to claim victims long after its official cessation.
Nothing could express more clearly the pathologies of a society that cannot unite even in the presence of overwhelming disaster. The wealth of Bangladesh is heavily dependent upon the labour of despised and humiliated workers, who form part of a vast machine for enriching others – lawmakers of political parties, bureaucrats, factory owners, exporters, middle-men, importers, retailers and international brands in the West.
The building was owned by Md Sohel Rana, a significant figure in the governing Awami League, who had held office in its Youth Wing, although he was disowned by the party. It emerged that official permission had been obtained for a six-storey structure, but two further floors were subsequently added, which placed further stress on the fabric of the building. No permit had been granted for its use as manufacturing units. It had, in any case, been constructed with substandard materials, and was also situated, like much recent building in Dhaka, on a former watercourse, which further destabilised the units. The overcrowding and the constant vibration of machinery were also found, in a provisional government report, to have contributed to the instability of the structure.
The building had been declared unsafe after cracks appeared in the masonry; and the employees of a branch of BRAC bank had been told not to report for work. The management of the factories, though, had not only reassured the workers that the building was perfectly secure, but some had also threatened them with a stoppage of wages if they failed to show up for work. Many operatives had hesitated that day before going to work; only the fear of losing their jobs appeared more compelling than the risk to their lives. After the collapse, the building’s owner fled but was apprehended as he tried to escape to India. Others were arrested – engineers, inspectors, officials. The story was transformed from a social and economic disaster into a criminal case, with the Prime Minister declaring that the guilty would be hunted down and brought to justice. In this way, a confrontation with the wider structural corruption in Bangladesh was avoided, and the issue reduced to one of wrongdoing in the erection of an individual structure.
The power of these owners with their political connections is reinforced by the industrial police, instituted in 2010 by the government; an invention unknown even to the flint-hearted mill-owners of early industrial Britain. Their function is to suppress militancy, to chase out those who disrupt production and to detect evidence of a ‘foreign hand’ in the creation of strife. To this end, labour leaders are perceived as saboteurs and union organisers are represented as wreckers or Indian agents, bent on spoiling the competitiveness of Bangladesh. It is as though the workers themselves were incapable of formulating their own demands for justice; a frame of reference that demonstrates the remoteness of ruling classes from those they nominally represent.
Garments are woven, as it were, into the fabric of the country and its powerful – and warring – elites. While the industry involves only the shaping and stitching of the material that comes from outside the country, the factories themselves are more durably sewn into the structures of privilege. Owners and foreign buyers blame each other for the pressure on the workers, but their interlocking relationship ensures that both make enormous profit at the workers’ expense. The garment lords of Dhaka lament that western brands constantly demand increases in productivity, even though their own yield from the labour of the people has passed any possible description of justice – they are obscenely, extravagantly rich. I once travelled in the Business Class of Biman Bangladesh Airlines, and it was like being present at a cocktail party of the ruling elite. They all knew each other, sharing stories and exchanging gossip about visiting their kinsfolk in London, Rome, Washington, California; the places where their children were studying; and the specialists whom their relatives had consulted. Clearly, the education and health care provision of Dhaka were not good enough for them. It is a restricted, claustrophobic world, which has at its disposal resources equal to anything the global rich can boast.
The channels of exploitative power have no doubt been modernised since the East India Company extracted its tribute from Bengal; but contemporary labyrinths of oppression achieve the same ends – workers cheated, denied fair remuneration, overly supervised and spied on, threatened by musclemen if they resist, and all the time fragmented and scattered, so that collective resistance is undermined: the rich grow richer as individuals, but the impoverished are made poorer collectively.
About 10 per cent of parliamentarians are factory owners, but as many as 50 per cent have some financial interest in the garments industry. The owners live in secluded compounds of great luxury, protected from the public by high walls, with frontiers that resemble those to another country and guards in watchtowers. They evoke the semi-military image of a citadel or fortress, beneath which the workers pass each day on their march to work, kicking up dust with their chappals on the margins of the road.
Perhaps predictably, the response to this widely reported tragedy in the West focused on the consciences of the purchasers of cheap products. Fashion experts and editors were quick to advise consumers of the necessity for ethical purchases: as though no one knew before this of the taint attached to articles of clothing clearly labelled with their country of origin, and known to be shipped out of the sweatshops of Asia. Western companies rushed to express their concern for the welfare and safety of the workers, even though they knew nothing of the sub-contractors who furnished them with their agreeably cheap merchandise. Features were published by and about fashionable people, upset and grieved by this predictably unexpected event. New impulse was given to campaigns conducted by organisations dedicated to fairness and ‘clean clothes’. Although Primark cannot be held responsible for the faulty structure of Rana Plaza, it issued a statement, saying: ‘The company is shocked and saddened’, and it offered ‘condolences to all those involved. Primark has engaged for several years with NGOs and other retailers to review the Bangladeshi industry’s approach to factory standards. Primark will push for this review to include building integrity.’ The company had, only a couple of days before the disaster, announced an increase in ‘operating profits’ of 56 per cent for the preceding six months to £238 million. 1
Declaration of a day of mourning; the Prime Minister’s determination that wrongdoers be brought to justice; the arrest of nine people on charges of ‘causing death by negligence’; commitment by the Bangladesh Garment manufacturers’ Export Association to tighten safety regulations; the remorseful contrition expressed by Mango, Matalan, Benetton and other foreign importers, was borne away on the humid breeze. The work of a complaisant and corruptible factory inspectorate contrasts with the zeal of the 3,000 members of the industrial police, whose labour concentrates on rooting out disaffection, and advising employers on the desirability or otherwise of employing certain firebrands and hotheads, whose concern is with the subordinate objectives of safety and the punctual payment of wages. The industrial police would have been more usefully employed looking into abuses by developers, builders, factory owners and managers, but this is not part of their remit.
The response of many other workers in Dhaka to this form of industrial terrorism was also sad and troubling. Their rage and despair at the indifference of the authorities found expression in crowds that took to the streets with sticks and staves, torching vehicles, vandalising buildings, venting their fury in an unfocused frenzy of grief. That the catastrophe should have sparked off an immediate display of violence is a measure of the powerlessness of the workers, the forbidden solidarities and prohibited collective endeavour of these victims of a development about which they have never been consulted. The image of police firing teargas and rubber bullets against the injured and humiliated of Dhaka has a haunting resonance; it is emblematic of a broken and corrupt system, turning its wrath against people forced into its compulsions.
Senghenydd
The scenes of desolation of the heartbroken and bereaved rouse obscure echoes in the people of Britain. The pictures of distressed family members, and their vigil at the scene of the disaster, were reminiscent of experiences familiar only the day before yesterday in the country that gave birth to the industrial revolution.
There were, of course, frequent accidents in the early mills and textile plants of Lancashire and Yorkshire; women and children, whose hair or clothing was caught up in unguarded machinery, so that their whole bodies were sucked into the system of pulleys and chains, whirled around and often severely injured. There were many fatalities. But these were widely dispersed, and could be represented as individual tragedies. Nothing occurred on the scale of Dhaka. In Britain, industrial calamities were reserved for more dangerous occupations, especially coal-mining, which was to Britain in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century what garments are to contemporary Bangladesh; it was the largest single employer of labour.
In 1913, pre-dating the events in Savar by exactly a century, the greatest industrial catastrophe ever known in Britain took place at the Senghenydd pit in South Wales. On that occasion, 439 miners were killed by an underground gas explosion. The rockfall from it prevented rescuers from reaching the victims: it took over a month to recover all the bodies.
The parallels with present-day serial disasters in Bangladesh are striking. The events at Savar had been preceded by many industrial misadventures – building collapses, fires and explosions, after which promises were made that greater attention would be paid to worker safety. In Britain, a decade before the Senghenydd calamity, seventy-eight miners had been buried alive in the same pit. Following this earlier accident, recommendations had been made for the improvement of safety arrangements, but these had been neglected. In fact, conditions had worsened in the meantime, since increased production had led to an even greater concentration of workers in cramped and confined spaces.
It is worth recalling such occurrences, since the echoes are remarkable, even though a century has passed between these non-accidental tragedies.
Pictures taken in 1913 prefigure scenes played out in Dhaka in 2013. There are the same frantic relatives, frozen in attitudes of disbelief and terror: women in shawls and long dresses looking for their sons; mothers who are nursing children, and who realise that they will never see their husbands again. The impotent anxiety, the surrender to the inevitability of what has happened, the faint residue of hope; long relationships, with all their pain, conflict and love, abridged, negligently, in a matter of seconds.
In what other way than in terms of warfare can we interpret the struggle to make yet more profit out of the labour of those who have nothing but the nimbleness of their pliable hands to bargain with against great global concentrations of capital? The significance of Dhaka in 2013 is that the locus of this prolonged war has shifted from the bleak pit-villages of Britain, places of stone and slate, to the capital of Bangladesh, a city described by the Economist in 2011 as the ‘least liveable’ in the world after Harare. The gender, too, has changed – all the dead of Senghenydd were male, while the majority in Dhaka were women, especially young women, on whose slender remittances whole families in the countryside – indeed, whole villages – depend. But it is the same conflict. The intensification of labour, the driving down of costs by competitive western companies, disregard for the lives and limbs of those who know no other livelihood, we have been through it, and we should know, if we have not fallen into the elective dementia of privilege, how it feels. A photograph survives of a street in Senghenydd, a row of small one-storey cottages: every house lost at least one member of the family.
Despite highly conspicuous arrests in Dhaka, history shows that the pursuit of the owners of faulty or dangerous factories has been less than effective. Individuals have been protected by political allies; court cases wind their way through the judicial system in slow motion; evidence is lost, the accused abscond or move abroad to places where they have prudently invested in real estate and other durables that will shield them from the wrath of their countrymen and women.
After Senghenydd, the owners and managers of the pit were prosecuted; but charges against the owners were dropped, and the manager of the mine was fined £24 – the equivalent of a few thousand Bangladeshi taka. A headline in the local paper declared that the life of a miner was valued at ‘a penny farthing’. The Mineworkers Federation appealed against the decision, and in consequence, the owners were fined £10 – about 1500 taka. The mine remained open until 1928. A memorial was erected to those who lost their lives only in 1981 – sixty-eight years after the event, and on the eve of the Thatcher government’s final battle with the miners. An official enquiry found that there had been no neglect on the part of anyone; although it was suggested that the number of Inspectors of Mines was insufficient.
Official remorse was perfunctory, but a relief fund soon reached £100,000, including receipts from a public viewing of the wedding presents of Prince Arthur of Connaught (grandson of Queen Victoria), and the Duchess of Fife. Charity stood in place of justice.
Compensation? …
Such public callousness would be unthinkable today. The world has changed; but remains, in many ways, obdurately the same. In its support for the families of the dead and wounded of Dhaka, Primark offered what it called a ‘compensation package’. This would ‘include the provision of long-term aid for children who have lost parents and financial aid for those injured and payouts to the families of the deceased’. This conciliatory gesture deserves closer scrutiny, for any humanitarian impulse is blunted by the chill euphemisms of language. ‘Children who have lost parents’ appears to imply, if not quite an element of carelessness, a chance misfortune that is nobody’s fault; the idea of a ‘payout’ is mechanistic and condescending. And ‘deceased’ implies natural causes, but these people were killed.
This is all in significant contrast to the immediate self-sacrifice and heroism of the rescuers – neighbours, students and workers from the neighbourhood. They did not wait for organised help but tore away at the rubble with their bare hands. Rescuers tell how they had to amputate limbs to free people trapped under heavy beams and reinforced concrete that could not be lifted; some of these improvised operations were carried out without anaesthetic, and by workers without medical experience. No one knows how many lives were saved in this way.
Stories that emerged from the wreckage confirm official indifference to those who worked in the factories. There was no complete list of all employees. Even the number was unknown, let alone the names. Some days after the tragedy, it was reported that thirty-two unclaimed bodies had been buried in the Jurain graveyard, an announcement that reinforces the sense of the anonymity and abstraction that is ‘labour’. Who knows whether the dead were unclaimed because those they loved were living in a remote part of the country, and did not know where their children were working: people change factories all the time because of unpaid wages, mistreatment, beatings or fines for ‘misconduct’ (which generally means making a mistake in stitching), harassment or sexual advances by predatory male overseers. There is a constant human tide in and out of these unregulated workplaces; labour is dispensable and infinitely replaceable; and only when an event like this illuminates the monumental insentience of the system does it dawn on those who employ them that the workers are more than the sum of their weekly labour, that they have families who struggle to survive and who depend upon the meagre sums they send home. How will the relatives of the nameless buried discover their children are dead? Will they find out from prolonged silence, or by the failure of the next remittances to arrive? Or will some neighbour from Dhaka come home with the news that they have perished? And how will they become reconciled to loss? Will they continue to hope, perhaps for the rest of their lives, that he or she escaped by some stroke of fortune and will one day come back? And what hauntings will they suffer, having been unable to bury them according to the rites of Islam? By the time they were retrieved, many bodies were so mutilated or so decomposed that they could be identified only by their mobile phones; cheap instruments of communication that outlasted the fragile bodies of those who owned them. Just as in Senghenydd, people were advised not to look at the bodies of their dead, since these were mutilated or decayed beyond recognition.
In Dhaka, cases occurred where several families claimed the same body: decomposed, perhaps unidentifiable, but relatives wanted to be able to say they had fulfilled their duty; and for this they needed possession of remains; to whom these belonged became secondary to the faithful performance of the necessary ritual.
Who lived and who perished was a matter of the caprice of fate. Some, little more than children, had worked only for a day or two, and had yet to receive a pay packet. Others had been called to Dhaka by sisters or brothers, telling of opportunities in the city’s 2,000 factories. A few people had failed to arrive for work that day, because of sickness or more urgent family duties. Others had distrusted official assurances that it was safe to enter the building. One girl had sent her sister in her place. Another young woman, reported dead, arrived home and the family believed she was a ghost. Miracles occurred: it was not the time to die for the woman sheltering under a staircase, and another survived, protected by the body of a colleague. And there was the wonder of the survival of Reshma, brought out physically unscathed after seventeen days. The world media reported this as an almost supernatural deliverance; although her story, told with the skeletal brevity with which the lives of poor people are usually evoked, is yet another tale of hardship and sorrow. Her father died when she was 3, and she and her four older brothers and sisters were brought up by their mother in Dinajpur. She came to Dhaka to join her sister, and married a co-worker she met in the factory. The husband treated her cruelly, taking control of her salary and beating her; a few months earlier she had left him. She was later appointed to a position in the Westin Hotel at a salary of 30,000 taka a month.
In the publicity that followed Reshma’s survival, politicians were not slow to make their way to her bedside. The Prime Minister and leader of the Opposition both arrived at the Combined Military Hospital to pay tribute to her endurance; perhaps also to earn back their lost reputation for humanitarian sentiments.
… or collective power?
After the event, swarms of journalists, film crews, photographers, journalists and commentators descended upon the scene, all supplied with the most sophisticated technology for recording it; but lifting equipment and tools for rescue were not immediately available. If a fraction of the money spent on reporting the disaster had been spent on safety, there would have been no news story to cover; in this way, few of us are entirely free of complicity in the drama. Some of the pictures, too, were unbearably graphic: a couple, half covered in rubble and pallid with dust, were caught in an embrace as they died.
Photograph of miners’ wives and children waiting at the Senghenydd pit-head. © Reproduced courtesy of Simon Barnett/http://senghenydd.com
The images of South Wales in 1913 and Dhaka in 2013 converge: the lines of white shrouds, the vigilant mothers and husbands and sisters who stood day and night in the same spot, clenched against the news they knew must come; the wrecked pithead and the concrete floors of the factory compressed like some monstrous sandwich, people standing with photographs of the missing, as if their picture could conjure them back from the dead.
The most vital issue for the workers is as it was in South Wales: since no one is going to protect you, how will you use the vast potential of your own collective power to ensure that organisations and institutions controlled by yourselves will shelter you from economic violence. This means a representative trade union, preferably industry-wide and united, recognised by workers, employers and government, elected freely and voluntarily by the factory operatives. The government quickly announced a rise in wages (unspecified), and said it would henceforth be possible for unions to form ‘without the prior permission of the owners’. Nothing about any comprehensive union to which all workers might belong.
Nor did the government say anything about whether it is time to do away with company-sponsored unions, bogus welfare organisations, ineffectual and self-seeking officials; or to dismiss spies and informers. There was no mention of foreign NGOs, ‘labour rights organisations’, or consumer groups, which, if they have a role at all, need to support the functioning of free trade unions in Bangladesh. It cannot be left to western activists, even less to the importers themselves, to determine what is good for those they and their suppliers and sub-contractors employ. If the workers are accorded a dignity and respect, which have, so far, been withheld, all the rest will fall into place.
It will no doubt be difficult for some employers, politicians and managers, who are accustomed to regard workers as a different kind of human being from themselves, to accept labour, not as an intractable factor of production, but as an equal partner. They have made much of trouble-makers who ‘tarnish the image of Bangladesh’; but nothing can have done greater injury to the reputation of the country than the spectacle of this shoddy structure crushing to death well over a thousand working women and men in the interest solely of enriching the already wealthy, both inside and beyond the country.
Bangladesh is crying out for radical change, and not only in the garment industry. Transcending the persistent civil strife between political parties and between both sides on an inconclusive debate about whether Bangladeshis are Bengali before they are Muslim or vice versa, will be achieved only by means of a dynamic and vibrant economy, which shares its wealth equitably. If people become better off, they will rise above the sterile and fractious legacy of splits, schisms and destructive divisions that have scarred the psyche of Bengal.
Is it possible? Or will the sense of outrage engendered by Savar pass, the incident be relegated to pious commemorative ritual, and then, will business as usual resume, until the next time hundreds of workers set out in the early morning, for what they imagine is another day’s labour, only to discover that their appointment is instead with avoidable and violent death?
The people of Britain’s past, the mute sepia-tinted grief of women in the dress of Edwardian Wales, are kindred to the weeping mothers of contemporary Dhaka, whose full-colour sorrows were transmitted instantly by the global media. They join together over time in a single explosive question: if this is progress, who is advantaged by it? To claim that this represents ‘development’ is to prioritise the lives of the rich West over those of the poor of the earth, and is simply a reconstruction of older imperial precedences. After all, ‘business’ is now the only area of human activity in which ‘empires’ are still routinely allowed to be built. Part of the sub-text of reports in the western media was an assumption that since ‘we’ have been through such tragedies, this is part of what needs to be endured by the people of Bangladesh, before they can emerge into (relative) prosperity and ease.
That all is changed, while everything remains the same, suggests that the work of those who strove for social justice, emancipation, freedom from oppression, and a secure and sufficient livelihood, far from having been accomplished, will have to be won all over again. Liberty now has to be wrested, not from the paraphernalia of imperial occupation, but from the apparently impregnable global fortresses of money-power, which replicate the vanished pomp of territorial empires.
Footnotes
Jeremy Seabrook is the author of The Refuge and the Fortress: Britain and the persecuted 1933-2013 (London, Palgrave, 2013). His forthcoming books are Pauperland: poverty in Britain (Hurst) and Fabrics of Empire: the de-industrialisation of Bengal and industrialisation of Lancashire; the de-industrialisation of Lancashire and re-industrialisation of Bangladesh (New Delhi, Navayana, 2014).