Rana Plaza: Two Years Later, Remembering 1,138 Deaths Caused By Greed & The Glorious “Free Market”

A few days ago, I wrote about the refusal of many of the billionaires at the top of the garment industry to pay up what they had committed to paying for enhanced monitoring of safety conditions in these horrendous factories.

Remember, people work for slave wages in these factories but that doesn’t seem to be enough for those who profit from that labor–if thousands die, oh well, that’s just tough luck.

And we need to remember Rana Plaza because of a simple fact: this happens every day. People are sacrificed for greed and the glory of the “free market” all around the world. Rana Plaza became a global story because of the huge number of worked who died in just a few minutes. But, most of those deaths are never seen, certainly not by people in the U.S, though it happens in the U.S. as well, as I wrote in this piece about the deaths of 28 miners in an explosion in 2010 at the Upper Big Branch mine in West Virginia.

Here are two pieces worth watching. Take the time and remember.

This is a short BBC documentary. What is astounding is the footage of the factory taken the day before–and knowing that specific workers who were interviewed 24 hours before the collapse about their fears about the safety of the factory would be crushed to death.

This is a shorter, a bit rougher but graphic video of the disaster (warning: you might find some of the images of people killed in the collapse upsetting):