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Showing posts with label New York University. Show all posts
Showing posts with label New York University. Show all posts

Wednesday, September 18, 2013

Doing Business in Bangladesh

International fashion safety continues mirror the genesis of the workers" compensation moment in the US. Today's post was shared by WCBlog and comes from www.nytimes.com


The owner of a clothing factory in Dhaka, Bangladesh, was at New York University last week to meet with clothing industry executives, labor activists and American and European government officials to talk about the Bangladeshi garment industry, the world’s second-biggest exporter of clothes after China.

The workplace disasters in this business have grabbed the world’s attention, and for the past year, Western retailers that outsource their clothing production to Bangladesh have tried to come up with reforms. But there are big obstacles to improving safety in an industry driven by low profits and constant upheaval.

I met with the businessman and another factory owner; both would speak only on the condition that they not be identified because they feared offending their customers. A central problem, the first owner told me, is the rapid turnaround big retailers like Walmart demand when they put in orders for tens of thousands of T-shirts or shorts. Since his factory isn’t able to make all the garments in time, he has to send some of the work to smaller producers. “I can’t do it officially,” he said, “but unofficially, I can.”
Unauthorized subcontracting to smaller, uninspected factories is not supposed to happen, but it remains an entrenched practice. It is a primary reason safety guidelines that apply to bigger contractors have not prevented the hundreds of worker deaths in fires and building collapses in facilities like Rana...

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Monday, March 21, 2011

Commemoration- Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire: A Century Later


The Forward has published a special section for its new March 25 issue to commemorate and honor the 100th anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire.  The section features the first-ever translations of the Jewish Daily Forward’s original Yiddish coverage of the event, including the front page of March 25, 1911, the day of the fire, stories about the heroes of the fire, and Editor Abe Cahan’s editorials about the tragedy.

The special section also includes an original essay from David Von Drehle, author of Triangle: The Fire That Changed America, as well as the winners of its Triangle Fire Poetry Contest, a prize poetry contest that the Forward held earlier this year to elicit  submissions for both an English and Yiddish poem to honor the poetry of Morris Rosenfeld who documented the fire at the time and to reflect upon the fire’s meaning and legacy. The winner of the English poem was Zackary Sholem Berger of Baltimore, Md and the winner of the Yiddish section was Alec (“Leyzer”) Burko of New York City.

Lastly, another neat part of the section is a video tour featuring Chris Connor, a retired NYC fire marshal who visits the current building where the Triangle Fire took place (now a part of NYU’s campus) to document what went wrong on that fateful day.