"small scale" tragedies far away simply do not tug at the emotional heart strings - the further removed you are from the event, the less newsworthy it sometimes seems to be. But consumers rush to WalMart to buy the cheap clothes. Yet, without the Western market, many argue that these workers would probably be worse off (generally speaking).
Consumers must insist that the Western corporate buyers must participate in making the workplaces safer.
SAVAR, Bangladesh — More than two days after their factory collapsed on them, at least some garment workers were still alive in the corpse-littered debris Friday, pinned beneath tons of mangled metal and concrete. Rescue crews struggled to save them, knowing they probably had just a few hours left to live, as desperate relatives clashed with police in their anger and grief.
Amid the chaos, the cries for help and the smell of decaying bodies at the eight-story building where more than 300 died, what happened to 18-year-old Mussamat Anna passes as luck. Rescue workers cut off the garment worker’s mangled right hand to pull her free from the debris Thursday night.
“First a machine fell over my hand and I was crushed under the debris. … Then the roof collapsed over me,” she told an Associated Press cameraman from a hospital bed Friday.
The death toll topped 300 on Friday and it remained unclear what the final grim number would be. Military spokesman Shahin Islam told reporters that 304 bodies had been recovered.
Brig. Gen. Mohammed Siddiqul Alam Shikder, who is overseeing rescue operations, said 2,200 people have been rescued. The garment manufacturers’ group said the factories in the building employed 3,122 workers, but it was not clear how many were inside it when it collapsed Wednesday in Savar, a suburb of Bangladesh’s capital, Dhaka.
An army rescue worker, Maj. Abdul Latif, said Friday that he found one survivor still trapped under concrete slabs, surrounded by several bodies. At another place in the building, four survivors were found pinned under the debris, a fire official said. An Associated Press cameraman who accompanied a rescue crew heard two men’s anguished cries for help; it was unknown Friday whether they were still alive.
Rescue workers said they were proceeding very cautiously inside the crumbling building, using their hands, hammers and shovels, to avoid more injuries and collapses. But they said the trapped workers were so badly hurt and weakened that they would need to be extricated within a few hours if they are to survive.
http://news.nationalpost.com/2013/04/26/death-toll-after-bangladesh-factory-collapse-climbs-past-300/