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	Workers Vanguard No. 1023	3 May 2013

Capitalist Profit Drive Kills

Texas, Bangladesh Disasters

“There was this huge wall of black smoke and people were coming out of it,” said one survivor of the April 17 fertilizer plant explosion in West, Texas. “It reminded me so much of 9/11.” At least 14 people were killed, mainly firefighters who were battling a blaze at the plant when an enormous cache of ammonium nitrate is reported to have blown up. The blast, which measured 2.1 on the Richter scale and dug a crater ten feet deep and 93 feet wide, injured over 200 people and damaged buildings in a five-block radius.

This disaster was no accident but rather a testament to the murderous workings of the capitalist profit system, in which the bottom line trumps safety. West Fertilizer had been operating for years in flagrant violation of accepted safety standards. Cutting corners to save money is the name of the game for capitalist enterprise, and tragedy all too often follows. Witness the April 2010 explosions in Massey Energy’s Upper Big Branch mine in West Virginia that claimed 29 lives and on British Petroleum’s Deepwater Horizon rig in the Gulf of Mexico that killed eleven workers. The leveling of the town of West itself recalled the 1947 explosion of a boatload of ammonium nitrate in the harbor of Texas City, Texas, which left nearly 600 dead and 5,000 injured.

More than 4,500 workers are killed on the job in the U.S. each year, the equivalent of 25 West Fertilizers a month. Another 50,000 are felled annually by occupational illnesses, such as black lung disease, the bane of coal miners. Millions more suffer non-fatal injuries and sickness. And it’s not only the workers who pay the price for the capitalists’ disregard for basic safety. As West, Texas, expanded over the years, a school, an apartment building and a nursing home were built next to the fertilizer powder keg.

The capitalist government, whether run by Democrats or Republicans, gives the owners virtually free rein to run their factories and mines as ticking time bombs. Then, when fatalities do occur, government officials are likely to intone that there are “no indications of criminal activity,” as one proclaimed following the West explosion. Since its founding in 1970, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has prosecuted 84 cases involving fatalities, with those sentenced serving a total of 89 months in jail. During this time, there were more than 370,000 workplace deaths.

As Russell Mokhiber, editor of Corporate Crime Reporter, aptly remarked shortly after the West disaster:

“Make no mistake, if it becomes clear that the Texas explosion was triggered by a terrorist attack, a la the Oklahoma City bombing, then Obama will begin talking about ‘the full weight of justice.’

“But if the focus is corporate crime and violence, corporate recklessness, workplace safety, ‘full weight of justice’ rhetoric won’t see the light of day.”

—“Corporate Terrorism in West Texas,” CounterPunch, 19 April

Now that the amount of ammonium nitrate stored in the plant has come to light, what has some in Congress, like Democrat Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, exercised is the lack of oversight…by Homeland Security!

Third World Sweatshop Tombs

Barely a week after the Texas explosion, the Rana Plaza building in Savar, Bangladesh, one of the poorest countries on the planet, collapsed on more than 3,000 garment workers toiling in five sweatshops. Mostly young women, they had resisted going to work after walls in the building began to show cracks the previous day. “Management forced us to go up and said there was no problem with the building,” recounted one survivor. “Just after that, I sat at my table to work, and the building just collapsed” (Democracy Now!, 25 April). Despite heroic efforts by firefighters and other rescue personnel to find survivors, nearly 400 dead bodies have been dug from the rubble in what is the worst disaster in the history of clothing manufacture. More than 1,200 other people were injured.

Mass protests erupted as news of the disaster spread, with hundreds of thousands of outraged workers walking out of plants in and around the capital city, Dhaka. Highways were blockaded and two factories whose bosses refused to shut down production were set ablaze. Protesters marched on the headquarters of the garment manufacturers association, chanting: “We want execution of the garment factory owners!” When police firing rubber bullets and tear gas could not quell the crowds, the industry announced on April 26 that all factories would be shut for the upcoming weekend. The Rana Plaza building owner was subsequently arrested trying to flee across the border into India.

The giant retailers who subcontract production to the Savar sweatshops—e.g., J.C. Penney, the French retailer Carrefour and the British Primark—expressed “shock” about the collapse and denied any complicity. But the depraved indifference exhibited by the capitalist magnates to the lives of those they exploit plumbs new depths when it comes to the semicolonial world, where the U.S. and other imperialist powers have imposed the most wretched conditions. The 5,000 factories in Bangladesh that produce garments for major U.S. and European brands are a cornerstone of the country’s economy. The millions of workers toiling in near-slavery in these deathtraps are paid the lowest wages in the world for that industry—as low as $37 a month, far below subsistence, even after working 15-hour shifts.

The long trail of capitalist industrial murder in Bangladesh includes an earlier building collapse in Savar that left 73 workers dead and a fire at Tazreen Fashions in nearby Ashulia last November that took more than 100 lives. At Tazreen, a source for Wal-Mart and Sears, managers blocked the stairs to keep workers at their sewing machines even as flames spread on floors below. The truth of the matter is that the multinational corporations are calling the shots and are well aware of what it takes to produce clothing at the prices they contract for, aiming to squeeze out the maximum profit. If orders go unfilled, they pick up stakes and move elsewhere. The local bosses are simply the whip hands, lining their own pockets in the process. (For more on conditions in Bangladesh, see “Women Garment Workers Fight Starvation Wages,” WV No. 974, 18 February 2011.)

To facilitate their many crimes, the garment bosses, aided by the government in Dhaka, brutally suppress unions, the only effective safeguard workers have against the rapaciousness of the capitalist profiteers. Trade unionists are banned from organizing in the factories and are frequent targets of arrest, torture and killing. A key organizer of the Bangladesh Center for Worker Solidarity, Aminul Islam, was murdered a year ago. As a result, labor unions are almost nonexistent in the garment plants; none of the Rana Plaza factories was unionized. Nevertheless, a number of strikes have swept the industry in recent years.

The industrial murder at Rana Plaza, and Tazreen Fashions before it, is a searing indictment of the daily workings of capitalist-imperialism. The situation cries out for union organizing drives—backed in action by the labor movement internationally—demanding decent wages and working conditions. These sweatshops are the first links in a “just-in-time” global cargo chain extending all the way to the retail stores in the imperialist countries, with key choke points at the ports and in the warehouses. Coordinated solidarity action could go a long way toward advancing the cause of labor in the semicolonial world and imperialist centers alike.

Organize the Unorganized!

The bosses have always rolled the dice with workers’ lives, writing off the human toll as just another cost of doing business. The 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist fire in New York City caused the deaths of 146 garment workers, mainly young Jewish and Italian immigrant women who could not escape because the bosses had locked the doors to the stairwells to prevent unauthorized breaks (not unlike at Tazreen a century later). The atrocity galvanized the labor movement in the city and spurred the growth of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union. Today as well, industrial carnage like that in West, Texas, should be a clarion call to organize the unorganized.

Texas, a “right to work” state with one of the lowest unionization rates in the country, had more fatal workplace accidents in 2011 than any other state. The only real measure of protection workers have against their cutthroat exploiters are strong unions with safety committees that can shut down dangerous operations on the spot. But in place of the kind of hard struggle required to organize unions, the class-collaborationist labor leadership relies on the good graces of the capitalist government, writing letters to Congress pleading for greater workplace regulation. This is the kind of impotent strategy the AFL-CIO tops roll out at their Workers Memorial Day events each April.

Falling in line behind the labor bureaucrats is the International Socialist Organization (ISO), which parrots their calls for beefing up OSHA (socialistworker.org, 23 April). Government agencies like OSHA do not exist to protect workers. OSHA’s pretenses to enforcing safety are so much window dressing for business as usual. As David Barstow reported in the New York Times (22 December 2003): “When Congress established OSHA in 1970, it made it a misdemeanor to cause the death of a worker by willfully violating safety laws. The maximum sentence, six months in jail, is half the maximum for harassing a wild burro on federal lands.”

The “compliance” history of West Fertilizer makes a mockery of claims that safety will be improved by reliance on the government. This non-union plant had a decades-long history of violations and petty fines for shady and unsafe practices. The facility lacked fire alarms, sprinklers, shut-off valves and blast walls. When OSHA last inspected the plant in 1985, it found five “serious” violations, for which West Fertilizer was fined all of $30!

The ISO blames the state of affairs at OSHA on “the neoliberal agenda” (i.e., the Republican Bush administration). What these reformists fail to mention is that the Democratic Clinton White House launched the “New OSHA” initiative that stressed “voluntary compliance” on the part of business, and that Obama has slashed spending for a number of workplace safety initiatives in next year’s budget. No less than the Republicans, the Democrats are a party of the class enemy. Republicans make no bones about going after working people, but Democrats do the same thing while occasionally proclaiming themselves “friends of labor.”

The U.S. capitalist rulers will try to do everything they can to increase profit margins, from busting unions and intensifying the exploitation of workers at home to exporting capital to countries where labor costs are cheaper. Against the chauvinist trade-union tops and their “America first” protectionism, we reiterate the call raised by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in the Communist Manifesto (1848): “Working men of all countries, unite!” It is through a series of proletarian revolutions that the working people of the planet can seize the bourgeois rulers’ capital and build an internationally planned economy, lifting the masses of the semicolonial world from their miserable poverty and paving the way to a future of plenty for all.