101 years ago, the Triangle Shirtwaist fire horrified a nation; the initial shock of seeing young women leap to their deaths from the inferno was quickly eclipsed by the exposure of the deadly conditions under which they worked; blocked and locked exits, lack of fire escapes, buildup of flammable material, and dangerous machinery all pointed to one conclusion: the utter indifference to human life in the sweatshop factories that made America’s clothes.
And for a while, it seemed as though these women hadn’t died in vain. In New York and across the country, fire codes were made more stringent almost immediately; it took longer for the nascent labor movement to improve wages, hours, and working conditions, but soon garment workers (except those in Dixie, natch…), acquired a modicum of dignity and safety for their grueling, thankless work. Similar disasters in other notoriously dangerous industries led to similar, if sometimes halting, reforms. Though mining and oil rig explosions continued to occur with thudding regularity, incinerating more than a dozen of one’s employees was considered unseemly enough to be avoided, even if it meant shaving a nickel or two off profits here and there.
The last five years have shown us that those days are over. Mining accidents caused by the grossest mismanagement can kill a dozen or two with no corporate criminal liability whatsoever, much less meaningful reforms. Murray Energy, which killed its workers by having them remove for sale the columns of coal that supported the mine itself, is still in business; its eponymous CEO is a Republican (would be) kingmaker. BP’s CEO went sailing after barbequeing a little under 20 oil rig workers and suffering no greater indignity than a discreet golden parachute. Don Blankenship, whose scandalously unsafe Upper Big Branch mine blew 27 miners to kingdom come, did have to step down, but walked away a free, rich teabagger.
For the very wealthy, whatever disincentive briefly existed to killing lots of people in the pursuit of even greater wealth seems to have gone the way of the Republican Cloth Coat; indifference to human suffering and even death has long plagued the parasitic rich, be they slaveholders, Gilded Age plutocrats, or our current crop. This is the bitter fruit of wealth concentration; the very fact that some people “earn” hundreds or thousands of times what everyone else does leads these same people to believe that they are worth that much more. Over the weekend, Carly Fiorina, whose catastrophic tenure at Hewlett-Packard cost 18,00 people their jobs and netted her $42 million, wailed without a trace of irony about how “unfair” it is that public employees are “so rich.” HP stockholders, of course, must rue the the day that that poor girl decided not to become a bus driver, where she might have contributed something to society, rather than wantonly depleting their portfolios.
But given the positive correlation of net worth over any useful amount and moral depravity, you have to understand, if not forgive, the Walton Heirs. This motley crew of lucky sperm club good-for-nothings, with more wealth between them than 40% of their nominal home country, is all but obligated these days to pile up the corpses, if only to hold their heads up high at the Kentucky Derby. At home, the methods are more subtle: keeping workers too poor and desperate to be uppity with slave wages and unpredictable part time hours that all but preclude a second job, denying them health care and sick leave to ensure they are unhealthy, and most importantly, setting a third-world standard that forces competitors and suppliers alike in an inexorable race to the bottom for all workers. But abroad, they can really let their freak flags fly.
While it is true that companies like Apple and Nike also exploit overseas labor, and often quite shockingly, each company has a domestic core of knowledge-based employees that are deemed worthy of respect by upper management; competitive pressures for attracting talented employees alone prevent them from dipping their toes too deeply into slavery and mass murder. Not so Walmart. Outside the corporate office, everyone is considered a needless drain on profits, and treated accordingly. At home this means full time managers with more than a decade at the company are still eligible for public assistance; in Bangladesh, it means 112 human beings being slaughtered, many burned beyond recognition,* in what was called in the “quaint” 19th century a “satanic mill.”
As you’d expect, one of Walmart’s understandably overworked crisis PR teams was quick to issue a non-denial denial that the factory was part of Walmart’s supply chain “at the moment.” Too bad for Walmart, is was precisely the wrong moment, following closely on the heels of a pitched labor dispute and yet another vulgar and violence-tainted Black Friday.
We may soon find out how many deaths, in our Ayn Rand era, is too many. Or not.
*The lawyers must be delighted with that little factoid….
