THE HUMAN PRICE
 |
| Tehera Begum, 25, survived the factory fire |
By JIM YARDLEY
Dec. 6, 2012
Article from New York Times
ASHULIA, Bangladesh — The fire alarm shattered the monotony of the
Tazreen Fashions factory. Hundreds of seamstresses looked up from their
machines, startled. On the third floor, Shima Akhter Pakhi had been stitching
hoods onto fleece jackets. Now she ran to a staircase.
But
two managers were blocking the way. Ignore the alarm, they ordered. It was just
a test. Back to work. A few women laughed nervously. Ms. Pakhi and other
workers returned to their sewing tables. She could stitch a hood to a jacket in
about 90 seconds. She arranged the fabric under her machine. Ninety seconds.
Again. Ninety more seconds. She sewed six pieces, maybe seven.
Then
she looked up.
Smoke was filtering up through the three staircases.
Screams rose from below. The two managers had vanished. Power suddenly went out
throughout the eight-story building. There was nowhere to escape. The
staircases led down into the fire. Iron grilles blocked the windows. A man
cowering in a fifth-floor bathroom called his mother to tell her he was about
to die.
“We all panicked,” Ms. Pakhi said. “It spread so
quickly. And there was no electricity. It was totally dark.”
Tazreen Fashions Ltd. operated at the beginning of the
global supply chain that delivers clothes made in Bangladesh to stores in
Europe and the United States. By any measure, the factory was not a safe place
to work. Fire safety preparations were woefully inadequate. The building itself
was under construction — even as sewing work continued inside — and mounds of
flammable yarn and fabric were illegally stored on the ground floor near
electrical generators.
Yet Tazreen was making clothing destined for some of
the world’s top retailers. On the third floor, where firefighters later
recovered 69 bodies, Ms. Pakhi was stitching sweater jackets for C&A, a
European chain. On the fifth floor, workers were making Faded Glory shorts for
Walmart. Ten bodies were recovered there. On the sixth floor, a man named
Hashinur Rahman put down his work making True Desire lingerie for Sears and
eventually helped save scores of others. Inside one factory office, labor
activists found order forms and drawings for a licensee of the United States
Marine Corps that makes commercial apparel with the Marines’ logo.
In all, 112 workers were killed in a blaze last month that has exposed a glaring disconnect
among global clothing brands, the monitoring system used to protect workers and
the factories actually filling the orders. After the fire, Walmart, Sears and
other retailers made the same startling admission: They say they did not know
that Tazreen Fashions was making their clothing.
But who, then, is ultimately responsible when things
go so wrong?
The global apparel industry aspires to operate with
accountability that extends from distant factories to retail stores. Big brands
demand that factories be inspected by accredited auditing firms so that the
brands can control quality and understand how, where and by whom their goods
are made. If a factory does not pass muster, it is not supposed to get orders
from Western customers.
Tazreen Fashions was one of many clothing factories
that exist on the margins of this system. Factory bosses had been faulted for
violations during inspections conducted on behalf of Walmart and at the behest
of the Business Social Compliance
Initiative, a European organization.
Yet Tazreen Fashions received orders anyway, slipping
through the gaps in the system by delivering the low costs and quick
turnarounds that buyers — and consumers — demand. C&A, the European
retailer, has confirmed ordering 220,000 sweaters from the factory. But much of
the factory’s business came through opaque networks of subcontracts with
suppliers or local buying houses. Labor activists, combing the site of the
disaster, found labels, order forms, design drawings and articles of clothing
from many global brands.
Walmart and Sears have since said they fired the
suppliers that subcontracted work to Tazreen Fashions. Yet some critics have
questioned how a company like Walmart, one of the two biggest buyers in
Bangladesh and renowned for its sophisticated global supply system, could have
been unaware of the connection.
The factory’s owner, Delowar Hossain, said his managers arranged work
through local middlemen. “We don’t know the buyers,” Mr. Hossain said in an
interview. “The local man is important. The buyer — I don’t care.”
Bangladesh
is now a garment manufacturing
giant, the world’s second-leading apparel exporter, behind China, which is no
longer the cheapest place to make many basic goods. Bangladesh has the lowest
garment wages in the world, and many of the Tazreen factory’s victims were
young rural women with little education, who earned as little as $45 a month in
an industry that now accounts for $19 billion in exports.
In Bangladesh, public
outrage about the fire has boiled
over. An estimated 100,000 people attended the burial ceremony of 53 workers
whose bodies could not be identified. Industry leaders have promised financial
support for survivors and the families of the dead. The Bangladeshi government
has started inspecting the country’s 4,500 garment factories; it has already
found fire code violations in almost a third of the hundreds it has examined.
“Now we have to do much more,” said Mohammad Shafiul
Islam Mohiuddin, president of the Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and
Exporters Association, conceding past failures. “We have learned. We start from
here.”
In the United States, Labor Secretary Hilda L. Solis
compared the Tazreen blaze to the 1911 Triangle shirtwaist factory fire in New
York, which led to sweeping reforms of American sweatshops. In Bangladesh,
factory fires have been a persistent problem, with the International Labor
Rights Forum saying more than 600 garment workers have died in such fires since
2005.
And even before the Tazreen blaze, outside pressure
was building on Bangladesh’s garment sector to increase wages and ease
restrictions on union organizing. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton,
along with European diplomats, has urged the government to investigate the unsolved
murder of a labor organizer, Aminul Islam.
In reconstructing the deadly blaze, The New York Times
interviewed more than two dozen survivors; relatives of the victims;
Bangladeshi fire officials; garment factory owners and managers; auditors; and
others. In the end, analysts said, the conflagration was a tragic byproduct of
an industry in which global brands and retailers, encouraged by hundreds of
millions of consumers around the world, are still primarily motivated by the
bottom line.
“We as consumers like to be able to buy ever-greater
quantities of ever-cheaper goods, every year,” said Richard M. Locke, deputy
dean of the M.I.T. Sloan School of Management. “Somebody is bearing the cost of
it, and we don’t want to know about it. The people bearing the cost were in
this fire.”
‘Precious’ Escape Time Is Lost
Several months ago, Shima Akhter Pakhi was summoned to
the sixth floor of Tazreen Fashions. Ms. Pakhi, 24, had worked at the factory
for three years, and every month she sent money back to her family in rural
Bangladesh. Now she earned a monthly base salary of $51, maybe $20 more with
overtime. Up on the sixth floor, managers were tapping her for fire safety
duty.
When Ms. Pakhi started at Tazreen, the factory had
only three floors, but the owner was adding five upper floors in expectation
that business would grow. The empty, unfinished sixth floor was nearly the size
of a football field. Ms. Pakhi and a few other employees were handed fire
extinguishers and taught to remove the pin, squeeze the handle and spray. They
were also told that in the case of a fire on upper floors, employees should
evacuate down the staircases in descending order from top to bottom.
“They did not tell us what we would do if the fire
started on the ground floor,” Ms. Pakhi recalled.
Fire investigators say the blaze erupted on the
cavernous ground floor after stacks of yarn and fabric caught fire. Had the
fabric been stored in an enclosed, fireproof room, as required by law, the fire
could have been contained and the workers could have escaped.
Instead, the blaze spread quickly, pushing up the
staircases, along with toxic fumes from burning acrylic. Investigators
discovered that few fire extinguishers had been used. And, finally, managers
made a catastrophic mistake by initially dismissing the fire alarm.
“They killed time,” said Abu Nayeem Mohammad Shahidullah, the director
general of Bangladesh’s national fire service. “Time was so precious, so
important. But they said it was a false alarm.”
Mr.
Hossain, the factory owner, said in a separate interview with Bangladeshi news
media that he did not know why managers on the floor would have tried to stop
employees from leaving the factory. He added that none of the gates in the
staircases were locked.
Managers had been preparing the factory for
inspections from buyers and staged a drill a few days before the fire, several
employees said. Ms. Pakhi said managers had even displayed photographs of the
fire training session on bulletin boards.
“I think they took the pictures and hung them on the
board to show the buyers,” she said. “They would see the pictures and think
they have trained people to fight fires. But personally, I don’t think I could
fight fires with this training.”
Tazreen Fashions is part of a larger garment
conglomerate, the Tuba Group, which owns at least half a dozen apparel
factories in Bangladesh. Mr. Hossain said a team from Walmart’s local office
conducted a compliance audit last year and faulted the factory for excessive
overtime, while making no mention of fire safety or other issues. Moreover, he
said, the local buying houses had also inspected and approved the factory,
tantamount, he assumed, to approval from Walmart and the other global brands
these middlemen represented.
Kevin Gardner, a Walmart spokesman, said the company
stopped authorizing production at Tazreen “many months before the fire.” But he
did not say why. Accredited outside auditors inspected the factory on Walmart’s
behalf at least twice in 2011, he said. That May, auditors gave the factory an
“orange” rating, meaning there were “higher-risk violations.” Three months
later, the factory’s grade improved to “yellow,” meaning there were
“medium-risk violations.”
Sears, in a statement, said its supplier “was not
authorized” to produce goods at the Tazreen factory and that it had done so “in
violation” of Sears’s rules.
But David Hasanat, the chairman of the Viyellatex
Group, one of the country’s most highly regarded garment manufacturers, pointed
out that global apparel retailers often depend on hundreds of factories to fill
orders. Given the scale of work, retailers frequently place orders through
suppliers and other middlemen who, in turn, steer work to factories that
deliver low costs — a practice he said is hardly unknown to Western retailers
and clothing brands. The order for Walmart’s Faded Glory shorts, documents
show, was subcontracted from Simco Bangladesh Ltd., a local garment maker. “It
is an open secret to allow factories to do that,” Mr. Hasanat said. “End of the
day, for them it is the price that matters.”
A Friend Shouts, ‘Save Us!’
On the sixth floor, Hashinur Rahman heard the screams
and rushed to a staircase. He and others had been making satiny lingerie, but
they pushed past a manager and began descending into thicker and thicker smoke.
Ignoring the manager would save their lives.
The factory did not have ceiling sprinklers or an
outdoor fire escape. Fire officials later concluded that the two staircases on
the eastern side of the building were quickly overwhelmed with fire and toxic
smoke. But officials say the lone western staircase remained passable for many
minutes and provided an escape route for many survivors. About 1,150 people
were working that night, and all of the roughly 300 workers on the second floor
managed to escape down the stairs, fire officials said.
Mr. Rahman, 32, had barely made it out of the
building, along with many of his colleagues, when his cellphone rang. It was a
friend who worked on the third floor. Hundreds of people were trapped.
“Save us!” the friend shouted. “Help us!”
Mr. Rahman said he ran to the narrow alley that separated the factory’s
western wall from a building under construction. The gap was maybe five feet.
Work crews had covered the western wall with rickety bamboo scaffolding so they
could put plaster on the exterior of the still-unfinished Tazreen factory.
Mr.
Rahman climbed the bamboo to a third-floor window covered with an iron grille.
He leapt onto a concrete slab of the new building and found a brick. He began
smashing the grille, trying to break it open. He looked inside and saw his
co-workers’ desperate faces. They were in the room where samples were made and
sent to buyers for final approval, and they stood on sewing tables, pulling
frantically on the grille.
One seamstress, who goes by a single name, Rahima, had
tried to escape the third floor by a stairwell but began choking on smoke. As
the smoke thickened, Ms. Rahima said, she fell to the floor. Then people
trampled her.
“When I fell down, and the people were stepping on me,
I did not think I would survive,” she recalled. “But then I thought of my
daughter.”
Ms. Rahima had been married to a husband who beat her.
When their daughter was born five years ago, the husband fled. Ms. Rahima left
her village to find work in the garment industry, which has provided an escape
from grinding rural poverty for millions of women like her in Bangladesh and
around the world. She moved into a rented room with her two sisters and got a
job at Tazreen. In the village, Ms. Rahima’s parents cared for her daughter
while she sent back money. Two days before the fire, the little girl arrived
for a rare visit.
“I got my strength, and I stood up,” Ms. Rahima said.
“I ran to the sample room.”
Finally, the iron grille gave way.
A few men jumped to the concrete slab of the adjacent
building. Leaning against the scaffolding, they reached across the gap to help
co-workers make the leap. Women went first. Ms. Rahima made it across. So did
Ms. Pakhi. On other floors, people smashed open windows or tore out exhaust
fans and leapt into the darkness. Some landed on the metal roofs of nearby
shanties. Some landed on the ground.
And some never made it out at all.
Son Phones ‘Ma’ Before Dying
As word spread, people raced to the factory: mothers,
fathers, husbands, wives and gawkers. Soon a throng stood beneath the building,
their faces glowing in the cruel brilliance of the flames. Golapi Begum left
her own factory job and raced to Tazreen Fashions to find her son, Palash Mian.
He was 18 and worked on the fifth floor. Ms. Begum stared up at the factory and
shrieked.
Then her cellphone rang. It was her son.
“Ma, I have no way to save my life,” he told her. “I
cannot find any way to get out. I am in the bathroom of the fifth floor. I am
wearing a black T-shirt. And I have a shirt wrapped around my waist. You will
find me in the bathroom.”
He hung up. He called his father, as well as several
friends. Then his phone went dead.
“I became insane,” his mother said. “I spent the whole
night in front of the main gate of the factory. I was screaming all the
time.”
She found him the next day. Rescuers had lined up all
the recovered bodies on the grounds of a nearby school. Family members unzipped
bag after bag, searching. One husband looking in vain for his young wife said
the charred human remains looked like chunks of coal.
But Ms. Begum unzipped a bag and found her son. She
recognized his face. And he was wearing a black T-shirt.
She collected his body and returned it to their
village, where he was buried.
Julfikar Ali Manik contributed reporting from Ashulia, and Steven
Greenhouse from New York.
By JIM YARDLEY
Dec. 6, 2012
Article from New York Times
ASHULIA, Bangladesh — The fire alarm shattered the monotony of the
Tazreen Fashions factory. Hundreds of seamstresses looked up from their
machines, startled. On the third floor, Shima Akhter Pakhi had been stitching
hoods onto fleece jackets. Now she ran to a staircase.
But
two managers were blocking the way. Ignore the alarm, they ordered. It was just
a test. Back to work. A few women laughed nervously. Ms. Pakhi and other
workers returned to their sewing tables. She could stitch a hood to a jacket in
about 90 seconds. She arranged the fabric under her machine. Ninety seconds.
Again. Ninety more seconds. She sewed six pieces, maybe seven.
Then
she looked up.
Smoke was filtering up through the three staircases.
Screams rose from below. The two managers had vanished. Power suddenly went out
throughout the eight-story building. There was nowhere to escape. The
staircases led down into the fire. Iron grilles blocked the windows. A man
cowering in a fifth-floor bathroom called his mother to tell her he was about
to die.
“We all panicked,” Ms. Pakhi said. “It spread so
quickly. And there was no electricity. It was totally dark.”
Tazreen Fashions Ltd. operated at the beginning of the
global supply chain that delivers clothes made in Bangladesh to stores in
Europe and the United States. By any measure, the factory was not a safe place
to work. Fire safety preparations were woefully inadequate. The building itself
was under construction — even as sewing work continued inside — and mounds of
flammable yarn and fabric were illegally stored on the ground floor near
electrical generators.
Yet Tazreen was making clothing destined for some of
the world’s top retailers. On the third floor, where firefighters later
recovered 69 bodies, Ms. Pakhi was stitching sweater jackets for C&A, a
European chain. On the fifth floor, workers were making Faded Glory shorts for
Walmart. Ten bodies were recovered there. On the sixth floor, a man named
Hashinur Rahman put down his work making True Desire lingerie for Sears and
eventually helped save scores of others. Inside one factory office, labor
activists found order forms and drawings for a licensee of the United States
Marine Corps that makes commercial apparel with the Marines’ logo.
In all, 112 workers were killed in a blaze last month that has exposed a glaring disconnect
among global clothing brands, the monitoring system used to protect workers and
the factories actually filling the orders. After the fire, Walmart, Sears and
other retailers made the same startling admission: They say they did not know
that Tazreen Fashions was making their clothing.
But who, then, is ultimately responsible when things
go so wrong?
The global apparel industry aspires to operate with
accountability that extends from distant factories to retail stores. Big brands
demand that factories be inspected by accredited auditing firms so that the
brands can control quality and understand how, where and by whom their goods
are made. If a factory does not pass muster, it is not supposed to get orders
from Western customers.
Tazreen Fashions was one of many clothing factories
that exist on the margins of this system. Factory bosses had been faulted for
violations during inspections conducted on behalf of Walmart and at the behest
of the Business Social Compliance
Initiative, a European organization.
Yet Tazreen Fashions received orders anyway, slipping
through the gaps in the system by delivering the low costs and quick
turnarounds that buyers — and consumers — demand. C&A, the European
retailer, has confirmed ordering 220,000 sweaters from the factory. But much of
the factory’s business came through opaque networks of subcontracts with
suppliers or local buying houses. Labor activists, combing the site of the
disaster, found labels, order forms, design drawings and articles of clothing
from many global brands.
Walmart and Sears have since said they fired the
suppliers that subcontracted work to Tazreen Fashions. Yet some critics have
questioned how a company like Walmart, one of the two biggest buyers in
Bangladesh and renowned for its sophisticated global supply system, could have
been unaware of the connection.
The factory’s owner, Delowar Hossain, said his managers arranged work
through local middlemen. “We don’t know the buyers,” Mr. Hossain said in an
interview. “The local man is important. The buyer — I don’t care.”
Bangladesh
is now a garment manufacturing
giant, the world’s second-leading apparel exporter, behind China, which is no
longer the cheapest place to make many basic goods. Bangladesh has the lowest
garment wages in the world, and many of the Tazreen factory’s victims were
young rural women with little education, who earned as little as $45 a month in
an industry that now accounts for $19 billion in exports.
In Bangladesh, public
outrage about the fire has boiled
over. An estimated 100,000 people attended the burial ceremony of 53 workers
whose bodies could not be identified. Industry leaders have promised financial
support for survivors and the families of the dead. The Bangladeshi government
has started inspecting the country’s 4,500 garment factories; it has already
found fire code violations in almost a third of the hundreds it has examined.
“Now we have to do much more,” said Mohammad Shafiul
Islam Mohiuddin, president of the Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and
Exporters Association, conceding past failures. “We have learned. We start from
here.”
In the United States, Labor Secretary Hilda L. Solis
compared the Tazreen blaze to the 1911 Triangle shirtwaist factory fire in New
York, which led to sweeping reforms of American sweatshops. In Bangladesh,
factory fires have been a persistent problem, with the International Labor
Rights Forum saying more than 600 garment workers have died in such fires since
2005.
And even before the Tazreen blaze, outside pressure
was building on Bangladesh’s garment sector to increase wages and ease
restrictions on union organizing. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton,
along with European diplomats, has urged the government to investigate the unsolved
murder of a labor organizer, Aminul Islam.
In reconstructing the deadly blaze, The New York Times
interviewed more than two dozen survivors; relatives of the victims;
Bangladeshi fire officials; garment factory owners and managers; auditors; and
others. In the end, analysts said, the conflagration was a tragic byproduct of
an industry in which global brands and retailers, encouraged by hundreds of
millions of consumers around the world, are still primarily motivated by the
bottom line.
“We as consumers like to be able to buy ever-greater
quantities of ever-cheaper goods, every year,” said Richard M. Locke, deputy
dean of the M.I.T. Sloan School of Management. “Somebody is bearing the cost of
it, and we don’t want to know about it. The people bearing the cost were in
this fire.”
‘Precious’ Escape Time Is Lost
Several months ago, Shima Akhter Pakhi was summoned to
the sixth floor of Tazreen Fashions. Ms. Pakhi, 24, had worked at the factory
for three years, and every month she sent money back to her family in rural
Bangladesh. Now she earned a monthly base salary of $51, maybe $20 more with
overtime. Up on the sixth floor, managers were tapping her for fire safety
duty.
When Ms. Pakhi started at Tazreen, the factory had
only three floors, but the owner was adding five upper floors in expectation
that business would grow. The empty, unfinished sixth floor was nearly the size
of a football field. Ms. Pakhi and a few other employees were handed fire
extinguishers and taught to remove the pin, squeeze the handle and spray. They
were also told that in the case of a fire on upper floors, employees should
evacuate down the staircases in descending order from top to bottom.
“They did not tell us what we would do if the fire
started on the ground floor,” Ms. Pakhi recalled.
Fire investigators say the blaze erupted on the
cavernous ground floor after stacks of yarn and fabric caught fire. Had the
fabric been stored in an enclosed, fireproof room, as required by law, the fire
could have been contained and the workers could have escaped.
Instead, the blaze spread quickly, pushing up the
staircases, along with toxic fumes from burning acrylic. Investigators
discovered that few fire extinguishers had been used. And, finally, managers
made a catastrophic mistake by initially dismissing the fire alarm.
“They killed time,” said Abu Nayeem Mohammad Shahidullah, the director
general of Bangladesh’s national fire service. “Time was so precious, so
important. But they said it was a false alarm.”
Mr.
Hossain, the factory owner, said in a separate interview with Bangladeshi news
media that he did not know why managers on the floor would have tried to stop
employees from leaving the factory. He added that none of the gates in the
staircases were locked.
Managers had been preparing the factory for
inspections from buyers and staged a drill a few days before the fire, several
employees said. Ms. Pakhi said managers had even displayed photographs of the
fire training session on bulletin boards.
“I think they took the pictures and hung them on the
board to show the buyers,” she said. “They would see the pictures and think
they have trained people to fight fires. But personally, I don’t think I could
fight fires with this training.”
Tazreen Fashions is part of a larger garment
conglomerate, the Tuba Group, which owns at least half a dozen apparel
factories in Bangladesh. Mr. Hossain said a team from Walmart’s local office
conducted a compliance audit last year and faulted the factory for excessive
overtime, while making no mention of fire safety or other issues. Moreover, he
said, the local buying houses had also inspected and approved the factory,
tantamount, he assumed, to approval from Walmart and the other global brands
these middlemen represented.
Kevin Gardner, a Walmart spokesman, said the company
stopped authorizing production at Tazreen “many months before the fire.” But he
did not say why. Accredited outside auditors inspected the factory on Walmart’s
behalf at least twice in 2011, he said. That May, auditors gave the factory an
“orange” rating, meaning there were “higher-risk violations.” Three months
later, the factory’s grade improved to “yellow,” meaning there were
“medium-risk violations.”
Sears, in a statement, said its supplier “was not
authorized” to produce goods at the Tazreen factory and that it had done so “in
violation” of Sears’s rules.
But David Hasanat, the chairman of the Viyellatex
Group, one of the country’s most highly regarded garment manufacturers, pointed
out that global apparel retailers often depend on hundreds of factories to fill
orders. Given the scale of work, retailers frequently place orders through
suppliers and other middlemen who, in turn, steer work to factories that
deliver low costs — a practice he said is hardly unknown to Western retailers
and clothing brands. The order for Walmart’s Faded Glory shorts, documents
show, was subcontracted from Simco Bangladesh Ltd., a local garment maker. “It
is an open secret to allow factories to do that,” Mr. Hasanat said. “End of the
day, for them it is the price that matters.”
A Friend Shouts, ‘Save Us!’
On the sixth floor, Hashinur Rahman heard the screams
and rushed to a staircase. He and others had been making satiny lingerie, but
they pushed past a manager and began descending into thicker and thicker smoke.
Ignoring the manager would save their lives.
The factory did not have ceiling sprinklers or an
outdoor fire escape. Fire officials later concluded that the two staircases on
the eastern side of the building were quickly overwhelmed with fire and toxic
smoke. But officials say the lone western staircase remained passable for many
minutes and provided an escape route for many survivors. About 1,150 people
were working that night, and all of the roughly 300 workers on the second floor
managed to escape down the stairs, fire officials said.
Mr. Rahman, 32, had barely made it out of the
building, along with many of his colleagues, when his cellphone rang. It was a
friend who worked on the third floor. Hundreds of people were trapped.
“Save us!” the friend shouted. “Help us!”
Mr. Rahman said he ran to the narrow alley that separated the factory’s
western wall from a building under construction. The gap was maybe five feet.
Work crews had covered the western wall with rickety bamboo scaffolding so they
could put plaster on the exterior of the still-unfinished Tazreen factory.
Mr.
Rahman climbed the bamboo to a third-floor window covered with an iron grille.
He leapt onto a concrete slab of the new building and found a brick. He began
smashing the grille, trying to break it open. He looked inside and saw his
co-workers’ desperate faces. They were in the room where samples were made and
sent to buyers for final approval, and they stood on sewing tables, pulling
frantically on the grille.
One seamstress, who goes by a single name, Rahima, had
tried to escape the third floor by a stairwell but began choking on smoke. As
the smoke thickened, Ms. Rahima said, she fell to the floor. Then people
trampled her.
“When I fell down, and the people were stepping on me,
I did not think I would survive,” she recalled. “But then I thought of my
daughter.”
Ms. Rahima had been married to a husband who beat her.
When their daughter was born five years ago, the husband fled. Ms. Rahima left
her village to find work in the garment industry, which has provided an escape
from grinding rural poverty for millions of women like her in Bangladesh and
around the world. She moved into a rented room with her two sisters and got a
job at Tazreen. In the village, Ms. Rahima’s parents cared for her daughter
while she sent back money. Two days before the fire, the little girl arrived
for a rare visit.
“I got my strength, and I stood up,” Ms. Rahima said.
“I ran to the sample room.”
Finally, the iron grille gave way.
A few men jumped to the concrete slab of the adjacent
building. Leaning against the scaffolding, they reached across the gap to help
co-workers make the leap. Women went first. Ms. Rahima made it across. So did
Ms. Pakhi. On other floors, people smashed open windows or tore out exhaust
fans and leapt into the darkness. Some landed on the metal roofs of nearby
shanties. Some landed on the ground.
And some never made it out at all.
Son Phones ‘Ma’ Before Dying
As word spread, people raced to the factory: mothers,
fathers, husbands, wives and gawkers. Soon a throng stood beneath the building,
their faces glowing in the cruel brilliance of the flames. Golapi Begum left
her own factory job and raced to Tazreen Fashions to find her son, Palash Mian.
He was 18 and worked on the fifth floor. Ms. Begum stared up at the factory and
shrieked.
Then her cellphone rang. It was her son.
“Ma, I have no way to save my life,” he told her. “I
cannot find any way to get out. I am in the bathroom of the fifth floor. I am
wearing a black T-shirt. And I have a shirt wrapped around my waist. You will
find me in the bathroom.”
He hung up. He called his father, as well as several
friends. Then his phone went dead.
“I became insane,” his mother said. “I spent the whole
night in front of the main gate of the factory. I was screaming all the
time.”
She found him the next day. Rescuers had lined up all
the recovered bodies on the grounds of a nearby school. Family members unzipped
bag after bag, searching. One husband looking in vain for his young wife said
the charred human remains looked like chunks of coal.
But Ms. Begum unzipped a bag and found her son. She
recognized his face. And he was wearing a black T-shirt.
She collected his body and returned it to their
village, where he was buried.
Julfikar Ali Manik contributed reporting from Ashulia, and Steven
Greenhouse from New York.
Julfikar Ali Manik contributed reporting from Ashulia, and Steven Greenhouse from New York.
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