Tazreen Factory Fire, Bangladesh: When Cries Go Unheard

Written by: Nabila Tasneem Anonnya

On 24 November, 2012 a massive fire broke out in the Tazreen Fashion Limited garments factory in Ashulia, on the outskirt of the capital city Dhaka of Bangladesh. The devastating fire at the factory killed at least 112 workers and left 200 more workers injured for the lifetime. 

The fire is believed to have been caused by a short circuit. But when the workers started panicking hearing the fire alarm, like The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City in 1911, the managers and the security guards locked the panicked workers inside and forced them to go back to the work claiming nothing happened. Neither the factory workers had been provided with any fire safety training nor the factory had any exterior fire escapes. The exits to the outside were all locked (this is a common practice prevailing in the country to lock the doors to the stairwells and exits of the factory building to prevent the theft of the machineries) which left the workers with only one option to save their lives— jumping through the windows of the upper floors as even the lower windows of the factory building were barred. More than hundreds of workers became permanently disabled when they jumped from the windows of the third and fourth floors to escape the fire that day. Many of the survivors had to go through serious back and head injuries that left them to deal with constant pain for the rest of their life. 

But even after such deadly massacre, garments workers’ fate hasn’t changed much, their miseries are still ignored by us. There’s no security for their lives, no assurance of their employment. They still have to keep on demanding for reasonable wages, better safety standards and working conditions. The eighth anniversary of the Tazreen fashion fire tragedy will be observed in few days but the former Tazreen workers are still on the roads, demanding for justice, for appropriate dignified compensation, to amend the provisions for compensation and for the improved safety conditions in Bangladesh’s 4,000 garment factories. It has been showed through many researches and studies done on Tazreen fire incident over the years that the owner was at fault and the one to be blamed for killing of 112 of his employees. But what is disturbing to note is that, while the workers are staging protest on the streets demanding the appropriate compensation eight years after the tragedy, the owner of the Tazreen Fashion Ltd is free on bail and there is no significant progress over the years on the cases filed against him and 12 others for murder under Section 302 of the Penal Code, culpable homicide not amounting to murder under Section 304, causing death by negligence under Section 304A, and voluntarily causing hurt under Section 323 (The Daily Star, November 20, 2020). 

The question remains why we care so little that the justice is still a far cry and that cries of the poor workers go unheard. I believe, the answer lies in our discomfort to account for the labor of the workers through which we are generating revenues, our inability to realize that the workers are not asking for any handouts— they are demanding for the wages that they deserve, a dignified compensation for losing the ability to work forever that was robbed of them and lastly, in the fact that when it comes to the poor working class, we have the privilege to choose not to care while the workers cannot but continue to work in "death-trap" working conditions and earn “foreign currency” for us. 

It is high time we stopped calling the garments factory tragedies just an “accident”. Tazreen factory blaze incident was never an accident, it was criminal. All the tragic incidents happening with the garments workers are not just happening without any reason.  It is the national and international ignorance to the sufferings of the garments workers and the systematic capitalist practice of making profit by using their cheap labor that are to be blamed and the reasons for increasing the miseries of the workers. Let’s raise question as to why the working class being the citizens of an independent state in 21st century are deprived of the very basic human rights. Let’s not call the man-made tragedies “accidents”, try to run away from our liabilities to protect the rights of the working class and pretend like we are not accountable for their miseries.