The World Has Learned the Wrong Lessons From the Rana Plaza Disaster
Ten years ago this week, over 1,130 workers died when the Bangladeshi garment factory Rana Plaza collapsed. A decade after the worst tragedy in garment work history, the reforms needed to prevent another similar tragedy haven’t materialized.
Volunteers use a length of textile as a slide to move dead victims recovered from the rubble after the Rana Plaza garment building collapsed in Savar, on the outskirts of Dhaka, on April 25, 2013. (Munir Uz Zaman / AFP via Getty Images)
“The fire in the garment factory began on the fourth floor, where polo shirts, neatly folded in boxes, made a fine feast for the hungry flames,” wrote the New York Times. Fifty-two people died in the November 25, 2000, disaster at Chowdhury Knitwears, thirty-five miles from Dhaka, Bangladesh.
In the ensuing years, I learned that this fire was a typical incident. Month after month, year after year, industrial disasters like fires plagued the garment industry in Bangladesh. I started feeling inured to the impact of articles like that of the Times, because I knew they would keep coming like clockwork yet nothing would change.
Then, ten years ago this week, the potential for everything to change arose. The garment industry saw its biggest disaster in its history: Rana Plaza, an eight-story building in Bangladesh’s capital, collapsed, killing over 1,130 people and leaving more than 2,500 others injured or permanently disabled.
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