No sweatshop workers in WEF mind frame
This refers to the report on the recent deaths of eight young women locked in a burning electronics sweatshop/slave pen owned by Juanito Go (“Pasay fire kills 8, bares Sino trader’s ‘prison-factory,’” Metro, 5/31/14).
I’m from the United States. Our country reached a major turning point in the struggle for workers’ rights 103 years ago, following what is now known as the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, which swept through a sweatshop and killed 146 garment workers, mostly young women. The women had been locked inside their workroom, supposedly to prevent theft of thread and the like. Trapped on the 10th floor (unreachable by fire truck ladders at the time), the women, mostly immigrants in search of a better life, had to choose between burning to death and jumping to death on the pavement below. They jumped, some already engulfed in flames as they fell.
The outrage that followed led to the unionization of garment workers and the passage of protective legislation on workplace safety. The owners were tried for negligent homicide but, of course, got off—just as Go will.
I felt the same outrage over the May 9, 2012, Novo Jeans & Shirts retail store fire outside General Santos City. There, 17 of 22 “stay-in” workers were killed by a fire, also largely because they had been locked in the building after working hours.
Then there were the two big incidents in Bangladesh: the Nov. 24, 2012, Tazreen Fashion factory fire which left 117 confirmed dead (again mostly women) and 220 injured. Those workers were also locked inside the factory and had no way out except through an exit on the ground floor where the fire was raging, thus making their escape impossible. Five months later, on April 24, 2013, some 1,000 people were crushed to death in the collapse of the substandard Rana Plaza garment factory building which held scores of small garment-assembler sweatshops.
Now the new sweatshops appear to be electronics assembly shops. How many more workers will die in this manner?
A government supposedly so concerned about the possible exploitation of its citizens abroad, and yet allows that “employment” setup which, in fact, was essentially a form of slavery (despite the victims receiving a token allowance) going on in an illegal location known to local officials!
And Go will walk free. Of that there is no doubt. Even if he were sentenced to jail after seven or 10 years of one-hour-per-month unimaginably arcane and convoluted criminal proceedings, we all know he’d buy his way out of any prison awaiting him. That’s how things work here, di ba? Oh, but I’m not showing the proper measure of delicadeza in my foreigner-prejudiced criticism, am I? Well, too bad! I just keep thinking of those poor young women, barely more than girls, all from a place I know, Negros Oriental. I’ll be polite when they are avenged and other young women like them are spared similar fates in this “rising economy.”
I wonder if the poor women who died huddled together in Go’s hellhole of a factory prison were even thought-of, even in the abstract, by the distinguished personages who attended the much-ballyhooed World Economic Forum on East Asia that just ended. For that gathering, street vendors were pushed off Taft Avenue, but those poor women in Pasay weren’t visible behind Go’s locked gates and walls. Only the possibly embarrassing “eyesores” like the street vendors below the Pedro Gil LRT Station were the poor folk who caught the “attention” of the powers-that-be, just to be driven away and denied their business.
I can only hope the embers of that burned electronics sweatshop will spark a firestorm of outrage and a real movement for workers and human rights in this country. Only time will tell, but I won’t be holding my breath.
Roy Eugene Boggs is a retired American (California) lawyer/law professor/labor activist living in Talipapa, Caloocan. He first came to the Philippines as an international refugee relief worker (Philippine Refugee Processing Center, Morong, Bataan, 1989-1990), following US Peace Corps service in the Dominican Republic and Morocco.
