The Bangaldeshi Garment Capitalists

The New York Times continues its run of articles on the garment trade in Bangladesh but once again I am frustrated with them. Saturday’s article focused on the Bangladeshi garment capitalists, essentially the middlemen between the apparel companies and the workers. These are not good actors. They are corrupt millionaires who dominate the nation’s politics and finance, create laws against unions, have union activists murdered, etc. But what this series of articles continues to do is naturalize American corporate behavior. In this and other articles, American companies aren’t the problem, it’s Bangladeshi corruption. But this situation exists precisely because it generates high profits for apparel companies. If Wal-Mart and Gap wanted to create better conditions in the factories, they could do so almost overnight. They could cut ties with subcontractors who use bad labor practices. They could work with international labor activists to ensure meaningful regulatory enforcement. And, amazing as this sounds, they could also open their own factories in Bangladesh that directly employ garment workers. Just because the apparel industry has subcontracted work for over a century doesn’t mean it has to be that way. Recreating the Triangle Fire over and over again is the upshot of capital mobility and garment industry labor practices. This can change. Bangladeshi factory owners suck but they are not the entirety of the problem, or even the majority of it.