Lay off Joe Fresh.

Activists always like to name and shame prominent retailers. But in this case, it’s simply not fair

On Tuesday morning, I turned on the radio and heard yet another CBC host talking about last week’s collapse of the eight-storey Rana Plaza in Savar, Bangladesh — a horrific accident that killed at least 400 people, most of them lowpaid garment workers.

The CBC has been covering this story intensely for the past week, and is to be applauded for doing so. This was the worst accident in the history of the garment industry (which is saying something). And within Bangladesh, it has aroused enormous fury at the often corrupt and uncaring elites who run the factories. It’s a big story.

What I am less comfortable with is the constant and prominent identification of a single Western retailer that traces its supply chain to the Rana Plaza facility: Joe Fresh, which sells its inexpensive fashion brand here in Canada primarily through Loblaw Inc. supermarkets. Almost every CBC show I’ve heard singles out Joe Fresh, identifies the executive chairman of Loblaws Companies by name, and laments the fact that he has not decided to come onto CBC airwaves to confess his company’s sins.

This feels wrong to me: There are 3-million textile workers in Bangladesh, working at tens of thousands of facilities, many of which no doubt are also in a poor state of repair. For activists, I see the logic of naming and shaming particular retailers. But the only difference between Joe Fresh and thousands of other Western companies that follow standard low-cost Western outsourcing practices is bad luck. And Loblaws executive chairman Galen Weston Jr. — whose company did nothing illegal, and is sending financial compensation to families of the disaster’s victims — should not be made up as the Western face of Bangladesh’s tragedy.

And yes, I say “Bangladesh’s tragedy” because it is patronizing to describe it otherwise. Many Westerners romantically like to imagine that we have the sweeping power to make life rosy in other countries simply by changing the place we buy our lace blouson tees and pencil skirts. But we don’t: The textile mills of Bangladesh sell into a global market that moves on price, no matter the small group of privileged consumers within wealthy nations — a subset within a subset — who have the luxury of making their buying decisions on other grounds.

Nor can well-intentioned inspectors deployed by Western retailers fully vouch for the safety conditions of textile mills in Bangladesh or anywhere else. That is something that can be done in a truly comprehensive way only by a professional civil engineering corps authorized and funded by local government. The reason textile mills collapse in Bangladesh, the reason coal mines collapse in China, the reason 12-year-olds harvest cocoa in subSaharan Africa ultimately is that government regulations and inspection regimes, insofar as they exist, are vitiated by corruption. These also generally tend to be countries that exhibit enormous levels of wealth inequality and political dysfunction, both of which conspire against any effort to make worker safety a national priority.

Moreover, even if Bangladesh and other sweatshop-trade nations had the political tools to bring the textiles industry to Western-standard on worker safety, they wouldn’t do so, since that would mean pricing Bangladesh out of the textile trade. A building collapse is just one of many ways to die in a nation such as Bangladesh. Someone who’s laid off from a textile job surely won’t die in an industrial accident. But penniless and improvident, they might then be forced to watch a child expire from malnutrition or an otherwise preventable disease. Which is worse?

Many activists are declaring that Rana Plaza was Bangladesh’s equivalent of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, which took the lives of 146 Manhattan garment workers in 1911. But I doubt that: The Triangle Fire did lead to improvements in workers’ rights and safety standards, but only because it happened during the Progressive Era, when a democratically robust and increasingly wealthy America already was beginning to respond to the problems associated with industrialization.

One day, Bangladesh will be at that stage of political and economic development. But it’s not there yet. And the fault for that doesn’t lie with Joe Fresh, or the people who shop there.