'Toontime: When Christmas Goes Bad

More: Over 100 Bangladeshi garment workers manufacturing cheap clothing for western markets including "Faded Glory" jeans sold by Wal-Mart perished in a factory fire on Monday. The nine floor building had no exterior fire escapes. Some workers jumped to the deaths from the top floor to escape flames. Eerily, the conflagration is reminiscent of the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire in New York that killed 146 mostly young female immigrants working for low wages, and horrified New Yorkers. That building was also a fire trap. In the aftermath, stricter fire and building codes were implemented by the city.

In Bangladesh workers from Tazreen Fashions protested and demanded punishment for those responsible for the disaster. They blocked roads and forced other factories to close down in a suburb of Dhaka. Bangladesh is a center of the global garment industry because of its low wages and lax regulation of conditions. It has about 4500 garment factories employing 40% of the country's industrial workforce. Clothing manufacturing makes up 80% of its $24 billion in annual exports. Since 2006, 500 people have died in factory fires there. A number of large US retailers have already denied any connection to the Tuba Group, owners of the factory. Wal-Mart said it is still looking into whether its products were made at Tazreen Fashions, but trade union representatives say Wal-Mart has refused to participate in voluntary safety programs intended to protect garment workers. US consumers are unmoved by the dangerous working conditions suffered by impoverished foreigners in third world countries to make cheap consumer goods available to them. In 1993 a fire in Thailand killed 188 people, mostly young women manufacturing cheap toys for top American brands. Wal-Mart announced it had the biggest Black Friday sales in its history.

[credit: Adam Zyglis, The Buffalo News]

The first retail workers strike in the company's 50 year history gets underway this Black Friday. The company is famous for it's aggressive labor practices and "always low wages". The median level pay in the US is $14.42/hour. A Wal-Mart worker earns an average $8.81/hour. The company has asked the NLRB for an injunction to stop the action, fearful it may dent it's profits on the biggest, craziest shopping day of the year. It will be interesting to see what effect the strike has since Wal-Mart is the poster child of most of retail Amerika:

The corporations are not entirely to blame for a Cratchet Christmas. A study by UC Berkeley says it would cost consumers only $12.49 a year more if Wal-Mart paid its workers a living wage of $12/hour. But Americans, by embracing Wal-Mart's business model of low wage--low prices, have chosen to follow the example of the unconverted Ebenezer Scrooge: cheap.