Wallmart, Polo Shirts to Ashes, भगवान आपके आत्माओं को आशीर्वाद

Before you read this story, I am still having that glitch problem, to read this story without the interference below(a link from another post mid stream) click the story title and read story solo, not as part of the front page, sorry for the technical issue..Grant G

Wallmart, Polo Shirts to Ashes, भगवान आपके आत्माओं को आशीर्वाद by Grant G

 Maybe I`m old school, for as long as I can remember railing against cheap goods made in China and India was the norm, racism was not the issue nor was Canadian and American pride in our domestic quality, protection of my fellow equal and job security into the long term were high on my reason-to buy-local list but to be brutally frank, the task of both shopping local and finding a country of origin tag originating on our continent is a feat in itself....and let me be clear, there are a hundred other countries we could look to and point fingers at..

 For years and years I wouldn`t be caught dead in a Wallmart, or big box store, buy small, support the local but in trying to do so, labels don`t lie, same crap pile, same labels of origin dominated by India and China now dominate even the small mom and pop shops, so now going to Wallmart matters not, the choice of where to buy isn`t dominated by country but by price, where has our domestic manufacturing gone?..

If I am going to be forced to buy cheaply made stuff, forced to buy even quality made goods but only made by 1 or 2 countries then the lowest price will be the deciding factor, as North America`s and Europe`s middleclass families and workers vanish, when family budgets shrivel and dry Wallmart flourishes, a perpetuating syndrome, the poorer people get the cheaper the goods are made, economies of scale develop, have you noticed, jars, juice containers, soup cans, almost every consumable and weighed consumer product contained within various shaped and sized containers have been transformed into the smaller, by deliberate guile our purchases are reduced, less mayonnaise, less ketchup, less everything, these containers look the same however, on close examination there are indentions and blockages, indentations designed to reduce volume and blockages configured to obstruct, the lines are clearly drawn, and the sands of profit are very fine..

Recently dog treats with ingredients from China have killed pets, several years ago China used melamine to spike protein levels in their wheat gluten to increase profits, it worked, melamine plasticizer did indeed cause protein levels to spike in wheat gluten, it also caused the death of 100,000 plus pet cats in North America, including one of mine(almost 2) and yet I never knew the cat food in my buggy was mostly filled with raw ingredients from China and how could one know when the label said "product of Ontario"..

Counterfeit goods from what we class as third world countries, India, China, and yes many many more countries, those two are the most prolific offenders, fake baby milk, fake prescriptions, fake fake and more goddamn fakery..

I was reading ALJAZEERA and there it was, a story I dreaded reading, that story spawned looking for another story, then some research, then more stories and the deeper I dug the more heinous my conclusion became, intrigue, high finance, worker bees, slaves, slave controllers, middle(doing the dirty work) managers, loan sharks and human smugglers and the worst part of it all, it`s also you, it`s our politicians, lobbyists and corporate sell outs, not only have we been sitting idly by watching our future prosperity go on permanent over seas holidays we also lit the match and turned lives to ashes, by no choice of my own my own hands have returned to soot

Phil Hocstein, Fraser institute, Michael Campbell, BC Liberals, temporary Chinese workers, workers doing agriculture, burger flipping, truck driving, now even coal mining, economists continue to use words like productivity, as in Canada needs to "increase productivity", code-word and phrasing once translated means "lower wages" while producing "more product" and yes at one time outsourcing meant setting up shop in foreign countries but now even resource extraction where the ores, coals, oil n gases are here in Canada, no problemo, now you merely bring in cheap labour, we saw examples on many a BC project, Golden Ears bridge, the Canada line, multi-billion dollar projects that both went way over the taxpayer funded budget and still cheap labour was infiltrated by those connected, right under our noses, through guile, bafflegab and a Canadian-take-it-in-stride-attitude by ignoring the issue, and today we must look in the mirror, identify the complicit enabler and admit what we are, party too the crimes...

Apparently Wallmart announced that Tuba(Textile Giant from India) had violated contract conditions by outsourcing to a CODE-Orange rated textile manufacturer named :Tazreen:

Code Orange means the company has had too many safety violations and those violations are safety, fire safety write-ups being the most serious, Tazreen was a vertical factory with the first floor mainly used for supplies, actual manufacturing took place on upper floors..

112 confirmed dead so far, a shoddy sweatshop burnt to the ground, a sweatshop named Tazreen, where fleece jackets and polo shirts are made by the millions, jackets, shirts and other garments you will find on Wallmart shelves, products that many of you will open up on Christmas day..

So there was a fire, a tragic fire, shit happens right?..Wrong, in reading one story everyone talked arson, deliberate sabotage, I thought my gawd, how could anyone burn down hundreds of workers then I read how Wallmart had announced the day before the fire that Tazreen was out, so was another company TUBA outsourced to..No longer would Wallmart deal with them, but what of the product these workers made, the supply chain moves, by the time Wallmart layed the boots to Tazreen they had made probably millions of garments, the supply chain goes as follows, clothing items made, items shipped to domestic distributor, items shipped to national distributor, then shipped to Wallmart and in most cases actual payment comes much much later...

Who would deliberately torch these domestic Indian workers and why, the first story had no answers...

We have come to the conclusion that it was an act of sabotage. We are finding out as of now who exactly the saboteurs
are and all culprits will be brought to book," Alamgir said.
Earlier, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina said she suspected the fire was an act of sabotage, but she did not identify any suspect or say why she thought the cause might have been arson.
More than 1,000 workers, some carrying black flags, demonstrated in the Ashulia industrial belt on the outskirts of
the capital where the factory is located.
They blocked traffic moving on a highway and vowed to avenge the deaths of their colleagues, witnesses said.
"Never shall we give up demands for punishment for those responsible for the tragedy," one worker said.
Habibur Rahman, Dhaka district police chief, told Reuters news agency that his men were investigating complaints from some survivors that factory managers stopped workers from running out of the building when a fire alarm went off.
Representatives of the Tazreen Fashions factory, including the owner, were not available for comment.
'Violation of policies'
The developments in Bangladesh came a day after the US retail giant Walmart said it had ended its relationship with an unnamed supplier who sourced garments from the Tazreen factory.

The multinational company severed ties with its supplier as anger over safety standards in Bangladesh's clothes manufacturing industry mounted. Bangladesh offers cheap labour to many Western apparel brands for manufacturing.
In a statement issued on Monday, Walmart expressed its condolences to the victims' families and said: "The fact that this occurred is extremely troubling to us, and we will continue to work across the apparel industry to improve fire safety education and training in Bangladesh.
"A supplier subcontracted work to this factory without authorisation and in direct violation of our policies. The Tazreen factory was no longer authorised to produce merchandise for Walmart. Today, we have terminated the relationship with that supplier."


 http://www.aljazeera.com/news/asia/2012/11/201211271991287788.html

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 Answers to my questions weren`t contained within that Aljazeera story, the  answer was indeed contained elsewhere, in thinking about why, why burn the employees down, I mused in the back of my mind, were these employees paid, I wonder, for why else would someone resort to acts that heinous if it wasn`t for money, Aljazeera`s take left me wanting answers and this wretched device i`m typing with and social media supplied the answers..

There were social media accounts of locked fire-escapes, and even more shocking reports of middle-managers keeping the workers in place for 10 precious minutes plus, managers telling workers that the fire alarm was but a drill, "get back to work" and aggression was used, not until smoke started filling the upper factory worker floors did many rise and attempt escape, by then it was too late for many...

And then I came across this...

"Survivors have described how a fire tore through a multi-storey garment factory just outside Bangladesh's capital, Dhaka, killing more than 100 of their colleagues in one of the worst such incidents in recent years.

Mohammad Shahbul Alam, 26, described flames filling two of the three stairwells of the nine-floor building – where clothes for international brands including high-street names appear to have been made — shortly after the fire alarm had been raised.

Rooms full of female workers were cut off as piles of yarn and fabric filling corridors ignited. Reports also suggested fire exits at the site had locks on, which had to be broken in order for staff to escape.

"It was 6.45pm when the fire alarm was raised. I rushed out. I heard that [grills blocking the way to] the second and third floors were locked. When I came down, I saw fire at both the stairways that the ladies used. I still have not found any trace of my sister-in-law," Alam told the Guardian.

According to Zakir Hossain, another worker, management told their employees not to evacuate immediately.

"The office staff asked us to stay where we were, telling us not to panic. We did not listen to them and started moving out," Hossain recalled. "A lot of people were stuck there. Some people got out climbing down the bamboo [scaffolding] tied against the building."

Witnesses said many workers leapt from upper stories in a bid to escape the flames. Twelve workers died in hospital from injuries sustained in falls, officials said, bringing the overall toll to 123 dead and more than 150 injured.

The blaze will focus attention once more on the conditions in which workers producing clothes for sale in the west work.

Fires in textiles and garments factories across south Asia have killed hundreds in recent months. More than 280 died in oneat a site in Karachi, Pakistan, in September.

Delwar Hossein, the managing director of the Dhaka factory, told the Guardian that the factory, Tazreen Fashions, had been making clothes for European high street giant C&A among other clients.

"I lived on these workers' efforts," he said. "I could not do anything for my workers. I do not know what went wrong and cannot understand why the staff could not get out of the building."

There was no immediate response from C&A.

The factory, in the Ashulia industrial zone, is one of around 4,000 such installations in Bangladesh, many of which operate with minimal safeguards against fire or industrial accidents. The country annually earns about £12.5bn from exports of garment products, mainly to the US and Europe.

Earlier this year, more than 300 factories near the capital were shut for almost a week as workers demanded higher wages and better working conditions.

Siddiq Ur Rahman, acting president of Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association said the families of the dead would receive 100,000 aka (£760) as compensation.

Abu Nayeem Mohammad Shahidullah, director general of the Dhaka fire brigade, told reporters the toll could still rise.

Army soldiers and border guards had been deployed to help police keep order at the scene of the tragedy as thousands of anxious and angry relatives of the factory workers gathered.

Kalpona Akter, from the Bangladesh Centre for Workers' Solidarity (BCWS), said: "We initially thought the fire broke out from generator but I checked the generator room today and it was not from there.".

Akter said that locks on exits at the factory had been broken, indicating that the gates had been locked when the fire broke out. Most bodies are too badly burned for immediate investigation. Fire service officials have said they believe a short circuit was responsible"

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That report really angered me and my world tour began, the more I dug the more my disgust with capitalism and Facism rose, this is why we need unions and worker protections, guaranteed incomes and live-able wages, the very things Harper and our own BC Liberals are doing to us, removing Grant`s law, watering down safety measures, remember the mushroom farmers, remember the illegal 10 person vans without seats, without seatbelts, these vans that slaughtered BC`s own sweatshop workers, now we have imported Chinese coal miners brought here to die in underground coal mines, and to die at a cut-rate price.. There is no difference except the severity of the violations, abuse is abuse and the driving force is corporate profits, now angered to no end I ran across the Straight Goods on this deliberate crime...From the times of Asia..

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Bangladesh blaze points to hell of garments trade
By Syed Tashfin Chowdhury


"The reason for the blaze is not yet known, with Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina raising the prospect of a political motive while some survivors said they had been promised before the tragedy that they would receive on Sunday three-months' unpaid wages and an unpaid standard bonus for the October Eid festival.
Tazreen Fashions, located in a rural area of Ashulia district nearly a three-hour drive from Dhaka, occupies a nine-storied building, with a space of nearly 1,500 square meters on each floor. The ground floor, which stored the factory's raw materials, had the only entrance to the factory, with three staircases leading to other floors.

The factory's main operations took place from the first to the fifth floors, with the three remaining floors still under construction. According to survivors and witnesses, the fire broke out on the ground floor around 6:15pm on Saturday. Manik Mia, who was working on the fifth floor, escaped immediately after hearing the fire warning siren. "I managed to rush down the stairs and ran out of the factory, not heeding what my production manager had to say. But I also witnessed how production managers of the first and second floors were barring workers from leaving their workstations, calling it a 'fire drill'," he said. 


Although this seemed to ease the minds of some workers, panic broke out about seven minutes later when smoke began to billow upwards. Workers, mostly female, stampeded to the first and second floors in a bid to make it to the ground-floor entrance. But as fire barred access to the stairs and the only gates were also allegedly locked up under instruction of management, possibly fearing looting, the workers tried to break through upstairs windows. Some tried to scale the pipes outside the building and others jumped through holes they managed to make by breaking large exhaust fans on the first floor.

Some workers managed survived their falls from upper floors with severe injuries. Others were not so fortunate. According to fire department sources, those "trapped on the first and second floors could not come out as there were not enough exits". 


 After the recovery work was suspended around Sunday evening, some reporters and workers went into the charred building. Mahfuzul Haque, a journalist with New Age, told Asia Times Online, "I walked into the second floor to find a skull. There was no skin on it. The rest of the body was nowhere to be found. Here and there lay body parts like hair, arms etc. There were pieces of glass bangles all over the floor, as mostly female workers had faced the tragedy."

The incident has again brought the working conditions of Bangladesh's apparels industry, which earns US$19 billion a year in revenue, into the international spotlight.

More than 500 Bangladeshi workers have died in factory fires since 2006, according to Clean Clothes Campaign, an Amsterdam-based anti-sweatshop advocacy group. Such a list would have been reduced if most of the nearly 3,000 apparel factories in Bangladesh, employing over 3 million workers, had met fire safety standards, according to labor experts in Bangladesh.

"The manner in which the gates of the only entrances to most factories are locked, thus trapping thousands of workers inside the factory once a shift begins - and also in the case of such disasters or unrest - is a punishable offence according to Bangladesh's Labour Act of 1965," Syed Sultan Uddin Ahmed, assistant executive director of Bangladesh Institute of Labour Studies told Asia Times Online. ...........



He urged a proper investigation by the five committees that have been set up to investigate the tragedy.

"Inquiry committees were also formed during earlier fires, like the one at Ha-meem garments factory in December 2010 that claimed the lives of at least 23 workers. But no concrete report was made public later. This should not happen this time," he said.

Tazreen Fashion's parent company, Tuba Group, exports apparel products to major brands like Walmart, Carrefour and IKEA, according to its website. Its Tazreen factory, which opened in 2009, employed about 1,600 people to make polo shirts, fleece jackets and T-shirts. These were exported to countries like USA, Germany, Italy, France, the Netherlands and others.

Tuba's website displays a document mentioning that Tazreen was rated "orange", which stands for a high-risk safety rating, following a May 2011 audit conducted by an "ethical sourcing" assessor assigned by Walmart, the world's largest retail company.

Walmart spokesman Kevin Gardner said after the blaze that Walmart was "so far unable to confirm that Tazreen is a supplier to Walmart nor if the document referenced in the article is in fact from Walmart.".............

 Mohiuddin suggested that the incident could be sabotage, echoing comments by Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina to parliament on Monday that the fire was "pre-planned".

Hasina brought the parliament's attention to how on Sunday, as the ashes of the Tazreen factory were still warm, a worker at a Debonair garments factory, also in Ashulia, set a fire inside her then empty workplace. The fire was doused before it could cause damage.

"I have seen video footage of it recorded on the CCTV camera," Hasina said. The worker, one Sumi Begum, "was paid 20,000 takas [US$246] for torching it. He who paid her has also been arrested. But those who are behind all these must be arrested." According to police, Sumi was paid by a Debonair floor manager to start the fire.

The following day, a fire broke out at a third factory in Dakhshin Khan, nearer the center of Dhaka. No casualties were reported in the incident.

Hasina also implied that politicians belonging to Jamaat-e-Islami, a member of the opposition 18-party alliance, could be behind such blazes, which in threatening the garments industry also threaten to undermine the country's most important foreign currency earner. She referred to how anti-independent forces (senior Jamaat-e-Islami leaders who collaborated with and supported Pakistan at the time) set fire to jute factories in Bangladesh during the 1971 war for independence."

 http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/NK28Df02.html

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We didn`t have an accident, just look at the facts on the ground, Wallmart just cut off parts of TUBA`s outsourced suppliers, Tazreen was one of TUBA`s suppliers, the employees haven`t been paid for three months, with Wallmart cutting off the nose of the cover company, that being TUBA the odds were those employees of Tazreen would never be paid, perhaps the ruthless bulldogs, the worker guards, those being middle management wanted the worker`s monies,...

Money was owed and competition was getting fiercer, we are in the midsts of a world slow-down, the race to bottom, corporate`s lowering the bar over and over again, here in Canada, the betrayal of Aveos employees, aircraft maintenance outsourced to South America, wages lowered by a factor 10...No inspections, no paper trail, no standards..Caterpillar too left for cheaper labour, betrayal after betrayal, now miners, coming from mining death capital of the world China, now coming here to die, finder-fees, room and board and a cone of silence, come to Canada to work, to die, and at half-price or less...

Caterpillar, Air Canada and British Columbia firms just shit on us, gave us the finger, bit by bit corporate whores are changing the playing field and altering the rules, decades of workers gains are being eroded at an astonishing rate while corporate profits surge, and as for our fearless leaders, Stephen Treason Harper and our own BC Liberal team of Facists have willingly and with malice sold us out, without a whimper Aveos, Air Canada, Caterpillar, pushed Canada`s labour laws to new lows..

And our politicians applauded

Caterpillar locks out 420 workers at London plant

Published on Monday January 02, 2012

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The Canadian Press

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LONDON, ONT. — Locomotive maker Electro-Motive began the new year by locking out CAW members at its plant in London, Ont.
Contract talks collapsed last week after the company issued a final offer that would cut the wages of union members in half, eliminate pensions and gut other benefits.
The previous contract for the more than 420 CAW members expired at the start of 2012, and the union set up picket lines at the plant Sunday evening.
Electro-Motive is owned by heavy equipment giant Caterpillar through its Progress Rail subsidiary. Caterpillar has a long history of playing hard ball with unions.
CAW president Ken Lewenza issued a statement blaming corporate greed for the lockout, calling it a serious attack on working people, their families and the greater London area.
“Caterpillar may be one of the richest corporations to ask for the deepest of cuts,” he said.
Progress Rail, which also produces diesel-electric locomotives, opened a plant in Muncie, Ind., in October, leading to speculation it intends to relocate the London operation there to benefit from Washington's Buy American policies.
The CAW is asking the federal government to disclose the terms and commitments made during the 2010 purchase of Electro-Motive by Caterpillar, under the Investment Canada Act.
Ontario Federation of Labour president Sid Ryan says Ontario's labour movement is ready to mobilize to help the CAW stop scabs from crossing picket lines at the London plant.
“Workers across the province are angry and feel betrayed by their government and they are ready to fight together to defend good jobs,” he said."

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Caterpillar despite making $billions in profits sold out it`s Canadian workers, it also sold out it`s American workers..

Betrayal at Caterpillar

22 August 2012

"Last Friday, after a bitter three-and-a-half month strike, 780 workers at Caterpillar’s Joliet, Illinois plant voted by a narrow margin to accept a brutal concessions contract pushed through by the International Association of Machinists (IAM). With nearly 40 percent of the workers abstaining, the vote was an expression not of support, but of disgust at the treachery of the union leadership.
The contract included virtually everything the company had demanded in an earlier proposal the workers voted down in May. They now face an estimated 20 percent reduction in real wages over the course of the six-year contract, as well as cuts in pensions and health care benefits.
Caterpillar insisted on slashing the workers’ wages despite the fact that it posted a record profit of $1.7 billion in the second quarter of this year, a 67 percent increase over the previous year. CEO Douglas Oberhelman took in $16.9 million in 2011, a 60 percent increase from the year before.
The Caterpillar struggle drew national attention and was closely followed by the US corporate elite. As the New York Times noted in a front-page article July 22, “it has become a test case in American labor relations” because the company is “seeking steep concessions from its workers even when business is booming.”

 http://www.wsws.org/articles/2012/aug2012/pers-a22.shtml


http://www.tubagroupbd.net/Profile/FACTORY%20PROFILE%20OF%20TUBA%20GROUP.pdf

Remember this line from the very first paragraph of this post..

"and let me be clear, there are a hundred other countries we could look to and point fingers at.."

But why bother, the perpetrators of this crime, perpetrators of these crimes are you and me, go into Wallmart and buy those $20 dollar shoes, go into that polling station and vote for Stephen Harper or Christy Clark, vote for the lowest denominator, vote for selling out our country..

Let the party of the workers be damned, Socialist hordes at the gate pull out the bazooka and press the trigger..Listen to those attack ads three years before the next election, listen to Christy Clark cite Joe McCarthy, listen to Michael Campbell and the Fraser institute and your Grandchildren too will be working behind guarded gates..

The Straight Goods

Cheers Eyes Wide Open