Profit Drive Kills Garment Workers, from L.A. to Bangladesh

Los Angeles, May 11 — Like Bangladesh, downtown Los Angeles is filled with garment factories that the bosses have callously neglected. As one of our comrades put it during a CHALLENGE sale here, to nods from workers passing by, “In an earthquake, this old building (see photo) could collapse just like the one in Dhaka that killed over 1,100 people.”
Why did factory owners in Bangladesh threaten to withhold workers’ pay to force them to enter a building with visible cracks in its concrete walls? Why was the fertilizer plant that blew up in West, Texas built next to a nursing home, several schools, and an apartment complex? Why are garment workers in LA working in buildings that have yet to be retrofitted to meet current earthquake-safety standards?
The answer, in a word, is “capitalism.” It’s not enough for capitalists to make a lot of money — they must extract the maximum profit. Otherwise, competitors will grab market share by investing more in equipment, research and development, and marketing, and hiring more workers. Since capitalism is a system of dog-eat-dog competition, companies that fail to maximize profits eventually go out of business.
How do companies maximize their profits? One primary method is to drive down wages, as in Bangladesh, where many garment workers make as little as $37 a month. Another is to invest as little as possible in healthy, safe working conditions.
The day before the Dhaka building’s collapse, inspectors found dangerous cracks in the building’s wall. Police issued an evacuation order, but garment workers were threatened with a loss of wages if they failed to come to work. The building’s owner, Mohammed Sohel Rana, a politician with the country’s ruling Awami League, has been arrested. By all accounts, he is guilty of murder. But the biggest criminals are the retailers in Europe and the U.S., like Benetton and Walmart, that pursued maximum profits by buying their goods from the substandard factories in Rana Plaza and countless others like them. The biggest murderers are the capitalists from imperialist powers who exploit the four million garment workers of Bangladesh, the great majority of them women. Rana was a small-time thug simply playing by their rules. 
Why do local and national governments around the world permit such practices? In two words: class dictatorship. Some governments take the form of democracies, as in the U.S. and Bangladesh. Others are formally kingdoms, as in Saudi Arabia and Jordan, or capitalist states, as in China. But the content of all existing governments is the same — to maintain capitalist exploitation. That’s why the Progressive Labor Party fights not for democracy, but for communism, a system without exploitation where the working class will rule.