From the Director

Dr. Daniel E. Wueste

Rana Plaza, an eight story building in Savar, a suburb of Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, collapsed on the 24^th of April.  The building was home to five garment factories and some 3,000 workers.  With a death toll of 1,127, the collapse of Rana Plaza is the deadliest accident in the history of the garment industry.  Sad to say, deadly accidents are nothing new to the garment industry, not only in Bangladesh (in November 2012, for instance, more than 100 garment workers perished in a fire at Tazreen Fashions also near Dhaka) but wherever the industry has flourished.

For example, as M.T. Anderson observes, garment industry disasters like Rana Plaza happened here in the United States during “the first phase of our national industrialization — the 1878 Washburn mill explosion in Minneapolis, the 1905 Grover Shoe Factory disaster in Brockton, Mass., the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in Manhattan — but…the most notorious was the 

1860 collapse of the Pemberton Mill in Lawrence, Mass.”  In the afternoon, on January 10^th 1860, the Pemberton Building began to shudder.  Flimsy iron columns, which had been known to be unsafe for years, but which would have been costly to replace, supported the upper floors of the building.  The weaving machines, too many of them, had fallen into rhythm: “and the building tore itself apart. The columns cracked, the floors splayed, the walls bulged and then burst outward, and a hideous cataract of timber, men, women, working children and iron machines collapsed into a heap of blood and crushing tonnage.”

 

Then, as now, such a tragedy raised vexing questions about responsibility, in the sense of liability (which presupposes culpability); and regulation, in particular, about its feasibility, justification, effectiveness, and consequences for the regulated businesses, workers, and the economies of which they are a part.   These are important and difficult questions.  In Bangladesh, for instance, which is second only to China in exports of apparel, this is especially true because economic progress has been closely tied to the growth of the garment industry.  Writing about his country, as rescuers were still searching for survivors of the Rana Plaza collapse, Fazle Hasan Abed put the point this way in an op ed in the New York Times: “Economic opportunities from the garment industry have played an important role in making social change possible in my country, with about three million women now working in the garment sector….. families living in poverty have changed their vision of the future.  More have acquired long-term goals, like educating their sons and daughters, saving and taking microloans to start new businesses, and building and maintaining more sanitary living spaces.”

One salutary feature of Abed’s op ed is that rather than engaging in the popular but only marginally useful game of blame (find the bad guy; “string him up”), he directs attention to steps that may ameliorate the problems of worker safety in Bangladesh.  That is very different from what was going on in media coverage as well as  “on the ground,” where leaders of the garment industry were blaming the owner of Rana Plaza, and Mr. Rana was blaming the owners of the factories  and the engineer, Abdur Razzaque Khan, who, on the day before the collapse, having been summoned to the building to have a look at cracks in the structure, said that the danger was great enough that the building should be closed and experts should be brought in to conduct a thorough investigation. 

Here, like Abed, I will put aside questions of responsibility that presuppose blameworthiness.  Instead, I will focus, briefly, on responsibility in the sense of what one ought ethically to do, which, I should say, nearly, if not completely, tracks with the query what one can be reasonably expected to do.  I do this in the hope that looking at the features of a situation that prompts one to think about responsibility may cast some light on how one might go about determining what one’s responsibilities are.  

The recent major garment industry disasters in Bangladesh (Rava Plaza, the November 2012 fire at Tazreen Fashions) share three features: 

(i)    they were preventable

(ii)   the cost of prevention in each case would have been small

(iii)  resistance to preventative measures was strong and they were, accordingly, not taken. 

In this, and in being horrific, they are quite like the Pemberton Mill disaster discussed briefly above.  They resemble Pemberton in another way.  The workers —the victims— were vulnerable, because, among other things, they needed the work and were better off for having it.  However, and consequently, just as they were in no position to negotiate or demand better wages, they were in no position to negotiate or demand safer working conditions.  



http://video.msnbc.msn.com/up/51932077/#51932048



Here, then, we stand at the intersection of three value-laden ideas: vulnerability, preventability, and

responsibility.  Two of these, namely, vulnerability and responsibility, are, as it were, inherent in the human condition.  All of us, though we do often forget it, are vulnerable in some measure.  And, with very few exceptions, for example, the very young and those who have severe cognitive impairments, we all have responsibilities.  There are, in other words, things that it is our responsibility to do (i.e., that we are rightly expected to do) as, for example, a friend, spouse, parent, professional (e.g., architect or doctor), or manager.  The third idea, preventability, is tied to the human condition in that whether something is preventable turns, in the end, on the reach of our control in a situation.  Partly, control is a matter of physical wherewithal, but the larger part, to use Peter Drucker’s terminology, is a matter of competence and authority.   [ Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices (New York: Harper and Row, 1973. p. 102.) Post-Capitalist Society (New York: HarperCollins, 1993.  pp. 347-48.)]

The question then appears to be something like this: Could we agree that responsibility is in some sense a function of the two factors called out above in discussing the garment industry disasters, namely, vulnerability and preventability?  Supposing that the answer is yes, we might say that responsibility (the legitimate expectation that we will act) increases with the vulnerability of the persons and the extent to which harm is preventable in the situation. 

The ethical principle suggested by this is that when harm is within an agent’s/organization’s ambit of competence and authority and it can be prevented (without substantial cost comparable to and greater than the cost of the preventable harm), it is the agent’s/organization’s responsibility to take steps to prevent it.

This principle implies that, for example, retailers contracting with garment manufacturers in Bangladesh have a responsibility to take steps to make garment factories safer places to work.  (If we could travel back in time, we’d find ourselves saying the same thing about the situation in Lawrence, Massachusetts in 1860.)

You will recall, I hope, that what I have written was motivated by the thought that examining the features of a situation that prompts one to think about responsibility might cast some light on how to go about determining what one’s responsibilities are.  The principle that emerged seems to do that.  I wonder what you think.  Is the principle too strong (in the sense that it implies responsibilities that no one playing with a full deck could accept or reasonably expect others to fulfill)?  Is it unrealistic?  Does it ignore  critical factors or conflict with other sound principles?  I welcome your observations, suggestions, and criticism, truly.  Please send them to me at ernest@clemson.edu.  And thanks for reading this far.