The price of ‘progress’? From Senghenydd to Savar

The response to the disaster of the clothing factories’ collapse in Savar, just outside Dhaka, in April 2013 with the loss of over 1,100 young lives, echoes the reaction to the greatest industrial calamity ever to have occurred in Britain. This took place in 1913, exactly one hundred years earlier – the Senghenydd pit disaster, which claimed the lives of 439 miners. Predictably, in the West in 2013, the conscience of the penitent cheaply clad took precedence over the actual lives of the producers of their apparel. The ‘humanitarian’ hand-wringing hides a deeper assumption, namely, that since ‘we’ have known such disasters on our journey towards prosperity, ‘they’ too, must expect a similar experience; built, as it is, into the nature of progress.