Different Places Have Different Safety Rules So It’s Okay If Poor, Brown People Die

Photo Credit: Women's Day
Photo Credit: Women’s Day

The Aerogram’s Kishwer Vikaas reads between the lines and reveals (red text is hers) what was really going on in Matthew Yglesias’s head as he wrote his recent blog post, Different Places Have Different Safety Rules and That’s OK.” The 375-word post penned by Yglesias, the business and economics correspondent for Slate, speaks on the pointlessness of enforcing workplace safety rules in countries like Bangladesh, where a building collapse yesterday killed over 200 garment factory workers. Rescuers continue to pull survivors and bodies out of the rubble. The Slate piece was originally titled, “Foreign Factories Should be More Dangerous.”

It’s very plausible that one reason American workplaces have gotten safer over the decades is that we now tend to outsource a lot of factory-explosion-risk to countries like Bangladesh where 230 poor, brown people just died slowly and painfully in a building collapse. And are continuing to die—crushed by the weight of concrete slabs. This post originally misstated the deaths as arising from a fire rather than a building collapse. Fire? Collapse? Who cares?! I don’t want regulations that would decrease the possibility of either.

This kind of consideration leads Erik Loomis to the conclusion that we need a unified global standard for safety, by which he does not mean that Bangladeshi levels of workplace safety should be implemented in the United States because that would be silly. (We don’t want to die ourselves, obviously.)

I think that’s wrong. Bangladesh may or may not need tougher workplace safety rules, but it’s entirely appropriate for Bangladesh to have different—and, indeed, lower—workplace safety standards than the United States. Absolutely appropriate, you guys. Here’s why. They’re brown. I mean, let’s think this through. Here’s what we know. We know the Bangladesh garment building had visible cracks in its exterior. We know that Bangladeshi police ordered an evacuation a day before the crash. And we know that factory owners ignored those orders and continued to work 2,000 workers in the eight-story building until it collapsed into a giant heap of concrete and metal. Those are the facts we know. But guess what? That’s just the free market doing what the free market does. Regulating itself.

But we also know this. While having a safe job is good, money is also good. So good it’s worth a couple hundred poor, brown lives here and there. Money is amazing. (Amazing you guys. I just got paid for this article and it took me less than 10 minutes to write.)

Jobs that are unusually dangerous—in the contemporary United States that’s primarily fishing, logging, and trucking pay a premium over other working-class occupations precisely because people are reluctant to risk death or maiming at work. (The total number of fatalities in 2011 for those three professions was 863, btw. Ridiculously high number. Let’s get on fixing that, government.) And in a free society like America it’s good that different people are able to make different choices on the risk–reward spectrum. Primarily, the poor brown people. Mostly Latinos. There are also some good reasons to want to avoid a world of unlimited choice and see this as a sphere in which collective action is appropriate (I’ll gesture at arguments offered in Robert Frank’s The Darwin Economy and Tom Slee’s No One Makes You Shop At Walmart if you’re interested), but that still leaves us with the question of “which collective” should make the collective choice.

Bangladesh is a lot poorer than the United States, and there are very good reasons for Bangladeshi people to make different choices in this regard than Americans. Our needs are just totally different. Citizens of Third World countries only need to survive. They have basic needs—food, water and shelter. I just want to go to Walmart and buy a designer knock-off shirt for $9.99. Is that too much to ask? That’s my need. That’s true whether you’re talking about an individual calculus or a collective calculus. Safety rules that are appropriate for the United States would be unnecessarily immiserating in much poorer, browner Bangladesh. After all, they’re only the third-largest garment manufacturing industry in the world.

Let’s stop trying to hold them back. I mean, honestly. Years and years of colonial rule by the British was enough. If they want to construct shoddy buildings and force under-paid workers to risk life and limb for pennies on the dollars, by all means, let them do it. Who are we to pressure Third World economies? Regulation, schmegulation, I say.

It would be super difficult and limiting to free commerce if we asked that nobody died once in a while. Life is a jungle, as Upton Sinclair once said. You can’t make designer purses without little Jimmy losing a finger or six. Or, you know, both his parents in a fire or a building collapse. It’s just the basic rules of capitalism.

Rules that are appropriate in Bangladesh would be far too flimsy for the richer and more risk-averse United States. Split the difference and you’ll get rules that are appropriate for nobody. The current system of letting different countries have different rules is working fine. I mean, Wednesday’s building collapse was only five months after the fire in Bangladesh killed 117  garment factory workers. That’s totally enough time to generate new workers. American jobs have gotten much safer over the past 20 years, clothes all over have gotten a lot cheaper and Bangladesh has gotten a lot richer. So who cares?

And in conclusion, God bless America.

Update: Matthew Yglesias posted this apology on Slate.

12 thoughts on “Different Places Have Different Safety Rules So It’s Okay If Poor, Brown People Die”

  1. Two narrow points of disagreement:

    (1) Is it fair to assume that Yglesias must not value the lives of brown people equally with those of white people? He’s half-Latino himself. It seems more likely that like most people (as with all the comparisons of American reactions to Boston versus American reactions to terrorist attacks outside the US), he values the lives of his countrymen more than the lives of foreigners. That may be xenophobic, but it’s not intrinsically racist. (And if it’s xenophobic, then the overwhelming majority of all humanity is xenophobic.)

    (2) What is the basis for saying that “the brown people, mostly Latinos” are primarily the people who are in high-risk jobs? I’m from Texas, and even there Latinos do not dominate fishing, logging and trucking (though as typified by the jobs mentioned in the HuffPo article you linked, they do dominate construction, cleaning and landscaping services, and low-customer-visibility restaurant work). Government statistics indicate that Latinos are actually under-represented in logging, and less than 20% of truckers (http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat18.htm).

    And a larger point: I can’t tell if you’re disagreeing simply with how Yglesias made his argument; if you’re agreeing with Erik Loomis that there should be a single global safety standard specifically for workplaces; if you think there should be a single global safety standard for everything, so that the Tata Nano can’t be sold in India if it doesn’t meet US auto standards; if you disagree with using cost-benefit analysis and life/health valuation for any kind of regulation, including stuff that affects everyone like the EPA-approved level of arsenic in the water.

    Yglesias made his argument exceptionally poorly, ignoring that as with prior workplace tragedies the factory actually wasn’t even complying with existing Bangladeshi rules. But his argument for country-by-country safety standards can be made without seeming to devalue brown people’s lives. For example, Poland is a very white country, yet it has a workplace injury mortality rate almost 10 times that of the UK. I bet Yglesias would argue that this is reasonable despite Poland’s whiteness because Poland is a poorer country than the UK. It’s hard to find reliable statistics for non-EU countries in the former Soviet bloc, but almost certainly they have higher mortality rates and lower safety standards than Western Europe, without this bothering Yglesias even though these Eastern European are really white.

    Finally, cheap goods are not just about “Oh, now I can have the latest designer knock-off and throw away last year’s clothes.” The importation of goods from countries where they can be produced more cheaply has helped to hold down inflationary pressures in the U.S. during a period of monetary expansion (the Fed’s low interest rates and quantitative easing). While everyone who can afford to buy fair-trade coffee, clothing made to the highest workplace standards, etc. should do so, not every American *can* afford to do so. Referencing Walmart in particular (as opposed to higher-end stores that still import from Bangladesh, like Victoria’s Secret) gives an unfortunately classist/ elitist tone to the condemnation of Americans who buy inexpensive imported goods.

    April 28 is World Day for Safety and Health at Work.

    • Perhaps the article would work better for you if you omitted the word “brown” from it. But it still makes its point. The fact is, your criticisms are, in fact, narrow in that they are focused on the racial aspect. I think your first point is also misplaced in that the critique doesn’t accuse Yglesias of being racist or xenophobic. And rightly so, because I don’t think he was any of those things. Yglesias might have a valid point, as you say, that there is an argument to be made against worldwide safety standards, but to make those arguments in the face of a tragedy that has no claimed 260 lives and by claiming “that’s okay” is offensive and insensitive regardless of what color I am, Vikaas is, or Yglesias is. And yes, I’m willing to bet that most if not all of those 260 that were lost were probably “brown”.

      Yglesias makes the point that the safety standards that led to 260 people losing their lives in this tragedy alone, not to speak of the tragedies that came before this, is justified because the Bangladeshi economy benefits from lax safety standards. This is a first world vs. third world problem and that’s what I got from this post. That’s what offended me as a human being when I read Yglesias’ original Slate article. There is an implication that American lives are worth more than Bangladeshi lives or lives in other third world countries and thus they merit stricter safety standards. I cannot get behind that morally at any time, much less when you have families grieving the loss of their loved ones simply because a factory owner decided to disregard orders to evacuate.

      The fact of the matter is this: Yglesias wrote a post. The title of that post said that the circumstances that led to hundreds of Bangladeshis being killeds is “ok” but for Bangladesh. Not for the US. Imagine if the tables had been turned and someone else had said the circumstances that led to hundreds of Americans being killed was somehow simply “ok.”

      • What is the point of the following — “Bangladesh may or may not need tougher workplace safety rules, but it’s entirely appropriate for Bangladesh to have different—and, indeed, lower—workplace safety standards than the United States. Absolutely appropriate, you guys. Here’s why. They’re brown.” — once you remove the word “brown”? What is the point of “And in a free society like America it’s good that different people are able to make different choices on the risk–reward spectrum. Primarily, the poor brown people. Mostly Latinos. ” once you remove the (probably not empirically correct) references to race and color?

        First, Yglesias doesn’t say that the existing workplace safety rules in Bangladesh are “OK.” As I quote above, he quite explicitly says that Bangladesh may or may not need tougher rules. He says that Bangladesh’s having lower standards than the U.S. is OK. Bangladesh could have higher standards than it does now (e.g., standards more like those of Russia) and still have lower standards than the U.S.

        Second, you can’t “Imagine if the tables had been turned and someone else had said the circumstances that led to hundreds of Americans being killed was somehow simply ‘ok.'”? Have you not been paying attention to the gun control debate in the U.S.? *Thousands* of Americans die each year due to the misuse of firearms, but even immediately after these tragedies, even in the faces of the grieving family members, people who believe that easy access to firearms is a fundamental right and a practical necessity will say that while the deaths are of course unfortunate, the cost to the victims and their loves ones doesn’t outweigh the benefit to our whole society. And this is not a fringe argument; it’s an argument that is prevalent in many parts of the country, is a majority view in one house of the federal legislature and is a large enough minority in the other house to block fairly basic legislation.

        Anyone who actually discusses policy choices ends up talking about cost-benefit analysis. There is no way to have a coherent argument about whether a particular life-saving thing (whether it’s stronger roofs on cars, or an innovative cancer drug) is worth the money that it costs unless you put a dollar figure on the life being saved. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/17/business/economy/17regulation.html
        The Bangladeshi government, as a sovereign state, can put a different value than the U.S. government does. Or do you sincerely think the best thing for Bangladesh is for the U.S. to say “We will ban imports until you regulate identically to the U.S.”?

        I agree that it’s insensitive for Yglesias to talk about differentials in safety regulation at this time (although I’m skeptical that many people with relatives in that factory are big Slate readers… it’s just not that popular overseas), but that’s not what the above Aerogram is about. The article is criticizing Yglesias’s substantive policy preferences and saying those preferences are driven by racial considerations about brown people’s lives being worth less. This substantive critique would be made regardless of when Yglesias had posted his views.

          • Yes. Yglesias acknowledges that he made his argument badly… like what I said in my first comment (“Yglesias made his argument exceptionally poorly”). He still defends his policy preference (“I read a guy who pivoted from the tragedy to a call for the U.S. government or U.S. consumers to try to impose U.S. safety standards on all U.S.-supplying factories around the world. I did not have detailed information about the situation in Bangladesh, but I did—and continue to—have good reason to believe that this call was mistaken. So I wrote a post trying to outline why I think it’s appropriate for rich countries to have more stringent standards than poor ones, and I absolutely stand by that conclusion.”).

            He also pointed out on Twitter that very few people have engaged with what he actually said, instead putting words in his mouth, as this Aerogram almost literally does. In particular, it puts words like “brown” and “Latino” in an argument that doesn’t intrinsically have anything to do with race. See below re: Russian fire safety.

            Had the word “poor” been the only adjective added, Yglesias probably would have agreed that this *was* what he meant: the comparative advantage of poorer countries in manufacturing is that their workers are willing to do things American workers don’t. And this isn’t just about physical safety; Apple has said certain jobs will NEVER come back to the U.S. because American workers, unlike Chinese ones, refuse to live in factory dorms and jump out of bed to go to work immediately whenever a slight change to an iPhone screen has been ordered. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/business/apple-america-and-a-squeezed-middle-class.html?pagewanted=all

  2. Yglesias behaves as if mourning and compassion is a scarce resource, to be closely guarded and hoarded, and not freely given. Being with the victims in their suffering, their “passion,” opening one’s heart to the losses faced by these struggling families would open Yglesias obviously in a well-worn intellectual exercise to the indictment of our society’s of wealth and consumptive behaviors. Its 2013, not 1969 and no one is a hippie anymore, so one must stop that hippie-talk and hippie-think.

  3. Hard to believe Yglesias admitted that his first response was annoyance. It is not hard to find people who think the world should just “get over” colonialism. It was so long ago it can’t possibly have an effect on what’s going on today. There can’t possibly be any lingering economic structural effects, can there? The same people have no problem believing the rest of the world hates American freedom. I don’t get it.

    • Why wouldn’t he be annoyed that people assume that his position regarding the wisdom different safety and health rules for different countries must be based on racism, rather than his longstanding free trade ideology?

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