Five years after a catastrophic building collapse killed 1,137 garment workers and maimed or injured thousands more in Bangladesh, a group of labor advocates gathered in a light-filled hall off New York City’s famed Times Square to reflect on the watershed disaster and its political and social ramifications.
The panel discussion, entitled “Has Anything Changed Since Rana Plaza? Worker Rights and Safety, Five Years After the Devastation,” took place just two miles north of the site of the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, the deadliest industrial accident in American history.
Half a world and more than a century apart, the catastrophes of Greenwich Village and Savar could not have been more different, yet few in the room could avoid drawing parallels between the two.