Two Tragic Factory Fires Highlight Safety Failures in Pakistan’s Garment Industry

Two factory blazes in Pakistan killed more than 300 workers Tuesday night, highlighting the country’s long-standing problems with workplace safety.

In Karachi, at least 289 people died in a garment factory that had no emergency exits. Twenty-five more people died in a fire in a Lahore shoe factory.

The BBC’s Aleem Maqbool says Pakistan’s cheap clothing sold to Western markets comes at the cost of safety features like sprinklers and fire exits.

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Marco Werman: As if the news out of Libya and Egypt wasn’t bad enough, we have to move to another tragic story in Pakistan. Hundreds of workers died yesterday in two factory fires. The worst fires in Pakistan’s recent history. The worst of the two blazes occurred in a Karachi garment factory. The other in a Lahore shoe factory. Both facilities lacked emergency exits and the underscores Pakistan’s notorious problems with industrial safety. The BBC’s Aleem Maqbool has been following this story from Islamabad. Aleem, you’ve spoken to a lot people on the ground there. Tell us what happened.

Aleem Maqbool: Well, really horrific details coming particularly out of that fire in Karachi. The latest we have is 289 people dead in that fire. It started late yesterday when, we hear, there was an explosion. A generator, we believe, was faulty, but that fire started very close to the only exit in the building. It was a four story building and people were forced to go upstairs, up to the higher stories in the building, because on the ground floor and the lower floors all the windows had bars on them. So people were forced upstairs where the fire became more intense. Terrible eyewitness accounts of people jumping from the higher floors and from the roof and otherwise people being trapped inside. Calling relatives outside saying they knew they were going to die.

Werman: So Aleem, were these illegal factories or legal factories but just not regulated at all for safety?

Maqbool: It’s often said that a factory is illegal in Pakistan, because they don’t have the right paperwork or this and that, but a lot of the factories in Pakistan don’t have what you’d call technical or correct paperwork. This was one of the larger ones. We always hear that they’re illegal and that they’ve done something wrong, but actually in Pakistan the regulations do exist. The safety regulations do exist, at least on paper, to stop things like this happening again. We’ve seen it so many times in the past. Nowhere near this kind of scale, but what always comes out is that, in fact, the Pakistani authority’s ability to enforce these regulations never really comes through. All day today we’ve been hearing about how investigations have been launched and that raids will now take place on different factories and they will do, I’m sure. They do every time, but there’s no consistency. Often times, inspectors, for example, can be paid off to turn a blind eye to regulations not being followed through. For the people who have suffered in this, some of the poorest people who work in these factories, there’s one chap I spoke to who lost six members of his family.

Werman: Wow.

Maqbool: They just feel utterly helpless. They feel like nobody is on their side and they have no faith that this is going to change.

Werman: And the victims, I mean, who are they? We hear so much about child labor in this part of the world. A lot of children?

Maqbool: Well, there were some children. The youngest of the dead, so far, that we’ve heard about was 12 years old. A lot of women as well. It was a clothing factory. So a lot of the workers were women, but it spanned the whole range. There were elderly working in there. Young men working in there. This was the source of income for a lot of people in that area. They were getting around five dollars a day for working very, very long shifts in very difficult conditions, but the clothing that they were producing was exported, most of it, to the markets of Europe and the United States.

Werman: So there’s a lot of clothing made in Pakistan that’s sold across the U.S. and the world and, presumably, produced in factories like this one.

Maqbool: Yes and the benefit, if you like, that Pakistan has over other countries is that it is very cheap. A lot of cotton does come from here, of course, but the primary factor is that it’s cheap for western companies to use factories over here, but to try and make up the margins, there are no sprinklers in these places. There are no fire exits. None of the things you’d expect in terms of health and safety regulations. Every inch of these is often used up and really they’re appalling places to work, but then it’s very difficult, I suppose, for western governments or western organizations to say, “Right, we’re not going to take any clothes from countries like this,” because then thousands of people lose their jobs and it’s perhaps even more poorly regulated, but on the other hand is there some responsibility of the companies that are ultimately taking these garments to make sure that the people who work for them are properly treated. What people here really are asking now, with the scale of this tragedy, is that going to spur the authorities on to really do something about this and really ensure that things like this don’t happen again, but it feels like so much would have to change in Pakistan for it not to happen again.

Werman: Aleem, we’ll leave it there. Thank you very much.

Maqbool: Okay.

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