holy crap Wal Mart said fire safety in Bangladesh factories too costly

[Enrique]

managers are getting arrested there. Their defenses will certainly bring this up. Wal Mart in deep shit.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-12-05/wal-mart-nixed-paying-bangladesh-suppliers-to-fight-fire.html

At a meeting convened in 2011 to boost safety at Bangladesh garment factories, Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (WMT) made a call: paying suppliers more to help them upgrade their manufacturing facilities was too costly.

The comments from a Wal-Mart sourcing director appear in minutes of the meeting, which was attended by more than a dozen retailers including Gap Inc. (GPS), Target Corp. and JC Penney Co.

Details of the meeting have emerged after a fire at a Bangladesh factory that made clothes for Wal-Mart and Sears Holdings Corp. killed more than 100 people last month. The blaze has renewed pressure on companies to improve working conditions in Bangladesh, where more than 700 garment workers have died since 2005, according to the International Labor Rights Forum, a Washington-based advocacy group.

At the April 2011 meeting in Dhaka, the Bangladesh capital, retailers discussed a contractually enforceable memorandum that would require them to pay Bangladesh factories prices high enough to cover costs of safety improvements. Sridevi Kalavakolanu, a Wal-Mart director of ethical sourcing, told attendees the company wouldn’t share the cost, according to Ineke Zeldenrust, international coordinator for the Clean Clothes Campaign, who attended the gathering. Kalavakolanu and her counterpart at Gap reiterated their position in a report folded into the meeting minutes, obtained by Bloomberg News.

“Specifically to the issue of any corrections on electrical and fire safety, we are talking about 4,500 factories, and in most cases very extensive and costly modifications would need to be undertaken to some factories,” they said in the document. “It is not financially feasible for the brands to make such investments.”

(...)

[Sekhmets Daughter]

1. Pigs...

[Bonhomme Richard]

2. That statement says it all.

This is how it works.
The companies have a consortium of sorts and they all have to agree because no single company is going to take the financial hit and pay a bit more for the product alone. They all have to agree to take the hit across the board. That way they all pay then same price for the product and they can raise prices accordingly to maintain the same profit margin. Walmart and The Gap wouldn't go along.
This has nothing to do with ethics or what's right. It has everything to do with greed.

[HockeyMom]

3. Precisely why they are operating in India

and not HERE. My Grandma watched the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire as a young pre-teen and saw girls not much older than she jump to their deaths. She told me about her experience when we passed the site one day when I was not much older than she at the time.

[baldguy]

4. It's cheaper to allow their workers to burn rather than not.

Lesson: Never trust a capitalist when lives are at stake.

[Earth_First]

5. This. n/t

[Initech]

8. Correction: never trust a capitalist when profit is at stake.

[joeybee12]

6. In other words, let them die, we don't give a shit...knr

[Initech]

7. These greedy pieces of shit need to be taken down a few pegs.

[raouldukelives]

9. The investors demand profit. Wal-Mart does its best to help them achieve it. nt

[rustydog]

10. Maybe, but I oubt it, this is India's Triangle shirtwaist factory

Maybe they'll learn killing humans for profit is not a good thing...

[JI7]

11. this is not india though it use to be part of it

[HiPointDem]

12. kr for the smoking gun. yes, corporations kill people.

[Bigmack]

13. Posted this on MY facebook page and

Said that this was one of SEVERAL reasons why I NEVER shop at Wal-Mart.