Nearly five years after the world watched a frantic search for survivors turn into an onerous recovery of the dead, the words “Rana Plaza” can still invoke powerful outrage about the precarious conditions that garment workers in the developing world endure every day. But while preventing another Rana Plaza is a vital endeavor, a new book argues that the highest stakes are not the only stakes.
Far more grinding than a major disaster is the violation of workers’ health that occurs on a daily basis, according to Rebecca Prentice and Geert De Neve, editors of Unmaking the Global Sweatshop: Health and Safety of the World’s Garment Workers.
“Large-scale factory disasters draw a lot of media attention and public outrage, but it is also important to consider the everyday, routine ways in which garment workers’ health and safety is under attack as a normal part of ‘business as usual,'” says Prentice, a senior lecturer at the University of Sussex.