An excellent response to Yglesias' asinine article
Here is the link to Matt Yglesias' corporate defense of slave labor, and the deaths in the Bangladeshi factory: http://www.democraticunderground.com/10022755137
And here is a great rebuttal: http://ramsincanon.wordpress.com/2013/04/25/panglesias-let-the-people-choose-to-die-grisly-deaths-for-pay/
Imagine if enforceable laws existed that protected workers’ rights to act in concert to protect themselves from their employer, and the punishments were real. Remember, the Washington Aluminum workers weren’t unionized. They were just cold. The Bangladeshi workers stated that they had protested having to work in the unsafe building. It was out of terror of losing their jobs (and being immediately replaced by other half-starving Bangladeshis) that constructively coerced them to work in literally murderous conditions. With a basic and enforceable labor rights regime, the workers could have walked out without fear of losing their jobs, because the state would make replacing them prohibitively expensive.
In that imagined scenario, you don’t have the “problem” of keeping Bangladeshis from “getting cash”; you just prohibit the employer (who, here, is ultimately a transnational corporation of immense size and resources) from exploiting the poverty of the workforce to coerce workers to work in conditions they know are unsafe. Yglesias’s Pangloss-like (Panglesias?) arguments (that assumes, fantastically, that Bangladeshis have “chosen” to have no decent workplace safety or labor rights regime, in exchange for $38 a month) evaporate.
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