IT HAS been almost a month since the collapse of a factory building in Bangladesh killed over 1,100 garment workers. The tragedy led to outrage in Bangladesh over the recklessness of the building's politically connected owner; factory operations were allegedly in the building without permits and workers were ordered to their machines even after inspectors found dangerous cracks in the structure. But the catastrophe has also led to a new round of reflection in advanced economies over the ethics of purchasing consumer products built by poor labourers in countries with lax labour regulations.

Several interesting takes on the question appeared in the wake of the collapse. At the New Yorker, James Surowiecki wrote of the modern garment industry:

Most of us have a sense that low prices in Dubuque have something to do with low wages in Dhaka, but that’s just one aspect of the pressure that we as consumers exert on global supply chains. Our insatiable demand for variety and novelty has led to ever-shorter product life cycles. In consumer electronics, the average product is replaced in just eight months. The rise of fast fashion means that clothing stores get new products almost every week. Richard Locke, a political scientist at M.I.T. who is an expert on global supply chains and the author of the new book “The Promise and Limits of Private Power,” told me, “Instead of buying lots of inventory with long lead times, brands wait as long as possible before ordering.” That way, they can ramp up production if a product takes off or shut it down if the product bombs... Just as most Western consumers seem reluctant to pay more for T-shirts, most Western companies have been reluctant to take real responsibility for what happens on their suppliers’ factory floors.

Mr Surowiecki notes that for conditions to improve governments must act, in coordination with each other if possible. Coordination is necessary to prevent the garment industry from relocating away from stricter labour rules: a race to the bottom. In a New York Times Magazinepiece, Adam Davidson noted that the race to the bottom in the textile industry is among the most venerable of economic trends:

Nearly every rich country has gone through a “T-shirt phase” — an economic period in which there are a significant number of poor farmers who, rather than toil on unproductive land, accept harsh work conditions and low wages in textile and apparel factories. Britain started its T-shirt phase in the late 18th century; the United States had two — New England in the 19th century, then the South in the 20th. During the last 80 or so years, many Asian countries — first Japan, then Korea, Taiwan and China — progressed from the T-shirt phase into broader economic development. Cambodia, Vietnam, parts of India and Sri Lanka are passing through this now. But Bangladesh, where an eight-story apparel factory tragically collapsed last month, killing hundreds of workers and devastating the country, is in the midst of a particularly confusing T-shirt phase. The question is whether it will emerge into a more developed economy, like its many predecessors, or remain stuck, like Haiti.

Neo-liberal defenders of the migrating T-shirt phase make two simple but compelling points in favour of our tolerance of low wages and long hours in industries like these (though no one should tolerate the criminal negligence on display in the Rana Plaza case). First, such factories are willing employers of low-skill workers whose alternatives are often much worse: subsistence agriculture, for instance, or abject urban poverty. And secondly, the first rung of the industrial ladder, while unpleasant, makes it easier to reach the second and third, where conditions and wages are better. As the garment industry matures, firms and workers develop more mechanical expertise, more financial resources, better infrastructure, and deeper ties with global markets. That can help a poor economy kickstart rapid economic development.

But as I read the two pieces above, I began to wonder about the future of this model. The pieces have a shared theme: that bargaining power matters. Mr Surowiecki notes that Western consumers are reluctant to pay higher prices for T-shirts; they are, just as most people in most places are reluctant to pay more for anything. The trick of it is that Western consumers have not had to pay higher prices, because there is always another place willing to squeeze its workers to capture market share. But Western consumers may well pay higher prices if higher prices is what they have to pay. And so coordination by governments around the developing world, or by Western fashion firms or retailers, could help shift the locus of bargaining power away from the consumer. And the consumer might not even mind that much.

But will that shift empower the workers in Bangladesh and elsewhere? One of the remarkable things about the textile industry, I think, is the fact that it remains so labour intensive. It was the arrival of automation to the industry more than 200 years ago that first launched the industrial revolution, after all. And here we are so many years later, with poor men and women still manning the looms. Why is that?

Well the easiest explanation is that it has never made much sense to not use people. Or rather, where it has made financial sense to automate there has been substantial automation. But even robots struggle to compete with Bangladeshi workers at less than $40 a month. Yet robots are getting better and better. And improved manufacturing techniques make it ever cheaper and ever easier to produce limited runs, just in time, of finely specified designs. So a shift in bargaining power away from Western consumers might simply be captured by the owners of capital, who will say that at higher developing-world wages it makes sense to automate the whole process from beginning to end. Then no one can ever picket a store over the use and abuse of cheap foreign labour.

So where does that leave our struggling Bangladeshi workers? It's possible they may find other means through which to use their cost advantage to provide inexpensive, labour-intense products and services to the global market. But maybe not. The textile industry has been relatively unique in industrial history in its ability to productively use unskilled labour at almost any scale. New York City, once upon a time, could employ within its borders the waves of immigrants arriving from overseas thanks to the limitless appetite of the city's garment industry. Other forms of manufacturing create many fewer jobs—and fewer than they used to, as China can attest. India's service and offshoring model might look attractive, but it, too, provides far too little employment relative to the crowds of willing but low-skill workers.

To improve the lot of these workers (or any workers, really) we have to improve their bargaining power. Unionisation might seem like a good option, but that won't help much unless the unionised workforce is already capable of competitively producing in a tradable industry. Education and training are a better bet. But there will be limited payoff to such measures for older workers. And skills don't translate into economic gain without an appropriately supportive economic infrastructure: of talented entrepreneurs, deep pools of capital, reliable utilities and transport, and so on. But there is another way. Mr Davidson notes in passing that:

New England’s textile workers had it relatively good; if conditions didn’t improve, they could threaten to leave for the frontier.

It is the rare economy that enthusiastically welcomes unskilled immigrants from places like Bangladesh. Unsurprisingly; people seem generally happy to exclude outsiders, and the economic gain to the receiving country is too small to mention. But the gain to the migrant himself is enormous; better than any improvement most developing-economy workers can hope to achieve in their home country. If we care about the well-being of the workers in Bangladesh we might support more robust labour rules there, but we should absolutely favour more open immigration.