The author seems particularly happy that Bangladesh has never known the 1947 Industrial Disputes Act which provides a procedure for the settlement of industrial disputes, regulation of strikes, lockout and lay off. Moreover he considers as a boon "the absence of a law that explicitly curtails labor-market flexibility" but he forgets to mention that "labor market flexibility" means no job security whatsoever for workers and ridiculously low wages in a country such as Bangladesh.



He nevertheless acknowledges that "Bangladesh still needs much stronger regulation to protect workers from occupational hazards" but conspicuously fails to mention the collapse of the Rana Plaza textile factory in 2013 in Dhaka with a death toll of more than 1000 workers and approximately 2,500 injured workers, and more recently in July 2017 the explosion of a boiler in a factory of the firm Multifabs in Gazipur (about 50 km from Dacca) which killed 13 workers in injured more than 50. To some extent, the workers in Bangladesh are just slaves and their life seems to matter much less than the gain for their firm and its growth.



We can wonder if the economic success talked about in this article is not mainly the financial success of the firms and the employers, with just a little consideration for the living condition and safety of the workers and the ordinary people.