Before the collapse of Rana Plaza, which killed over a thousand people, most of them textile workers, there was the fire that killed a hundred at the Tazreen factory. A major cause is western companies’ greed for profits.

A solitary glass tower stands on the banks of Lake Hatirjheel as though transplanted from the City of London to the middle of a vast shantytown. It is the headquarters of the Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association (BGMEA). This sparkling tower is unlikely to crumble, unlike Rana Plaza, which collapsed on 24 April causing the death of 1,127 people, most of them textile workers. Yet on 19 March Bangladesh’s High Court ordered the demolition of the skyscraper within three months, on the grounds that it had been built illegally on public land (with the complicity of the trade minister). The BGMEA has appealed against the judgment. Whatever the outcome of this appeal, no one imagines that the “cancerous tumour”, as the magistrates called it, is in imminent danger of being reduced to rubble.

Visitors to the tower get a military salute from the security guards. Tourists are rare in Dhaka, so western visitors are often taken for buyers from clothing companies such as Mango, Benetton or H&M. The security guards and doormen show due deference.

When I visited the BGMEA on 9 April, Rana Plaza, 20km away, was still standing. The worst disaster in Bangladesh’s industrial history was still two weeks in the future, but the issues of worker safety and labour conditions in the textile industry were already pressing. On 7 January a fire had caused the death of eight workers at Smart Garment Export, a small factory with 300 employees in the centre of Dhaka. “They were all under 16,” said Saydia Gulrukh, an anthropologist who has helped textile workers set up a solidarity group. On 24 November 2012 a fire destroyed the Tazreen Fashions factory in Ashulia, a northern suburb, killing 112 and injuring about a thousand, according to official estimates.

Three thousand workers — mostly young women from the poorest rural regions trying to earn enough to support their families — were crammed into the nine-storey Tazreen factory. They worked 10-hour days, six days a (...)