Ignorant American Finds No Problem With Work Safety In Bangladesh

It's hard to believe that someone who is considered a progressive in American can be so cavalier about the lives lost when the factory in Bangladesh collapsed killing at least 200 people yet Matt Yglesias writing for Slate did just that.

It's very plausible that one reason American workplaces have gotten safer over the decades is that we now tend to outsource a lot of factory-explosion-risk to places like Bangladesh where87 people just died in a building collapse.* This kind of consideration leads Erik Loomis to the conclusion that we need a unified global standard for safety, by which he does not mean that Bangladeshi levels of workplace safety should be implemented in the United States.
I think that's wrong. Bangladesh may or may not need tougher workplace safety rules, but it's entirely appropriate for Bangladesh to have different—and, indeed, lower—workplace safety standards than the United States.

He thinks that's wrong because obviously the lives of the economically disadvantaged workers in Bangladesh are worth less than American workers in simular employment situations. Additionally because America has over time developed higher work place safety standards than Bangladesh those same standards should not be applied to a poor country and its workers because they are desperate for the needed income these types of jobs provide.

Bangladesh is a lot poorer than the United States, and there are very good reasons for Bangladeshi people to make different choices in this regard than Americans. That's true whether you're talking about an individual calculus or a collective calculus. Safety rules that are appropriate for the United States would be unnecessarily immiserating in much poorer Bangladesh. Rules that are appropriate in Bangladesh would be far too flimsy for the richer and more risk-averse United States. Split the difference and you'll get rules that are appropriate for nobody. The current system of letting different countries have different rules is working fine.American jobs have gotten much safer over the past 20 years, and Bangladesh has gotten a lot richer.

 So, remember even though Bangladesh doesn't have particularly good work place safety rules that's all right because Bangladesh has become a richer country on the backs of its dead workers. 

Its really nice to know that Matt doesn't give a shit about the worlds poor.