The toll from one of the deadliest industrial fires in Philippine history rose to 72 on Thursday, officials said, as firefighters carried one body bag after another out of the blackened remnants of a slipper factory... The bodies that have been recovered were burned beyond recognition.
SOURCE: Death Toll in Philippine Factory Fire Climbs Above 70The tragic incident in Valenzuela that gutted an entire factory of cheap sandals and left scores of people dead draws instant parallelisms to a similar tragic incident in 2012 in Bangladesh, where hundreds of textile workers died when the building they were working in collapsed and buried them alive.
Both incidents involved poorly paid laborers working under deplorable conditions, with complete and utter disregard for their safety and well-being, no thanks to the willful negligence of some callous businesspeople and local safety officials.
Just two weeks ago, various groups mobilized a multisectoral May 1 Labor Day rally to call for an increase in basic pay and the improvement of working conditions of Filipino laborers. These calls, as usual, went unheeded.
So long as laborers are not treated with respect, so long as they are not afforded a dignified way to earn a living, and so long as they are casually fed into a lethal cycle of state-santioned exploitation, it would be an exercise in hypocrisy to believe that, from hereon, no more Filipino laborer shall die a gruesome death and be reduced to skull and bone over the course of an ordinary exploitative day.