It's a staggering tale, and I was so proud of the Times for its coverage over the weekend. Hell of a story. Thanks for highlighting it.

Thanks for this snippet - will need to steel my courage to actually read the whole thing. Will we never learn?

Insourcing. It's now a thing. All kinds of companies are suddenly discovering that a wide range of products can be manufactured profitably right here in the good old U.S. of A.

And why not? Pension funds have been plundered, unions busted, corporations stripped of non-performing assets like prime developable land, the ground purged of its fossil fuels by pumping god-knows-what in, the workforce cowed by going-on-six-years of recession and high unemployment.

Next up: eliminating pesky regulations that hobble the job-creators, and we can have our very own 60-hour mandatory workweeks, barracks housing, and barred factory windows (outside of corporate agribusiness, I mean).

Next up, my franchises of Guillotines, Pitchforks, and Torches set to exceed earnings expectations this year, worldwide!

It's the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire all over again.

This is why it drives me nuts when people say how awful American Apparel is because Dov Charney masturbated in front of a reporter, and they show woman nipples on their website.

*Tazreen

@7 (O/T): I'm sure you know the story, but if you keep a file of popular-press stories on paleontology, here's a link for you:

http://www.npr.org/2012/12/09/166665795/…

@5 except the Triangle Shirtwaist fire motivated Americans to action so that something like this could never happen again in the United States. I hate to be cynical about this, but the majority of Americans will never hear about this story (and the many, many other fires that have occurred over the past 10 years—this is not an anomaly). If they do read this article, they still won't stop buying cheap clothes. It's not just Walmart that sells sweatshop clothes; it's almost all of the chain stores.

There's a great 2008 HBO documentary called Schmatta about all this stuff. You'll never want to buy overseas clothes again!

@ 7 -- fixed.

@9: It's not really up to Americans to fix the problem, anyway. It's up to the Bangladeshi workers to demand better safety regulations and better working conditions, just like American labor unions did in the 1920s.