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Has the world learned anything from the Rana Plaza disaster?
A decade ago over 1,000 garment workers were killed due to the demands of fast fashion and greedy brands. We have the power here in Britain to change the system everywhere, writes CLAUDIA WEBBE MP
OUTRAGE: Workers sort through the remains of the factory in the Dhaka region of Bangladesh, December 2014 [NYU Stern BHR / Creative Commons]

TEN years ago today, more than 1,100 people were killed and more than 2,500 injured when the eight-storey Rana Plaza building collapsed in Bangladesh.

Corruption and greed were identified as the key causes. The building had been built on unstable ground on a filled-in pond, with substandard materials and with eight floors instead of the four for which the developer had permits.

These dangerous working conditions are not new and workers have always been the ones to face the cost. Over a century earlier, in 1911, 146 garment workers died in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York City, while just a few years before the Rana Plaza collapse, in 2005, the Spectrum building just a few miles away collapsed, killing 64 workers and injuring 80.

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