A fire that broke out early Monday morning in a Chinese slaughterhouse has killed 119, state media reported. There are still some workers unaccounted for, although it’s unclear how many. More than 300 workers were in the plant at the time, and China’s official news agency, Xinhua, reported that about 100 workers had managed to escape. “The complicated interior structure of the prefabricated house in which the fire broke out and the narrow exits have added difficulties to the rescue work,” Xinhua reported, although China’s safety record is infamously abysmal. People took to China’s social-media website Weibo to express their anger, writing things like “was this place ever regularly inspected by fire safety authorities?”

Reuters:

"Victims' relatives gathered outside the building to "demand the government investigate and announce the cause of the accident as soon as possible", Xinhua said.

Hong Kong's Phoenix Television cited family members as saying that the doors were always kept locked during working hours during which workers were forbidden to leave and that the slaughterhouse never carried out fire drills.

China's record is poor. Fire exits in factories are often locked or blocked and regulations can be easily skirted by bribing corrupt officials."

Many of China's most deadly industrial accidents happen in the large coal mining industry, in which more than 1,300 people died last year alone from explosions, mine cave-ins and floods.

The agreement on worker safety and building regulations in Bangladesh intended to prevent disasters like the factory fire in November and the factory collapse earlier this month will be missing one major retailer: Walmart. Even though major names like H&M, Zara, Primark, Tesco, Sainsbury’s, and more signed the agreement, Walmart opted out, saying that the deal was “unnecessary to achieve fire and safety goals.” Instead, the retail giant created its own agreement, which it claims goes above and beyond the regulations outlined in the current deal. The difference: Walmart’s manifesto is not legally binding.

The Guardian:

Instead, Walmart has agreed its own deal to inspect all 279 factories it uses in Bangladesh within six months, and has promised to publish the findings immediately.

Bosses claim this goes beyond the UNI Global Union and IndustriALL deal, pointing out the agreement requires 65% of inspections instead of 100% inspections taking place and argue its own deal means results are published straight away rather than within 45 days.

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[Workers bury the body of an unidentified garment factory fire victim. Reuters]

Documents found among the ruins of the Bangladesh garment factory where over 100 people perished during a fire last month, show that Wal-Mart worked with at least five different suppliers there this year. Further, in 2011, the retail giant decided against aiding factory upgrades that could have stopped fires like the deadly blaze.

Bloomberg News reports:

Wal-Mart said the Tazreen Design Ltd. factory near Dhaka, Bangladesh’s capital, was no longer authorized to produce merchandise for the company and that it had cut ties with one supplier that kept using the facility. It’s not clear if any other suppliers continued to use the factory, which Wal-Mart had de-authorized before the blaze, the company said.

Purchase orders, shipment statements, inventory reports and other documents show that two New York-based suppliers for Wal- Mart and a third in California had sourced merchandise from Tazreen. Two companies in Bangladesh also manufactured apparel there for Wal-Mart, the records show. As recently as September, five of 14 production lines at the factory were making shirts and pajamas for Wal-Mart, an income report shows.
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The Bangladesh Center for Worker Solidarity photographed the documents. The group passed them on to the Worker Rights Consortium, a labor-rights monitoring group based in Washington, which provided the documents to Bloomberg News. Suppliers cited in the documents include Topson Downs, of Culver City, California. That supplier subcontracted work to Bismillah Sourcing, a Bangladesh firm.

Also among the documents, an e-mail correspondence between a Wal-Mart buyer and IDG (Tazreen produced shorts for Wal-Mart’s Sam’s Club brand through IDG) "highlighting the pressure the world’s largest retailer puts on its suppliers."

In a January e-mail, Wal-Mart's buyer requests and early delivery of 266 pairs of shorts from IDG for a new store opening, and IDG complied. Numerous other documents show that "tens of thousands" of the same pairs of shorts were made at Tazreen for IDG since at least the first quarter of 2012.

In 2011, Walmart reportedly decided against aiding factory upgrades that could have stopped fires like the deadly blaze at the Tazreen garment factory.

During an April meeting, Bangladeshi suppliers reached out to retailers of their garments with a plan that would help upgrade their facilities to make them more fire-proof -- other retailers approved the plan -- only to have it fall through when Wal-mart and the Gap refused to pay higher prices to make such upgrades feasible.