The fires we choose to cry for

Last week, a fire broke out in a garment factory in Mirpur. A chemical explosion in an adjacent warehouse tore through the factory building, killing 16 workers. By midday, the images had already begun to circulate—flames devouring the structure, smoke rising over the narrow lanes, and people running, desperate and disoriented. News outlets covered the incident throughout the day. Yet, within a week, ripples of outrage dulled and a collective moment of mourning disappeared. The story had vanished from conversations.

We treat industrial fatalities as background noise because our hearts have been numbed by repetition. Over the past decades, workplace death in Bangladesh has become tragically routine. In 2013, the Rana Plaza collapse killed over 1,100 garment workers, marking one of the deadliest industrial accidents in history. The fire at Tazreen Fashions in 2012 killed more than 117 workers, exposing the lethal risks baked into our industrial model. Despite following safety audits, building inspections, and international pressure, the baseline danger persists. In 2023, the Occupational Safety, Health and Environment (OSHE) Foundation recorded 1,432 workplace deaths, among them 1,103 in non-institutional settings and only 329 in institutional workplaces. In 2024, at least 758 workers died in 639 workplace accidents nationwide, according to the Safety and Rights Society (SRS). Within the first six months of 2025, 422 workers lost their lives in 373 accidents across sectors. These statistics are not sterile; they are lives erased, families shattered, and dignity denied.

Yet we remain unmoved. Because we have practised selective empathy. We praise Bangladesh as a model of cheap labour with a comparative advantage in global supply chains. We boast export numbers, foreign investments, and industrial growth. But we seldom factor in the real cost of lives that are considered negotiable and expendable. We are comfortable as long as our own security is intact. It is not difficult to notice that our moral compass has long been conditioned by class. We mourn selectively, grieve in categories, and rage only when the tragedy feels familiar. A fire in a restaurant unsettles us because we have been there and we can imagine ourselves trapped inside. A factory fire, on the other hand, remains distant, unimaginable. It belongs to a different Bangladesh, one that we benefit from but do not belong to. And so, our sympathy falters.

Unfortunately, we belong to a society where even death has a hierarchy. The intensity of our sorrow depends on the postcode of the tragedy, and the value of a life is measured by where it was lost. We tell ourselves that this is how the poor die, that this is the natural order of things. But there is nothing natural about indifference. The workers who die in these accidents are the invisible architects of our comfort. They sew the clothes that line our wardrobes, they assemble the garments that keep the economy running, they sustain a global industry that we take pride in. How long can we pride ourselves on cheap labour without paying for it?

Even as everything else becomes more expensive, we refuse to let labourers' lives rise in value. We pass wage increases only after a long struggle, while safety remains voluntary. We negotiate trade deals and foreign investment on the backs of those whose lives are easily discounted. This is a failure of the collective conscience where we have mastered the art of selective outrage. And that, perhaps, is our deepest moral failure. Not our inability to act, but our inability to feel. We normalise a world where the poor die invisibly, It is time we stop treating these deaths as mere incidents. They are indictments. They scream at us of moral inertia, institutional cowardice, and social amnesia.

If prices rise for food and rent, then labourers' lives must also rise in protection and dignity. The cost of clothing should reflect the true cost of its creation. The price of fashion should include the price of safety. Without that shift, we will remain comfortable in the illusion of progress while we tolerate the quiet genocide of the working class. It is not the fire that should frighten us anymore; it is our silence. And silence is not the absence of noise, but the presence of consent. When we remain unmoved by the suffering of others, we consent to a system that will, eventually, consume us all.

So this month, 16 families will sit in silence, facing the unfilled absence left behind by their dead. Their grief will not trend. Their names will not echo through our streets. And the rest of us will sleep through another night, certain that the fire has nothing to do with us. But it does.

Maisha Islam Monamee recently graduated from the Institute of Business Administration (IBA) at the University of Dhaka and is a contributor at The Daily Star.