The infamous 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist fire killed 141 workers. In 2013, the collapse of the Rana Plaza factory near Dhaka left 1129 dead and injured more than 3000. In his first book, Loomis, assistant professor of history at the University of Rhode Island and the “Lawyers, Guns, and Money” blogger, uses these two major catastrophes as bookends for his study of a century of global exploitation of labor, toxic materials, and increasing outsourcing of work to places with low and/or unenforced safety standards.
