Less than a week apart, two industrial catastrophes—one in Bucksnort, Tennessee, and the other in Dhaka, Bangladesh—claimed the lives of at least 16 workers each. Though separated by 8,200 miles, the October 10 explosion at the Accurate Energetic Systems (AES) munitions plant and the October 14 garment factory fire in the Bangladeshi capital share the same root cause: the subordination of human life to corporate profit.

In both tragedies, families held vigils and clutched images of missing loved ones as authorities prepared DNA tests to identify remains. The youngest victim in Tennessee, Adam Boatman, was just 21; in Bangladesh, two were 14-year-old child laborers.

At AES, the $18–$19 an hour wage was considered good in a region where the median household income barely tops $34,000. Several victims had complained of unsafe conditions but felt trapped by debt. Twenty-six-year-old LaTeisha Mays told relatives she suffered nosebleeds at work and dreaded every shift but could not quit until she paid off her car loan.

In Dhaka, victims lived in slums wedged between chemical warehouses and garment plants. The Anwar Fashion factory paid just 7,000–7,500 taka a month—$57–$61. “Just the day before, my sister said, ‘I’ll leave this factory. There’s never a day off here,’” a sibling told The Daily Star.

In both countries, authorities ignored workers’ warnings and shielded the corporations responsible. As the WSWS has explained, Bangladesh’s garment sector remains a death trap despite the 2013 Rana Plaza collapse, which killed 1,134 workers. Government ministers offer token sympathy, investigations are buried and the country continues to sell itself as a cheap-labor haven. Trump’s tariffs on Bangladeshi imports will only deepen the exploitation as global brands demand lower costs.

In the US, the pattern is identical. Within hours of the Tennessee blast, Republican Governor Bill Lee rushed to defend AES, minimizing its history of safety violations, including exposure to cyclonite (RDX), a neurotoxic explosive. He dismissed any link to a 2014 explosion at the same site that killed worker Rodney Edwards, claiming it occurred under a different firm—though AES was contractually responsible for ensuring safety compliance. AES quietly settled a lawsuit over that case for an undisclosed amount.

Lee has also ignored the firing of AES whistleblowers, including maintenance supervisor Greg McRee, who in 2020 used a garden hose to extinguish a fire in the very same Melt-Pour building that exploded October 10. His silence is easily explained: Between 2017 and 2021, Lee received campaign donations from former AES President John Sonday and his wife, current owner Kimberly Sonday.

In 2008, John Sonday served five months in federal prison for ordering workers to use substandard explosives in shoulder-fired missiles for the US Navy. Yet Tennessee and the federal government continued to reward AES with contracts and subsidies. In 2020, Lee hailed AES for creating 80 jobs and handed it a $601,000 “FastTrack Economic Development” grant as part of a $9.7 million expansion.

According to state records, Sonday transferred ownership to his wife in 2022, allowing AES to qualify as a “woman-owned small business” and gain preferential access to federal contracts. Between 2002 and 2024, AES received more than $100 million in federal contracts, including from the Army and Navy. Less than three weeks before the explosion, the Army awarded it a $120 million TNT procurement contract—with AES the sole bidder.

The governor’s financial patrons extend far beyond Bucksnort. Lee’s campaigns have been bankrolled by FedEx, Amazon, Nissan, General Motors, Koch Industries, Tyson Foods, BNSF and the Tennessee Bankers Association. In return, he signed the largest corporate tax cut in state history in 2024, allowing more than 60 percent of corporations in Tennessee to pay nothing in excise taxes.

AES cynically claimed after the blast that it had always maintained “the highest safety standards” and that “this tragedy is difficult to comprehend.” In reality, it is easily understood: Workers were sacrificed for profit and militarism.

Last week, a wrongful death lawsuit was filed on behalf of the widow and nine-year-old daughter of victim Jeremy Moore, 37, charging AES’s parent company, AAC Investments, with gross negligence—failing to enforce safety rules, warn of hazards or provide adequate protection and trained personnel.

The Tennessee disaster is also directly connected to the insatiable demand for weapons by US imperialism. An October 18 New York Post article titled “Tennessee factory explosion effect already stretched US weapons production” barely mentioned the dead workers, focusing instead on the impact to “explosives used in landmines and other munitions for the Army and Navy.” Defense analysts lamented the “bottleneck in munitions production” amid Washington’s wars in Ukraine and Gaza. The real concern of the ruling class is not workers’ lives but uninterrupted weapons output.

The same capitalist logic that drives Bangladesh’s sweatshops drives America’s military-industrial complex. Both depend on a cheap, expendable labor force, whether stitching clothes for global fashion brands or packing explosives for imperialist wars. Throughout the world, workers face the same exploitation by the same multinational corporations and their political servants. In the US, Trump’s “America First” nationalism, backed by the corporate media and the United Auto Workers (UAW) bureaucracy, seeks to pit American workers against their class brothers and sisters abroad. But the Tennessee and Bangladesh tragedies show that workers share the same conditions and enemies.

The fight for safe workplaces cannot be waged within the framework of nationalism or through the corrupt, pro-company union apparatus. It requires international unity and the independent organization of the working class.

The victims of the Tennessee explosion have received support from families who lost loved ones in the Pike River Mine and Christchurch building disasters in New Zealand. This expresses the organic strivings of the working class to unite to defend workers’ lives.

The July 27 public hearing convened by the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC) demonstrated what this means in practice. The hearing presented findings from its investigation into the death of Stellantis worker Ronald Adams Sr. at the Dundee Engine Complex in Michigan. Six months after Adams was crushed to death inside the plant, neither Stellantis, the United Auto Workers (UAW) nor the Michigan Occupational Safety and Health Administration (MIOSHA) has explained how it happened.

Workers, family members and youth who attended the hearing unanimously adopted a resolution calling for the establishment of rank-and-file safety committees in every workplace—democratically controlled by workers themselves and independent of the pro-corporate union bureaucracies. Such committees must investigate unsafe conditions, expose cover-ups and assert the right of workers to refuse dangerous labor.

The resolution concluded:

We, therefore, call on all workers—in the United States and internationally—to join the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees and take up the fight for a national and international movement to end the sacrifice of workers’ lives and limbs on the altar of profit. The time has come to organize, to resist, and to reclaim the right to live and work in safety and dignity.

The Tennessee and Bangladesh catastrophes confirm the urgency of this demand. From munitions plants and auto factories to hospitals, rail yards and schools, the working class must seize control of safety from the hands of corporate management and union bureaucrats who function as its enforcers.

Every industrial death exposes the criminal character of capitalism. In the United States alone, more than 5,000 workers per year die in traumatic workplace incidents, and an estimated 120,000 more die from occupational diseases. Yet the corporate media treats these deaths as routine, while politicians of both parties slash regulations and funnel tax breaks to corporations. The fight for safe conditions is inseparable from the fight against war, dictatorship and the capitalist profit system itself.

Trump, backed by the billionaire elite and their Democratic accomplices, is dismantling safety and environmental protections while demanding record weapons production for new wars abroad and repression at home. His co-conspirator, Governor Lee, has deployed the National Guard to Memphis.

The task facing workers is clear. Independent rank-and-file organizations must link the struggles of defense workers, auto workers, garment workers, teachers and all sections of the working class into a unified global movement against exploitation and imperialist war.

The tragedies in Bucksnort and Dhaka are not isolated “accidents” but crimes of capitalism. They reveal a social order that prizes profit over life and pits workers against one another across borders. The working class must answer with international solidarity and the conscious organization of its own power.

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