The Triangle Shirtwaist fire on March 25, 1911, was devastating. (Jeffrey Riman, Creative Commons)

Most people, if they’ve taken any class in U.S. history, have heard of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, the devastating fire of 1911 that killed 146 people in a garment factory.

To increase worker productivity, the supervisors had locked the workers in the third floor working space and had forbidden breaks. The fact that there were no building codes back then also meant there were no mandated fire escapes. One spark, and the whole place was ablaze. Women threw themselves out the third floor windows in an effort to escape the flames, but were killed or injured in the fall.

In the height of the Gilded Age, during which reformers like Upton Sinclair and Ida Tarbell were vying for more regulations for the safety of the consumer and of the employee, this tragedy catalyzed much of the legislature that now requires fire codes.

It has now been over 100 years since that garment factory fire.

But on Tuesday, more than 300 people were killed in two similar factory fires in Karachi, Pakistan. Each occurred on the same day - one in a textile factory and one in a shoe factory. Locked doors and barred windows prevented escape, and many workers were faced with the choice between being engulfed by the flames, or throwing themselves off the roof, four stories above the ground.

Although these events constitute appalling tragedies, it’s shocking to see that regulations that have been essential to the infrastructure of our building codes are not being implemented elsewhere. Obviously, the goal in implementing such regulations should not be an imperialistic design to align developing countries with Western-centric paradigms. But, following in the example of humanitarian missions around the world focused on improving working conditions and protecting human rights, we should be doing all we can to preserve innocent human life.

The problem is that this story of the Pakistan factory fires is receiving a relatively small amount of news coverage. There are so many parallels to draw between this story and the history of the U.S.; yet, evidently, not many are placing much stock in the deaths of over 300 individuals. The reason for the changes in building codes and regulations in America in the early 1900s was that people spoke out, using tragedies as opportunities to facilitate a faster rise from the ashes. If those capable do not speak up to do the same thing now, it could make this disaster even worse -by perpetuating the same problems, increasing apathy and disregarding human life.

Reach Contributor Jonathan Stoller-Schoff here.