Bangladesh and Mr Thornton.

http://www.perioddramas.com/articles/north-and-south.php

Last night I watched the 4 Corners on the garment factories of Bangladesh that make the clothes we buy from Target, Kmart, Rivers, etc. Quite a bleak story. Makes me not like my cheap thermal singlet from Target made in Bangladesh.

Recently, NPR Planet Money podcast did an interesting story on the bigger picture of cheap garment factories. http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2013/05/14/184019151/episode-458-bangladeshs-t-shirt-economy Basically, when a country is moving from a subsistence farming economy to an industrialised economy, the first rung on the ladder is t-shirts. Bangladesh is now where China was a few decades or so ago, and now China makes electronics and everything and more people are climbing into the middle class. Go back a couple of centuries, and the West was in the same place. Which is where Mr Thornton comes in. I've been reading North and South (3rd read through), and it's pretty much a snapshot of the same struggle for safe working conditions and fair pay vs market forces. Bessie dies of "fluff on the lung". There's no compensation for workplace injuries. Children work instead of being at school. That's what Margaret Hale sees when she moves to Milton. That's the big struggle with the strike. And today we, in Australia, who happened to be born in the right place at the right time, are the ones indirectly putting the squeeze on the workers at the bottom of the ladder. Imagine THAT as an epic love story.