More than 100 workers died in a garment factory fire on November 24 in Bangladesh. The Dhaka plant, which was making products for Walmart and Sears, had no emergency exits or emergency evacuation procedures.

But in a meeting last year, Walmart officials decided against agreeing to pay suppliers more so that they could upgrade their manufacturing facilities and pay for the costs of safety improvements. “Specifically to the issue of any corrections on electrical and fire safety, we are talking about 4,500 factories, and in most cases very extensive and costly modifications would need to be undertaken to some factories,” Walmart officials said in documents obtained by Bloomberg News. “It is not financially feasible for the brands to make such investments.”

More than 300 Bangladeshi garment factory workers have died since 2006. Walmart reported a 9 percent increase in third-quarter net income, earning $3.63 billion.

A fire that killed 129 people in a Bangladeshi garment factory is raising questions about working conditions in the exporting hub. Sunday’s deadly fire immolated the Tazreen Factories plant just outside the major city of Dhaka, which appeared to have been making clothes for Western clothing giants like Walmart. The Dhaka plant had no emergency exits and utterly deficient emergency evacuation procedures:

When the fire alarm went off, workers were told by their bosses to go back to their sewing machines. An exit door was locked. And the fire extinguishers didn’t work and apparently were there just to impress inspectors and customers.

Though the safety risk posed by Tazreen’s substandard equipments was understood well before Sunday’s blaze, the same conditions appear to be relatively common among Bangladeshi factories. Since 2006, over 200 garment-factory workers have died in workplace fires. After another garment-factory lit up on Monday, the Guardian reported that “[w]orking conditions at Bangladeshi factories are notoriously poor, with little enforcement of safety laws, and overcrowding and locked fire doors are common.”

Fire safety is far from the only threat facing Bangladeshi garment workers. Bangladesh’s minimum wage requires workers be paid at least $37 a day, but there are credible reports of factories are paying below even this pittance as well as (occasionally sexual) abuse of employees. Bangladesh only recently legalized unions, and the ones that do exist are not yet powerful enough to take on the garment industry.

Many of these workers are making clothes for American and other Western markets; clothing makes up 80 percent of Bangladeshi exports and American imports from Bangladesh are growing rapidly.

Our guest blogger is David Abromowitz, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Of all the many claims that Mitt Romney pitched to the American public with such confidence that most viewers declared him the “winner” during Wednesday night’s debate, few were as brashly misleading as his response to the President’s objection to tax breaks that enable outsourcing jobs overseas. “Look, I’ve been in business for 25 years. I have no idea what you’re talking about. I maybe need to get a new accountant,” Romney said. “But the idea that you get a break for shipping jobs overseas is simply not the case.”

But even Fox News acknowledges that “companies can claim a deduction for the costs associated with moving jobs overseas.” The idea that former Bain CEO Romney wouldn’t know this is simply not believable. Instead, his advisers have argued that this isn’t a “special” tax break for outsourcing — it’s just a deduction like any other cost of doing business.

But beyond any semantic argument, Romney certainly would know that just this summer, Republicans in the Senate (with three exceptions) blocked a bill to eliminate this deduction when the expenses are for relocating jobs out of the US. As ABC New reported, “Under existing law, employers may take tax deductions for the costs associated with moving jobs out of the country. The proposed legislation would have eliminated that, and used the resulting new revenue to fund a 20 percent tax credit for the costs companies run up ‘insourcing’ labor back into the U.S.”

The biggest rebuttal to Romney’s claim of not having a clue of what the President was talking about, however, is Romney’s own tax plan. It actually includes a far more favorable tax break that would increase incentives for American companies to move operations overseas. As the Center for American Progress Action Fund’s Seth Hanlon has explained in detail, Romney’s tax plan “pledges to move the United States toward a ‘territorial’ tax system. What this means is that instead of paying a deferred tax on their foreign profits, U.S. corporations would pay no U.S. tax. Exempting overseas profits from tax would be a tax cut for multinational corporations of $130 billion over 10 years.”

A firm run by Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney invested in a Chinese company just a week after it touted the low wages it paid its employees, stringent working conditions, and the low tax liability it faced compared to American companies in a document to investors.

Romney has gotten tough on the Chinese government on the campaign trail, but in 1998, Brookside Inc., a subsidiary of Bain Capital, invested in Global-Tech Appliances days after it sent investors a document detailing the low wages it paid its workers and the low tax liability it faced, the Boston Globe reports:

It used “inexpensive labor,” Global-Tech Appliances wrote in a prospectus meant to attract investors on April 8, 1998. Its location in China meant “an overall effective tax rate that may be less than that of US corporations.” It said its current operations would not be subject to “material US taxes because it should not be considered to have significant income effectively connected with a trade or business in the US.” [...]

Nine days after the document was released – on April 17, 1998 — an affiliate of Bain Capital called Brookside Capital Partners Fund acquired about 6 percent of Global Tech, according to Securities and Exchange Commission documents that were first reported by Mother Jones magazine.

A leaked video from a Romney fundraiser showed the candidate giving an account of a trip to China to visit a factory in which Bain considered investing. Romney talked of the long hours worked by teenage girls who lived in dormitories on the premises and earned low wages. Spokespersons for both the Romney campaign and Bain Capital declined to comment for the Globe’s story.

Mother Jones reported in July that Global-Tech also depended heavily on the outsourcing of American jobs to China. Romney has blasted that practice on the campaign trail, but as the chief executive at Bain, he routinely oversaw the outsourcing of jobs to China and other low-wage countries. Investment documents released in August also detailed an investment into a company that is outsourcing jobs to China and forcing American workers to train their replacements.

Workers at Sensata Technologies, a business based in Freeport, Illinois, have been protesting Mitt Romney’s campaign stops across the country all summer because the company, which is owned by Bain Capital, is laying off workers in order to hire employees in China. Bain took control of Sensata in 2006; last year, it took over the Freeport plant and announced that it would layoff 165 workers and close it.

Some of the workers, according to Sensata employees, have been forced to train their Chinese replacements, adding insult to the injury that was their looming job loss.

Bain’s role in the layoffs hasn’t been a secret. But given that it took control of Sensata and the plant well after Romney’s departure from the firm, the candidate has thus far steered clear of the controversy, only drawing protests from the workers who want him to step in and stop the plant’s closure. But according to documents detailing Romney’s finances obtained and published yesterday by Gawker, his connection to Sensata is much more direct.

Romney held a direct investment in Sensata through one fund titled “Bain Capital Fund IX, L.P.,” dated December 31, 2009, meaning he has likely financially benefited from Bain’s ownership of the company in the past, and could benefit from the plant’s closure and the outsourcing of the jobs to China. According to his 2011 personal financial disclosure, Romney still holds the Bain Capital fund that contains the Sensata investment.

Romney has a history of outsourcing jobs as the chief executive of Bain Capital. The Washington Post reported in June that under Romney’s leadership Bain “invested in a series of firms that specialized in relocating jobs done by American workers to new facilities in low-wage countries like China and India.” Other companies in which the firm invested sent jobs to Mexico and other low-wage countries around the world.

While that history might be politically toxic, Romney’s proposals wouldn’t stop the outsourcing of American jobs. In fact, his plan to reform the corporate tax code by instituting a territorial tax system would make it easier for American companies to outsource jobs, while at the same time encouraging them to store even more money in offshore tax havens.

Sensata workers, meanwhile, are planning to protest Romney and Bain’s involvement in Sensata at the Republican National Convention next week.

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s plan to overhaul the American corporate tax code would “exacerbate the worst features of our current tax system” by giving corporations more than $1 trillion in tax breaks and providing an incentive to outsource jobs and stash profits overseas, according to Seth Hanlon, the director of fiscal reform at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

While the United States already provides an incentive for companies to store profits in offshore tax havens instead of investing those profits at home, Romney’s plan to shift the U.S. to a territorial tax system would make the situation even worse, Hanlon wrote in a report published today:

Gov. Romney’s proposed exemption for foreign profits would exacerbate the worst features of our current tax system. It would:

– Enhance the tax code’s rewards for moving jobs and investments overseas

– Provide a gratuitous windfall to some of the very companies that have already shifted jobs and profits overseas

– Further invite the offshore tax haven abuse that deprives the U.S. Treasury of tens of billions of dollars in revenue every year

The current system already encourages investment overseas, since corporations are allowed to defer tax payments on foreign profits until they “repatriate” them to the United States. Romney’s plan would exempt companies even from this tax, which will cost the U.S. $130 billion over the next decade. “When combined with Romney’s proposal to slash the top corporate rate from 35 percent to 25 percent, which would cost more than $900 billion, it pushes the total corporate tax cuts in the Romney plan to over $1 trillion,” Hanlon writes.

Romney’s reforms could also cost America jobs and invite further abuse of offshore tax havens, Hanlon writes. Because corporations would know they are permanently free from paying American taxes if they invest abroad, Romney’s plan would encourage such investments. Those investments would lead to 800,000 jobs in other countries, “potentially displacing U.S. jobs.” Economist Kimberly Clausing, Hanlon notes, “estimates that under a territorial tax system, even more profits of U.S.-based companies would shift to tax haven countries,” a problem that already costs the average American taxpayer $434 a year.

Bain Capital, the company Romney founded, routinely outsourced jobs to low-wage countries like Mexico, China, and Ireland while Romney was its chief executive, and it also utilized offshore tax havens in Bermuda and the Cayman Islands to help investors avoid American taxes. Now, his corporate tax reform plan would make it even easier for companies to do the same under the guise of “competitiveness.”