Parts of shoes are seen after a collapse at a shoe factory in the Kong Pisei district of Cambodia's Kampong Speu province on May 16, 2013
On May 16, the floor of a raised storage area collapsed on employees in a Cambodian shoe factory outside Phnom Penh, killing two and injuring a dozen more. Workers stacking supplies noticed the floor begin to shake before it suddenly buckled under the weight of packaging materials, one employee told the Wall Street Journal. Chunks of concrete and iron rebar rained down on staff toiling below. A spokesperson for the Wing Star Shoes factory promised to compensate injured workers and make an initial payment of $1,000 to the families of those killed. Coming so soon after the wanton devastation of the Rana Plaza collapse in Dhaka, Bangladesh, it served as a reminder that lax safety standards are an industry-wide problem.
MORE: A Tale of Two Factory Disasters: What Cambodia Can Teach Bangladesh