PROVIDENCE — A small group of workers’-rights advocates chomped on pizza and engaged in lively conversation Saturday afternoon, just before a 38-year-old Bangladeshi labor leader attracted their attention.

The organizer, Babul Akhter, had the ashen expression of a man who faces a death sentence.

His story was about his own plight and also about the suffering of Bangladeshi garment workers, including hundreds who have been burned alive in factory fires over the past four years....

New Yorkers’ fierce fight to prevent Wal-Mart from setting up shop in the city is well-known. But meanwhile, other big-box stores are quietly opening without a murmur of protest, like an Aldi store that launched in Rego Park, Queens, in February.

“People say that somehow New York City should erect a wall against Wal-Mart,” said Greg David, director of the business and economics reporting program at the City University of New York. “But Home Depot, Target, Kohl’s, the warehouse stores, now Aldi, are in important ways just like Wal-Mart.”

NEW YORK — Tragic as the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire was, the most definitive moment of Thursday’s all-day symposium honoring its centennial was an impromptu exercise that reminded guests just how far removed they are from the factories that produce the clothes they wear.

That indignity, and the crowded and unsanitary factory floor, led many of the 400 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory workers to go on strike in 1909 as they began to claim their rights to respect, better wages and safer working conditions. They won concessions on pay, but little else from the factory owners, who kept the workplace in a shambles.

And the doors locked.