Mehul Srivastava
By Mehul Srivastava
Six months ago, when more than 1,100 Bangladeshi workers were killed in the collapse of a high-rise warren of garment factories, international outcry led to pledges by western retailers and the government to set up a large-scale inspection regime and a new wage system.
Today, not a single Bangladeshi garment factory has been inspected under any of the three programmes that sprang from those promises, according to officials at the programs. Nor has danger ceased in the $19bn industry: This month, nine workers died when a fire ripped through a factory in suburban Dhaka that provided material for plants supplying clothing to companies including Wal-Mart Stores.
The Rana Plaza collapse, on April 24, is considered the world’s worst garment factory disaster.
The programmes’ slow implementation comes against a backdrop of worker unrest that has stalled production and led to massive street demonstrations over safety conditions and wages, which are set at $39 a month before overtime. One, on October 15, was quelled by the Industrial Police, a rubber-bullet-firing riot force set up two years ago to bring protesting garment workers under control.
“There is no time to lose anymore,” Dutch ambassador Gerben Sjoerd de Jong said on Tuesday in announcing a $24.2m programme funded by the Dutch and British governments and the International Labour Organisation to support the Bangladeshi government inspections. “The inspections need to begin now.”
The first international staff for an inspections system led by European retailers, called the Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh, arrives next week. The Alliance for Bangladesh Worker Safety, a group of mostly North American retailers, says the list of the factories its signatories use is ongoing and no inspections staff is in place in the country.
The Bangladeshi government, which will inspect the remaining plants under the Tripartite National Action Plan, hasn’t completed the list of plants that fall under its purview or beefed up staffing for the inspections.
And so far, the three groups have yet to agree upon what a universally acceptable inspection will look like, a delay that De Jong said was holding up the process and endangering workers’ lives. Until then, retailers are conducting their own independent reviews.
working conditions
An hour-and-a-half drive from Dhaka, in a suburb called Gazipur, the fire-scarred building that burned on October 8 shows the costs of poor working conditions.
Emdad Hossain, Director of the Aswad Composite Mills factory, was in his second-floor office at 5.33pm when he heard somebody scream out “fire”. Flames were leaping from floor to floor.
Hossain and his men deployed the plant’s fire-fighting equipment while waiting for fire trucks that had to navigate a traffic-clogged highway and a narrow, pot-holed road to get to the four story-building. By the time the blaze was controlled, nine men had either burned to death or died from smoke inhalation, according to the police. Television footage showed flames shooting out of the roof.
“It was completely unbelievable,” Hossain said two days afterward. “We never imagined it would spread so fast.”
On October 13, the Department of Inspections of Factories and Establishments filed criminal charges against the factory’s owners, Palmal Group. The department alleged Palmal had been warned that it didn’t have enough fire extinguishers, didn’t fully report its electrical machinery, had expanded the facility without proper approvals and that its walkways were too narrow.
Nafis Sikder, a director at Dhaka-based Palmal, denied the allegations in an October 22 phone interview, saying the company had never received any notice of the violations.
Palmal had supplied clothing to retailers such as H&M, Wal-Mart subsidiary Asda and Primark Stores, a British-based unit of Associated British Foods, according to statements from the companies. As the joint inspection process gets under way, the European retailers-led Accord group will have a safety inspector in Dhaka starting November 1, said Andy York, a member of the Accord’s steering committee.
Brad Loewen, a former fireman and safety inspector from Winnipeg, Canada, will move to Dhaka to work with an executive director, Rob Wayss, from the ILO. Both are to operate under an annual budget of about $10m for inspections and safety training, York said. The Accord also provides for additional funds from participating brands to help pay for repairs at factories after violations are found.
Data Collection
H&M spokeswoman Elin Hallerby said data collection about the factories has been completed and key appointments filled, and the company will continue its own audits in Bangladesh. The immediate goal is a common inspection standard so that each of Bangladesh’s 5,000 or so factories are reviewed only once, York said.
That requires coordination with the local garment lobbying group, the Bangladesh Garment Manufacturer’s and Exporter’s Association (BGMEA). The Washington-based International Labour Rights Forum, in a December 2010 report, listed the BGMEA as a top offender in failing to enforce labour-rights violations.
BGMEA President Atiqul Islam said that his organisation supports the creation of worker committees, training of workers and monitoring for illnesses. Rules passed by the government to make it easier to unionise were supported by the association.
Many companies are continuing their regular audits of suppliers and will compare them to the final standards, York said. In one case, the challenges became clear.
June inspection
An independent June inspection by Tesco, Debenhams, Primark and Hong Kong-based Li & Fung found that a sewing unit for a factory called Liberty Fashion Wears was near collapse. On October 2, the retailers said: “It would be dangerous to allow workers to return to work.” The building was closed and workers idled while the buyers negotiated with factory owner Mozammel Huq over bringing the factory up to acceptable standards.
Huq disagreed and arranged for an alternate inspection by the BGMEA and the Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology. Both BGMEA and BUET reports said the factory was safe, Huq said. The method of the reviews “is completely unethical,” he said. “For more than 10 years they have bought from this factory, and suddenly they have decided it is unsafe?”
The retailers provided $400,000 to pay the idled workers their wages and a bonus for Eid, according to a person with knowledge of the negotiations. On October 15, the day before Eid, hundreds of workers protested outside the factory, demanding a resolution.
“I have been borrowing money from family for months to pay for food and medicine, and now it’s Eid and I can’t even buy my son a new shirt for the holidays,” said Rahima Begum, 28, who asked a reporter for $5 so she could pay off some of her loans. “All the buyers have their money, and the owner has his money and his big cars, and we are left with nothing.”
The Alliance, whose founders include Wal-Mart and Gap Inc, two of the biggest buyers sourcing in Bangladesh, hasn’t begun its own independent inspections, said Rosanna Maita, a spokeswoman for the Alliance. Of the 620 factories identified by brands in the Alliance, more 300 have been audited by the brands themselves under standards that could be considered equivalent to Alliance levels, said Jeffrey Krilla, president of the programme.
The Alliance expects to have inspected all of the factories on its lists within the year, he said. Alliance brands will contribute to a capital improvement fund so that factory owners can get low-cost loans for repairs and modifications, and share responsibilities for paying workers for any work lost during repairs. “The good news is that the companies in the Alliance have very high standards,” Krilla said.
unauthorised plants
Wal-Mart spokesman Kevin Gardner said that the company would make an updated list of unauthorised factories available through the Alliance rather than posting them on its website as originally announced.
While the Accord covers about 1,600 factories and the Alliance an additional 620, Bangladesh has about 5,000 garment plants all together, according to a database maintained by the BGMEA.
The ones that fall outside the Accord and the Alliance will be inspected by a group of Bangladeshi government agencies under the agreement with the ILO and supplemented by the $24.2m in funding over a three-and-a-half-year period.
The office of Bangladesh’s chief inspector of factories, Mushiur Rehman, is a cramped room with no computer, a single functioning phone line and a filing cabinet overflowing with documents. Rehman was unavailable for comment, his personal assistant said.
His colleagues work in a different building, where workers snoozed after the lunch hour. The department has fewer than 50 safety inspectors for some 8,000 factories, according to a presentation in Bangladesh’s parliament this year.
Rajuk, which is what the Dhaka Development Authority is called locally, has asked for funding to expand its total number of inspection engineers to about 240, said Chief Engineer Emdadul Islam.
In the days after the Rana Plaza collapse, Rajuk had started its own survey of buildings, seeking to get a head-start on the process by collecting engineering plans and digitizing them. The process was finally abandoned because of a lack of resources, including broken-down cars, exhausted engineers and reluctant factory owners, said Islam. “It’s a very difficult task,” he said, sitting on the couch in his offices, juggling two phones that rang non-stop. “We don’t have enough engineers, we don’t have enough resources.”
WP-BLOOMBERG
By Mehul Srivastava
Six months ago, when more than 1,100 Bangladeshi workers were killed in the collapse of a high-rise warren of garment factories, international outcry led to pledges by western retailers and the government to set up a large-scale inspection regime and a new wage system.
Today, not a single Bangladeshi garment factory has been inspected under any of the three programmes that sprang from those promises, according to officials at the programs. Nor has danger ceased in the $19bn industry: This month, nine workers died when a fire ripped through a factory in suburban Dhaka that provided material for plants supplying clothing to companies including Wal-Mart Stores.
The Rana Plaza collapse, on April 24, is considered the world’s worst garment factory disaster.
The programmes’ slow implementation comes against a backdrop of worker unrest that has stalled production and led to massive street demonstrations over safety conditions and wages, which are set at $39 a month before overtime. One, on October 15, was quelled by the Industrial Police, a rubber-bullet-firing riot force set up two years ago to bring protesting garment workers under control.
“There is no time to lose anymore,” Dutch ambassador Gerben Sjoerd de Jong said on Tuesday in announcing a $24.2m programme funded by the Dutch and British governments and the International Labour Organisation to support the Bangladeshi government inspections. “The inspections need to begin now.”
The first international staff for an inspections system led by European retailers, called the Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh, arrives next week. The Alliance for Bangladesh Worker Safety, a group of mostly North American retailers, says the list of the factories its signatories use is ongoing and no inspections staff is in place in the country.
The Bangladeshi government, which will inspect the remaining plants under the Tripartite National Action Plan, hasn’t completed the list of plants that fall under its purview or beefed up staffing for the inspections.
And so far, the three groups have yet to agree upon what a universally acceptable inspection will look like, a delay that De Jong said was holding up the process and endangering workers’ lives. Until then, retailers are conducting their own independent reviews.
working conditions
An hour-and-a-half drive from Dhaka, in a suburb called Gazipur, the fire-scarred building that burned on October 8 shows the costs of poor working conditions.
Emdad Hossain, Director of the Aswad Composite Mills factory, was in his second-floor office at 5.33pm when he heard somebody scream out “fire”. Flames were leaping from floor to floor.
Hossain and his men deployed the plant’s fire-fighting equipment while waiting for fire trucks that had to navigate a traffic-clogged highway and a narrow, pot-holed road to get to the four story-building. By the time the blaze was controlled, nine men had either burned to death or died from smoke inhalation, according to the police. Television footage showed flames shooting out of the roof.
“It was completely unbelievable,” Hossain said two days afterward. “We never imagined it would spread so fast.”
On October 13, the Department of Inspections of Factories and Establishments filed criminal charges against the factory’s owners, Palmal Group. The department alleged Palmal had been warned that it didn’t have enough fire extinguishers, didn’t fully report its electrical machinery, had expanded the facility without proper approvals and that its walkways were too narrow.
Nafis Sikder, a director at Dhaka-based Palmal, denied the allegations in an October 22 phone interview, saying the company had never received any notice of the violations.
Palmal had supplied clothing to retailers such as H&M, Wal-Mart subsidiary Asda and Primark Stores, a British-based unit of Associated British Foods, according to statements from the companies. As the joint inspection process gets under way, the European retailers-led Accord group will have a safety inspector in Dhaka starting November 1, said Andy York, a member of the Accord’s steering committee.
Brad Loewen, a former fireman and safety inspector from Winnipeg, Canada, will move to Dhaka to work with an executive director, Rob Wayss, from the ILO. Both are to operate under an annual budget of about $10m for inspections and safety training, York said. The Accord also provides for additional funds from participating brands to help pay for repairs at factories after violations are found.
Data Collection
H&M spokeswoman Elin Hallerby said data collection about the factories has been completed and key appointments filled, and the company will continue its own audits in Bangladesh. The immediate goal is a common inspection standard so that each of Bangladesh’s 5,000 or so factories are reviewed only once, York said.
That requires coordination with the local garment lobbying group, the Bangladesh Garment Manufacturer’s and Exporter’s Association (BGMEA). The Washington-based International Labour Rights Forum, in a December 2010 report, listed the BGMEA as a top offender in failing to enforce labour-rights violations.
BGMEA President Atiqul Islam said that his organisation supports the creation of worker committees, training of workers and monitoring for illnesses. Rules passed by the government to make it easier to unionise were supported by the association.
Many companies are continuing their regular audits of suppliers and will compare them to the final standards, York said. In one case, the challenges became clear.
June inspection
An independent June inspection by Tesco, Debenhams, Primark and Hong Kong-based Li & Fung found that a sewing unit for a factory called Liberty Fashion Wears was near collapse. On October 2, the retailers said: “It would be dangerous to allow workers to return to work.” The building was closed and workers idled while the buyers negotiated with factory owner Mozammel Huq over bringing the factory up to acceptable standards.
Huq disagreed and arranged for an alternate inspection by the BGMEA and the Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology. Both BGMEA and BUET reports said the factory was safe, Huq said. The method of the reviews “is completely unethical,” he said. “For more than 10 years they have bought from this factory, and suddenly they have decided it is unsafe?”
The retailers provided $400,000 to pay the idled workers their wages and a bonus for Eid, according to a person with knowledge of the negotiations. On October 15, the day before Eid, hundreds of workers protested outside the factory, demanding a resolution.
“I have been borrowing money from family for months to pay for food and medicine, and now it’s Eid and I can’t even buy my son a new shirt for the holidays,” said Rahima Begum, 28, who asked a reporter for $5 so she could pay off some of her loans. “All the buyers have their money, and the owner has his money and his big cars, and we are left with nothing.”
The Alliance, whose founders include Wal-Mart and Gap Inc, two of the biggest buyers sourcing in Bangladesh, hasn’t begun its own independent inspections, said Rosanna Maita, a spokeswoman for the Alliance. Of the 620 factories identified by brands in the Alliance, more 300 have been audited by the brands themselves under standards that could be considered equivalent to Alliance levels, said Jeffrey Krilla, president of the programme.
The Alliance expects to have inspected all of the factories on its lists within the year, he said. Alliance brands will contribute to a capital improvement fund so that factory owners can get low-cost loans for repairs and modifications, and share responsibilities for paying workers for any work lost during repairs. “The good news is that the companies in the Alliance have very high standards,” Krilla said.
unauthorised plants
Wal-Mart spokesman Kevin Gardner said that the company would make an updated list of unauthorised factories available through the Alliance rather than posting them on its website as originally announced.
While the Accord covers about 1,600 factories and the Alliance an additional 620, Bangladesh has about 5,000 garment plants all together, according to a database maintained by the BGMEA.
The ones that fall outside the Accord and the Alliance will be inspected by a group of Bangladeshi government agencies under the agreement with the ILO and supplemented by the $24.2m in funding over a three-and-a-half-year period.
The office of Bangladesh’s chief inspector of factories, Mushiur Rehman, is a cramped room with no computer, a single functioning phone line and a filing cabinet overflowing with documents. Rehman was unavailable for comment, his personal assistant said.
His colleagues work in a different building, where workers snoozed after the lunch hour. The department has fewer than 50 safety inspectors for some 8,000 factories, according to a presentation in Bangladesh’s parliament this year.
Rajuk, which is what the Dhaka Development Authority is called locally, has asked for funding to expand its total number of inspection engineers to about 240, said Chief Engineer Emdadul Islam.
In the days after the Rana Plaza collapse, Rajuk had started its own survey of buildings, seeking to get a head-start on the process by collecting engineering plans and digitizing them. The process was finally abandoned because of a lack of resources, including broken-down cars, exhausted engineers and reluctant factory owners, said Islam. “It’s a very difficult task,” he said, sitting on the couch in his offices, juggling two phones that rang non-stop. “We don’t have enough engineers, we don’t have enough resources.”
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