BLOG - Preserving the legacy of the Rana Plaza wake-up call
On a day in April, a 2-storey building at the site of a garment factory in Bangladesh partially collapsed. The workers of the factory were terrified and refused to continue working. The workers refused to believe assurances by the factory owners that the factory was safe to work in. They knew there was an independent safety entity they could turn to that would promptly send inspectors over. These declared the building unsafe and ordered that no worker would be allowed to enter the building until the damage was repaired. Five days later, the inspectors confirmed that after repair the factory was safe for use again and workers could return to work.[1]
This incident happened in April 2017. The entity the workers turned to was the Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh. Four years before, when workers in another garment factory in Bangladesh were afraid to return to work in a visibly unsafe factory which their employers guaranteed was safe, they had no such organisation to turn to. Thousands of workers entered the Rana Plaza building on 24 April 2013 under threat of losing a month of wages. Over 1,100 died when the factory collapsed later that day and thousands more were injured and traumatised for life. This horrible tragedy was the push that brands and retailers sourcing from Bangladesh needed to sign on to a legally binding programme for factory safety in the country[2]; something which unions and labour rights organisations like Clean Clothes Campaign had been advocating for years.[3]
As a result, the Accord has in the past 7.5 years successfully improved workplace safety for over 2.5 million Bangladeshi garment workers and empowered them to take their safety in their own hands through a powerful complaint mechanism, which protects them against retaliation by factory owners. The programme’s rigorous standards, unprecedented levels of transparency and enforceable character have been crucial to this success and have made the Accord exemplary in showing how change in the garment industry is possible.
The one area of progress
The RMG industry makes up over 75% of Bangladesh’s export and unfortunately has built its attractiveness to global apparel brands and retailers on the basis of a reputation to be cheap and lax on labour regulations[4]. This means that Bangladesh’s garment industry is built on poverty wages and rife with instances of union busting, repression of worker protests[5], and – especially during the Covid-19 pandemic[6] – non-payment of dismissed workers or workers who are injured on the job. While the minimum wage has more than doubled since the Rana Plaza collapse, it still amounts to less than one one-third of what workers would need to ensure a decent living for them and their families.[7]
Amidst this plethora of issues – on which the government of Bangladesh and the brands and retailers sourcing from the country have shown limited appetite to initiate meaningful improvements – there has always been one ray of light: the progress in the field of factory safety enabled by the consistent work of the Bangladesh Accord. Its work was challenging and did not always move as fast as many would have wanted, but progress was steady: over 90% of factories under the programme are now fully remediated[8], factories that refused to comply with the safety requirements were made ineligible for business with Accord company signatories[9], non-compliant signatory brands and retailers were held to account in court[10], and workers’ trust in its transparent and credible complaint mechanism continues to grow.[11] But, substantial work remains to be done. It is often the most challenging and expensive fire safety and structural renovations that remain outstanding[12]. Above all, ensuring safe factories is a continuous process: without the threat of action by the Accord, factory owners could resort to old measures such as locking exits or storing product in hallways and stairwells needed for swift evacuation in case of emergency...
You can find the rest of the article in the International Union Rights: Focus on Trade Union Rights in Asia journal, available here.
Authored by Christie Miedema, Clean Clothes Campaign, for International Union Rights, Focus in Trade Union Rights in India, Vol. 27, Issue 4, 2021.
For further information:
Amidst Covid-19 Crisis, Untested Industry Group Assumes Safety
Responsibilities for Bangladesh Garment Factories despite Concerns brief (2020)
Pakistan's Garment Workers need a Safety Accord report (2019)
Calling for Remedy report (2019)
[1] Worker Rights Consortium, “Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh (video)”, 14 May 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SUOAXL8ksUQ&t=128s; Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh, “Accord prevents factory collapse. An example of how the Accord is fulfilling its main objective of preventing factory collapse”, 26 September 2018, https://bangladeshaccord.org/updates/2018/09/26/accord-prevents-factory-collapse-ananta-apparels.
[2] The agreement signed in 2013 was a five-year agreement https://bangladesh.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/2013-Accord.pdf; The Accord was extended through the 2018 Accord, which is set to expire in June 2021 – https://bangladesh.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/2013-Accord.pdf.
[3] Clean Clothes Campaign, Maquila Solidarity Network, “The History behind the Bangladesh Fire and Safety Accord”, 8 July 2013, https://cleanclothes.org/file-repository/resources-background-history-bangladesh-safety-accord/view.
[4] Mark Anner, “Binding Power: The Sourcing Squeeze, Workers’ Rights, and Building Safety in Bangladesh Since Rana Plaza (Research Report, Center for Global Workers’ Rights)” (2018), at 7, https://ler.la.psu.edu/gwr/documents/CGWR2017ResearchReportBindingPower.pdf.
[5] Worker Rights Consortium (WRC), “Banning Hope: Bangladesh Garment Workers, Seeking a Dollar an Hour Face Mass Firings, Violence, and False Arrests” (2019) https://www.workersrights.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/Crackdown-on-Bangladesh.pdf
[6] See the Clean Clothes Campaign Covid-19 live-blog on cleanclothes.org/covid19.
[7] Clean Clothes Campaign, “#WeDemandTk16000: International solidarity with the workers in Bangladesh”, https://cleanclothes.org/news/2018/10/12/international-solidarity-with-the-workers-in-bangladesh-who-demand-the-16-000-taka-minimum-wage.
[8] The 93% remediation rate refers to remediation of original findings. New safety defects might be discovered later and remediation might still be pending: https://bangladesh.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Accord_Quarterly_Aggregate_Report_October2020.pdf. Accord brand signatories are required to ensure that remediation at their suppliers is financially feasible. See Art. 17 of the 2018 Accord and section Ensuring remediation is financially feasible, at p. 20 in the above report.
[9] 184 supplier factories previously covered under the Accord programme have been made ineligible for business with Accord brand signatories for failure to implement the required safety measures; see https://bangladeshaccord.org/factories, apply filter ‘Ineligible’
[10] IndustriALL Global Union, “Supply chain justice through binding global agreement”, 15 January 2019, http://www.industriall-union.org/feature-supply-chain-justice-through-binding-global-agreements.
[11] Bangladesh Accord, “Update Safety and Health Complaints”, 10 December 2020, https://bangladeshaccord.org/updates/2020/12/10/update-safety-and-health-complaints.
[12] See Remediation Section in https://bangladesh.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Accord_Quarterly_Aggregate_Report_October2020.pdf
[13] The Accord faced the real possibility of its liaison office in Bangladesh being required to close down on 30 November 2018 through a High Court restraining order. See the Foreword from the Accord Executive Directors in the 2017 Annual Report, https://bangladesh.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/Annual-Report-2017.pdf,
[14] Bangladesh Accord, “Accord Reaches Resolution on Continuation of Its Work in Bangladesh 19 May 2019, https://bangladeshaccord.org/updates/2019/05/19/accord-reaches-resolution-on-continuation-of-its-work-in-bangladesh; Bangladesh Accord, “Transition to The RMG Sustainability Council (RSC) 1 June 2020, https://bangladeshaccord.org/updates/2020/06/01/transition-to-the-rmg-sustainability-council-rsc.
[15] CCC, MSN, WRC, and ILRF/GLJ, Amidst Covid-19 Crisis, Untested Industry Group Assumes Safety Responsibilities for Bangladesh Garment Factories despite Concerns, October, 2020, https://www.workersrights.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Accord-Witness-Signatory-Assessment.pdf.
[16] Idem.