[dropcap font="" size="50px" background="" color="" circle="0" transparent="0"]O[/dropcap]n April 24, 2013, garment workers at Rana Plaza, a damaged building outside Dhaka, Bangladesh, pleaded with their managers not to be sent inside. Just the day before they had complained about sounds coming from obvious cracks in the building. In less than 90 seconds from the moment they stepped inside, the eight-story building collapsed, killing at least 1,132 people and leaving more than 2,500 injured.
Unions called the disaster a “
mass industrial homicide.” The avoidable disaster led the United States to cancel generalized system of preference privileges for Bangladesh in
2013, citing serious shortcomings in workplace safety.
Nine years on, what has changed? Shaikh Abdur Rahman, a research assistant at the Central Foundation for International and Strategic Studies based in Dhaka,
writes: “Workers in Bangladesh’s garment industry are safer than they were a decade ago” while admitting that “more remains to be done.”
Rahman cited data that showed how two organizations, the
Alliance for Bangladesh Worker Safety (the Alliance) and the
Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh (the Accord), formed in 2013 actually made garment factories in the country safer for workers.
Both organizations ended their terms in 2018. By then, about
84 percent of safety hazards at the Accord factories have been corrected, and 90 percent of the issues at the Alliance factories have been addressed. By 2018, the Accord
fired 96 of its roughly 800 dealers and the Alliance 168 of its approximately 2,000 suppliers.
Experts say the Accord breaks away from the voluntary “corporate social responsibility” model — which has mostly failed to address labor rights problems — and provides “a new paradigm stressing enforceability and inclusivity,” according to researcher Jaakko Salminen in
The American Journal of Comparative Law. He writes, “the Accord takes the form of an enforceable contract that directly connects first-world buyers with representatives of the third-world laborers of their supply chains.”
More remains to be done, though, for the garment workers. They still struggle to make a living on their measly wages. In 2018, a wage board fixed the minimum wage of the garment workers at 8,000 Bangladeshi taka — about US$92 — per month, reports
The Diplomat. It has not increased since then.
Over 200 injured workers, victim families and trade union leaders recently staged
a protest to demand proper rehabilitation of injured workers and compensation. They vented their frustration at the snail-paced progress in the murder case filed over the Rana Plaza collapse: Only one out of 594 prosecution witnesses has
testified.
In
March, new evidence of violations of workers’ rights in Bangladesh in the garments industry came to light. These violations include violence and harassment, wages and benefits discrimination, unpaid overtime, and denial of freedom of association.