The unforgiving legacy of Rana Plaza

A memorial in front of the empty plot where Rana Plaza once stood in Savar, near Dhaka in this 2015 file photo. (ucanews.com photo)

Four years is not enough time to get over the ramifications of one of the worst industrial disasters in world, the Rana Plaza collapse, which killed 1,136 workers and injured over 2,000.

So, on April 24, all major national and international media outlets ran stories to remember the accident that shocked the world; workers and activists rallied to pay tribute to the dead and injured victims; while rights and advocacy groups released statements issuing stark warnings to the government, international brands and factory owners to avoid such a tragedy in future.

Reportedly, apparel industry groups, brands and unions have reaffirmed their commitment to ensuring long-term reform in the Bangladesh garment industry.   

There was a prevailing sense of grief, guilt and loss across the events but it was not felt by everyone. 

The government deployed hundreds of riot police, armed with batons and water canons at a memorial ground at Savar, near Dhaka where Rana Plaza once stood. Police did not allow a group of protesters to hold rally although they were simply demanding compensation and justice for victims, and fair wages and rights for garment workers.

Siddiqur Rahman, the president of country's most powerful trade body the Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association (BGMEA) claimed that owners of five Rana Plaza factories were not responsible for the disaster but only Sohel Rana, the owner of the ill-fated complex.   

Ironically, he made this comment while visiting a graveyard in Dhaka where some 311 unidentified Rana Plaza victims were buried.

It seems his visit was simply a courtesy call but like most garment factory owners he was apathetic to the plight of workers even after such a massive disaster.

Fatal accidents are nothing new in Bangladesh's US$25 billion garment industry, the second largest in the world after China. It supplies clothes to Europe and the Americas and counts for 80% of Bangladesh's annual exports.

The Rana Plaza disaster was not a bolt from the blue. It was a culmination of grim, atrocious irregularities and malpractices in the industry that employs some 4 million workers, mostly poor rural women. 

It came about six months after Tazreen Factory blaze that killed 112 workers. Altogether, over 2,000 workers have died in various accidents in the industry in the past two decades, occurring on average two to four times per month.

These accidents were not only a fault of greedy profiteers but were a product of the collective negligence and apathy of all who are directly or indirectly involved with the industry and benefit from it.

So, the Rana Plaza collapse brought collective shame on all, not only Bangladeshis but across the globe, sparking an unprecedented national and global outcry for long overdue safety reforms and worker's rights.

The accident was heavy to swallow for most governments and companies, forcing them to pay heed to the call for real change and accountability in the industry. Four years on, the industry has seen a push for major changes.

The government has raised the minimum wage of workers about 76 percent, from US$37 to US$68 per month, although it is still among the lowest monthly wages in the world.

Two bodies of Western brands: the European-dominated Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh and the American-backed Bangladesh Alliance for Worker Safety have invested millions of dollars in two separate five-year deals to conduct safety inspections and implement a corrective action plan in over 2,000 source factories. The Bangladesh government and the International Labor Organization have been inspecting the remaining factories.

The actions have yielded fruits, as there have been no major accidents in garment factories or casualties since Rana Plaza.

Amid pressure from international trade unions and governments, including the suspension of trade privileges in the U.S. for Bangladesh, the government amended the labor law to allow workers to unionize. Hundreds of trade unions have been formed and workers are more vocal about their rights than ever.

In Bangladesh, garment factory owners wield immense political and financial clout. In the present parliament, 60 percent of parliamentarians are businessmen and at least 30 percent own garment factories.

Before Rana Plaza, labor law was friendlier to owners and no owner was held accountable for previous accidents. But now, both owners of Tazreen and Rana Plaza are facing trial, although justice is elusive.

These are all strong, positive signs for major changes. But there is little reason to be cheerful, because it's just one side of the coin.

After the Rana Plaza collapse, the government and the BGMEA raised about US$20 billion in compensation for the victims, while the ILO created Rana Plaza Trust Fund of US$30 million with donations from international brands sourcing clothes from Bangladesh. However, to date none of the victim families have received the full amount of US$1,250 in cash and US$19,000 in saving as promised.

A recent report from non-government organization ActionAid Bangladesh shows 42 percent injured victims of Rana Plaza are still unemployed as they are physically and psychologically unfit to work and they never received compensation or rehabilitation.

Most of them are still traumatized to work in garment factories due to their horrific experience, trapped under concrete rubble before being pulled out alive. No concerted effort has been taken to address their problems through psychological counseling.  

The minimum monthly wage was raised to US$68 but high inflation and a price hike on daily essentials have lessened workers' purchasing capacity. So, workers' living standards have actually gone down as they cannot afford good housing, nutritious foods or even school for their children.

The abuse and ill treatment of workers has not stopped either. This was vividly illustrated in December 2016 when factory owners dismissed some 1,500 workers in Dhaka after they took part in demonstrations for a wage hike. The owners collaborated with police to charge hundreds of workers with false cases, jailing and torturing them in custody.

Workers are free to form trade unions but many are reluctant as owners threaten them with termination and pay officials to root out unionists to be fired.

The labor law provisions labor courts to resolve any dispute, but in reality poor and powerless workers do not have the money and time to fight legal battles. It provisions US$1,250 in compensation from a factory owner if a worker dies or is injured in a workplace accident. No sane person would agree to that amount for a lost life. There have been debates between labor groups, owners and the government to fix a lifetime compensation package but nothing worked out in the end.

While Accord, Alliance and ILO are checking for safety upgrades in large factories there is a vast underworld of smaller factories operated by subcontractors that continue business in shoddy apartments, basements, rooftops and shops, where workers sew clothes under immense pressure from abusive bosses. These factories are largely out of touch and devoid of any kind of inspection, keeping the door open for disasters.

Labor leaders are concerned about what will happen after the five-year safety upgrade ends. Will there be constant vigilance and monitoring? There is no such indication or commitment so far.      

On the legal side, two cases filed after the accident are in limbo. The police, in 2016, charged 41 people including the Rana Plaza owner, factory bosses and government officials for murder and negligence.

While Rana remains in jail, 16 others are freed on bail and the rest are at large. The trial procedure has yet to start as the government is still trying to save officials accused in the cases, citing they were simply monitors of inspection and safety, not direct accomplices in the incident. So, it's highly unlikely that justice will be done.

Global brands are also failing to keep promises as well.

New York-based Human Rights Watch said only 29 out of 72 global apparel and footwear companies contacted were disclosing information about their source factories, failing to comply with a transparency pledge endorsed by a coalition of labor and rights organizations.

The scar of Rana Plaza will continue to haunt Bangladeshi workers unless real changes take place.

Rana Plaza could go down in history as a catalyst for change and reform in the Bangladesh garment industry. If not, the unforgiving legacy of the disaster will continue to remind us we have failed as collective humanity to pay back the innocent victims, who truly deserve to be remembered as lives, not merely numbers.

END

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Hunger strikers at Dhaka garment factory fall sick

Garment workers in a factory at Bangladesh's capital Dhaka fall sick after days of hunger strike over unpaid wages. (Photo: Kollol Mustafa)

At least 40 garment workers in a mass hunger strike in Dhaka have fallen sick as a tense standoff with factory managers entered a fourth day on Thursday with no sign of resolution.

Some of the 1,500 workers, mostly women, began to flag after they began striking on Monday at the start of Eid, the festival ending the month-long Ramadan fast.

Some were placed on saline drips but continued to refuse food or to leave the cramped office of their employer, the Tuba Group, after it failed to pay three months of wages and an Eid bonus.

“I am so sad and frustrated because the management has ruined our Eid and forced us to hunger strike. We won’t give up until our demands are met,” said Rabeya Akter, 35, a sewing machine operator.

Workers in the factory are typically paid between 10,000 taka and 12,000 taka (US$130 - $156) per month including overtime, among the lowest garment wages in the world, but have not been paid since the end of April.

Remembering Rana Plaza, one year on

The Rana Plaza tragedy sparked strong public outcry and calls to improve factory safety and conditions for Bangladesh’s garment workers. (Photo by Stephan Uttom)

It’s been a year since the Rana Plaza textile complex collapsed, killing 1,135 workers and injuring more than 2,500, making it the worst industrial disaster in Bangladesh history.

Fatal accidents are all too common in Bangladesh’s US$20 billion garment industry, the second largest in the world after China's. In the past decade accidents have occurred an average of two to four times per month. It’s ironic—and outrageous—for an industry that employs four million people and fetches 80 percent of country’s annual export income to be so poorly regulated.

About 2,000 workers have been killed in work-related accidents in Bangladesh in the past ten years. These accidents, and the easily preventable deaths that occurred as a result, have largely been due to lax safety standards and atrocious working conditions in the factories. Disasters like the Rana Plaza collapse and the Tazreen Fashions factory fire, which killed more than 100 people in Dhaka in 2012, are a product of the collective negligence of everyone who has benefited from the Bangladesh garment industry. They have occurred under the noses of the authorities, trade bodies and Western buyers, who remained astonishingly silent as workers perished. The catalysts for these events did not just appear over night. Year after year, a wide range of monitoring bodies and agencies put their stamps of approval on thousands of factories, despite the fact that structures lacked proper fire doors, fire escapes, smoke-proof stairways and automatic sprinkler systems.

Some analysts have drawn parallels between the Rana Plaza accident and the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist fire in New York that killed 146 workers and led to lasting safety reforms in the US garment industry. Well, seven times as many individuals died at Rana Plaza. The scale of suffering in the wake of the collapse was almost too much to swallow, even for the most apathetic of companies or governments. It triggered an unprecedented outcry from the media, labor advocates and consumer groups, which is paving the way for long overdue reforms in Bangladesh’s garment industry.

Indeed, a year after the collapse, Bangladesh has seen a major push for changes.

More than 150 mostly European companies have signed the legally binding Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh, while 26 mostly North American companies including Walmart, Gap and Target have formed the separate Bangladesh Alliance for Worker Safety that commits the companies to invest in upgrades in more than 2,000 factories. The Bangladesh government and the International Labor Organization have pledged to conduct safety inspections in the remaining factories.

Under intense pressure from foreign governments—including suspension of US trade privileges for Bangladesh—the government has amended its labor law to make it easier for workers to unionize. To date, more than 100 new trade unions have been registered and workers are speaking out strongly against poor working conditions and walking away from jobs if necessary. Their collective efforts have led to an increase in the minimum wage from $37 to $68 per month.

The owners and managers of Tazreen Fashions and Rana Plaza are being prosecuted for culpable homicide charges in a country where garment manufacturers wield immense political power and have never been held accountable for previous accidents.

These are all positive changes, despite the fact that they have only come about as a result of such a massive loss of lives. But, we would be foolish to believe that everything has been cleaned up and will henceforth be on the straight and narrow.

Though Western brands have begun a major push for safety improvements, they have divided into two oft-feuding groups—those that signed the Accord and those that signed the Alliance—which is an arrangement that analysts say hinders the overall effort.

Members of the Alliance claim that they have so far performed more factory inspections than the Accord brands, while Accord members say that the Alliance’s inspections are far less rigorous. Accord members also say they work closely with trade unions and have input from workers, while Alliance members assert that some Accord brands have not provided wages to workers who were laid off after their factories were temporarily closed following inspections that discovered serious safety violations.

The Alliance has been widely criticized for not being legally binding and for its lack of transparency. The Alliance claims to have inspected about 400 factories so far, but it does not make its inspection reports public. Meanwhile, the Accord has published reports on 10 factories and asserts that it has inspected about 300.

In a sense, the competition appears positive on the grounds that they are attempting to raise the bar higher in terms of safety standards. But at times it also seems like an unappetizing neo-colonial battle in the globalized world.

The Accord inspection reports paint an ominous picture of dangerous conditions in the factories. Inspectors found structural, safety and fire faults in every factory they visited including dangerously heavy amounts of storage, which has led to cracked walls and stressed, sagging support beams. They also found basic fire equipment missing and exit routes that didn’t lead to the outside. Viyellatex, considered one of the best factories in Bangladesh, received multiple citations.

If massive, top-of-the-line factories have such issues, one can only imagine how bad the reality could be in smaller factories. In Bangladesh, there is a vast underworld of small factories operated by subcontractors working for larger manufacturers. These businesses often operate in shoddy apartments, basements, shops and rooftops where underpaid workers sew clothes under fierce pressure from bosses who abuse them and care little for workplace safety.

Unauthorized subcontracting is common. International buyers often know about it, though they don’t admit such things officially. The reality is they can’t stop it.

Flaws of the labor law 

At its core, the labor law is not that worker friendly. Theoretically, workers are free to form trade unions, but in practice it’s not that easy. In a country where corruption is widespread, officials can be discreetly paid off to prevent the formation of a union. Likewise, factory owners can obtain a list of prospective union members from corrupt officials and fire the workers who intended to unionize. If workers take their case to the labor court, justice is rarely the outcome. Most garment workers are too poor to afford protracted unemployment, and the legal system is too expensive and too drawn out for them to stick out their case.

The labor law guarantees $1,282 in compensation from a factory owner if a worker dies or is seriously injured in a workplace accident. But is this money worth a person’s life? For years, the labor law has remained friendlier to owners than to workers, largely because owners wield immense political power. Some have even become parliamentarians or government ministers.

Meanwhile, the government has reportedly raised $16 million in compensation for the victims of Rana Plaza, while the Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association has raised some $1.8 million. However, some victims’ families say they have received nothing, and not a single family has received the full amount of $1,250 in cash and $19,000 in a savings scheme the government promised.

There is a serious lack of coordination among authorities and various organizations working to help victims and families. No one seems to know when the compensation payments will be made.

“It seems everyone is considering it as an act of charity, not as an act of responsibility,” a labor export said recently.

Rana Plaza could go down in history as a big turning point for the Bangladesh garment manufacturing industry. Like the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist fire in New York, it might be the wake-up call that international brands and factory owners need.

But if it’s not, and better safety standards aren’t enforced, there’s no telling how many more Rana Plazas there could be.

Read the original opinion piece here Remembering Rana Plaza, one year on

Time to end modern-day slavery in Bangladesh

Rana Plaza might prove to be the wake-up call required to fix Bangladesh garment sector, but at a huge cost

With the rubble cleared and the dust settled, all seemed quiet at the former eight-story Rana Plaza site, home to a bank, shops and five garment factories before it collapsed last month, killing 1,129 workers and injuring about 2,500.

Only a few dead roses hang from the fence around the building alongside several altars erected by friends and family grieving in the wake of the April 24 tragedy.

On that fateful day, hundreds of dead and wounded were pulled out from among the smashed walls and furniture of the destroyed tower as wailing relatives watched in horror. The scene at the nearby Adhar Chandra High School was equally heart-wrenching, and pathetic.

It was here that authorities gathered bodies. About 300 remain unidentified.

I felt ashamed – as the building owners and factory bosses themselves should – because collectively, as a nation, Bangladesh had demonstrably failed to give any kind of protection to its workers and it had shown this shameful truth in grim close-up for the whole world to see.

That this was not the first ‘accident’ of its kind is perhaps the biggest disgrace.

Nearly 2,000 workers have died in fires, stampedes and other accidents in garment factories in recent times, all tragedies which were avoidable. In none of these cases was a factory owner or boss punished, many of whom appear to be guilty of cutting corners for profit.

Bangladesh’s roughly four million garment workers earn a minimum wage of just US$38 per month, half the level in Cambodia, for example, which itself has received scrutiny over poor labor conditions in recent years.

For the millions of poor Bangladeshis who leave their rural homes to seek financial independence in the shape of a stable job in a garment factory, in reality they are simply condemning themselves to the closest thing to slavery in today’s globalized world.

This is an industry worth $19 billion to Bangladesh, very little of which trickles down to those who put in most of the work and shoulder most of the risk: Not financial, perhaps, but mortal, certainly.

Even in death, Bangladeshi garment workers are treated like slaves. According to current labor law, a factory owner is supposed to pay 100,000 taka ($1,250) compensation for a worker’s death.

Since the industry accounted for 1,129 additional deaths last month there are signs that, finally, some are saying enough is enough as Bangladesh comes under strong pressure from labor groups, the media, some consumers and even some garment buyers which employ the services of factories like those in Rana Plaza.

The US government is holding a hearing which will determine whether Bangladesh will continue to enjoy Generalized System of Preference (GSP) access to the world’s largest economy.

“Bangladesh has two choices. They can go to the future and they can assist in providing safe working conditions, safe factories and programs for fire prevention,” said Congressman George Miller who visited Bangladesh this week as part of the US enquiry into the country’s GSP status. “Or they can struggle in the past and lose the value of the Bangladesh label.”

The European Union, Bangladesh’s largest market by export value, has threatened to revoke duty-free access if the industry doesn’t reform.

In response to the threat of serious damage to the country’s biggest earner, the government has hastily inspected all factories across the country, promised to set up a separate wage board and amended the labor code. Money talks, especially amid threats that it could disappear.

But question marks remain as to whether these changes are substantive or mere window-dressing. Bangladeshi media remains unconvinced.

“Theoretically, laborers can go to court to file a complaint against their bosses. But in practice it is expensive and too lengthy a process that most workers can’t afford it,” said Jafrul Hasan, a lawyer.

Unsurprisingly, the industry body – the Bangladesh Garments Manufacturers and Exporters Association – appears to be trying to protect their members' interests behind the scenes amid the backlash.

A key dilemma is whether it is right and ethical for global retailers to pull out of Bangladesh altogether? A superficial answer would be ‘yes.’

Just before the Rana Plaza tragedy, the Walt Disney Company – the largest media conglomerate in the world – stopped sourcing products from Bangladesh in the wake of a fire at Tazreen Fashions last year which killed 112 people.

But having profited from these workers for decades, is it really right for companies like Disney to wash its hands of Bangladesh? The result is that this giant company has shunned its responsibility and let slip the leverage it once had to promote tangible reforms for the better.

“On the labor issue, absolutely, buyers have a critical role and they must be engaged,” Wendy Sherman, US undersecretary of state for political affairs, said during a visit to Bangladesh this week.

Major European retailers including H&M, Inditex, Primark, C&A, Tommy Hilfiger and PVH, Tesco, Benetton, Marks and Spencer and Carrefour, have all signed an accord on fire and building safety in Bangladesh.

Tuesday was the deadline to sign onto the accord, but at least 14 North American retailers including Walmart, Gap, Target and JC Penny, joined by Asia’s largest retailer Uniqlo, declined to participate, citing legal concerns.

The agreement demands a five-year commitment from participating retailers to conduct independent safety inspections of factories and pay up to $500,000 per year toward safety improvements.

This amount is nothing to global giants like Walmart. But it would surely contribute to improving the hellish working conditions for garment workers in Bangladesh. It would surely make all the difference for them.

Third World View is the pseudonym of a commentator based in Dhaka, Bangladesh

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