Depending on whom you ask, Bangladesh has either made great strides in improving compliance or hasn’t done enough since the Rana Plaza building collapse roiled the country’s ready-made garment (RMG) industry in April 2013 and aired the apparel industry’s workplace safety shortcomings.
Regardless, some things have changed and some haven’t.
Brands are taking a more active roll in inspecting the facilities they do business with and disclosing their factories and findings publicly for greater transparency. Structural upgrades have been made to unsound buildings, exit routes have been more clearly established and fire doors installed. In some cases workers have access to hotlines where their workplace concerns can be heard, and some are enjoying higher pay, though arguably still below what’s necessary for a reasonable standard of living. Workers’ wages were increased 77 percent to $68 a month following the tragedy that killed more than 1,100 people, injured hundreds of others and left many missing.
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Groups of brands and retailers have banded together to form the Alliance for Bangladesh Worker Safety and the Bangladesh Accord on Fire and Building Safety, two initiatives dedicated to inspecting factories and improving standards. As of April 2015, the Accord, whose signatories include H&M, Adidas and Fast Retailing, has inspected more than 1,250 factories and is working with 950 of them on corrective action plans. The Alliance has inspected 100 percent of its 645 factories, partially or fully closed 19 of them and has some form of remediation in place at all.
According to Mark Chubb, the Alliance’s newly named chief safety officer based in Dhaka, Rana Plaza saw a lot of things go wrong in conjunction. Structural unsoundness met with absent evacuation plans and closed exits prevented workers from getting out.
With regard to structural upgrades, the Alliance has inspected factories to determine bearing capacity of soils and to ensure they are sound enough to bear the loads typically imposed on them for use and occupancy. In cases where the structure was found to be subpar, the Alliance took to adding columns, removing live loads or relocating the ones beyond repair to new locations altogether.
Exits at Alliance-inspected facilities are being kept accessible, evacuation plans are posted for workers’ easy visibility, and more emphasis is being placed on employee training and having workers in responsible positions.
While some big things still remain to be done, Chubb said, the Alliance has made it harder for the smaller things to all line up and threaten a multiple fatality disaster.
The Alliance is still working with its factories to install adequate safety equipment, like fire doors and alarm systems, but the costs associated with incorporating these items have in some cases been prohibitive. An average factory in Bangladesh has two to four exits per floor, two doors are required for each exit, so at an average of $1,000 per door, this upgrade could run factories anywhere from $20,000-$30,000 just for fire doors. Since Rana Plaza, the Bangladesh government eliminated import tariffs on fire safety equipment, which have, in the past, added fees of up to 60 percent to the purchase price in an effort to make the equipment more accessible for factories.
Per factory estimates for required remediation are as much as $250,000-$400,000. Some brands have offered direct contributions to the remediation process, and the Alliance is working with international funding bodies and partnering with local banks to help factories manage the costs of compliance.
“I think as much has been done as could be done. To be honest, I’m pretty impressed by how much has been done in the time. I don’t think there’s any precedent for what’s going on here,” Chubb said. “There isn’t anybody else that I know that’s tried to tackle such a big problem in such a comprehensive way.”
He added, “Bangladesh should be proud that it’s made so much progress, the Alliance brand members should be pleased that they’re having such a positive impact, and the customers that buy from them should be confident that the money they’re spending is actually improving conditions in a country that needs improvement.”
But Sarah Labowitz, co-director of the Center for Business and Human Rights at NYU Stern School of Business, has researched Bangladesh’s RMG industry extensively and found, “Two years after Rana Plaza, we still don’t have a clear picture of the scope of the problem. There’s more transparency than before the collapse, but outsized attention has been paid to inspections in the narrow group of factories for which the brands have accepted responsibility through the Accord and the Alliance. Too little focus has been directed at the highest risk factories and developing practical approaches to solve the root causes of these risks.”
Labowitz, whose research has honed in on subcontracting factories, the smaller more invisible facilities that are unregistered and squeak past audits and inspections, says these factories are the riskiest—and they are used often when bigger factories are under pressure for tight deliveries, say.
“A major outstanding question is how to address factory safety and worker rights in the group of factories producing for export but that fall outside of the Accord, the Alliance, or even the National Action Plan. These are the factories where workers are most vulnerable, as there is the least oversight and transparency in this part of the sector.”
All told, the workers don’t seem to have benefited as much as expected from the changes made to date.
“Two years after the Rana Plaza disaster, Bangladesh’s labor rights framework remains exposed to serious and widespread risks of violations and under-enforcement,” Arvind Ramakrishnan, principal Asia analyst at global risks analysis company Verisk Maplecroft, added.
Though government-instituted regulatory changes have made it easier for workers to form unions, for example, as of early this year, less than 10 percent of the more than 4,500 garment factories were estimated to have these employee organizations, Ramakrishnan said.
“With international attention on Bangladesh’s labor rights record seemingly fading, the government appears to be quietly returning to its policy imperative of sustaining the growth of the critical garments industry at the expense of basic labor rights protections,” he added.
