Activists say only 40 percent of employers comply with minimum wage regulations. Credit: Obaidul Arif/IPS

By Naimul Haq and Kanya D'Almeida
DHAKA/NEW YORK, Jun 10 2015 (IPS)

Some say they were beaten with iron bars. Others confess their families have been threatened with death. One pregnant woman was assaulted with metal curtain rods.

 These are not scenes typically associated with a place of work, but thousands of people employed in garment factories in Bangladesh have come to expect such brutality as a part of their daily lives.

Even if they don’t suffer physical assault, workers at the roughly 4,500 factories that form the nucleus of Bangladesh’s enormous garments industry almost certainly confront other injustices: unpaid overtime, sexual or verbal abuse, and unsafe and unsanitary working conditions.

The event that prompted the international outcry – the collapse of the Rana Plaza factory on the morning of Apr. 24, 2013, killing 1,100 people and injuring 2,500 more – was deemed one of the worst industrial accidents in modern history.

Government officials, powerful trade bodies and major foreign buyers of Bangladesh-made apparel promised to fix the gaping flaws in this sector that employs four million people and exports 24 billion dollars worth of merchandise every year.

Promises were made at every point along the supply chain that such a senseless tragedy would never again occur.

But a Human Rights Watch (HRW) report released on the eve of the two-year anniversary of the Rana Plaza disaster has found that, despite pledges made and some steps in the right direction, Bangladesh’s garments sector is still plagued with many ills that is making life for the 20 million people who depend directly or indirectly on the industry a waking nightmare.

Based on interviews with some 160 workers in 44 factories, predominantly dedicated to manufacturing garments sold by retailers in Australia, Europe and North America, the report found that safety standards are still low, workplace abuse is common, and union busting – as well as violence attacks and intimidation of union organisers – is the norm.

Still, there is a silver lining on the dark cloud: an international donor’s fund set up in 2013 under the aegis of the International Labour Organisation (ILO) recently reached its goal of raising 30 million dollars, which will be paid to victims and survivors of the 2013 tragedy.

In a statement on Jun. 9, 2015, ILO Director-General Guy Ryder stressed, “This is a milestone but we still have important business to deal with. We must now work together to ensure that accidents can be prevented in the future.”

Almost exactly two years ago, on the morning of Apr. 24, over 3,600 workers – 80 percent of them young women between the ages of 18 and 20 – refused to enter the Rana Plaza garment factory building in Dhaka, Bangladesh, because there were large ominous cracks in the walls. They were beaten with sticks and forced to enter.

Forty-five minutes later, the building collapsed, leaving 1,137 dead and over 2,500 injured – most of them women.

The Rana Plaza collapse is just one of a long series of workplace incidents around the world in which women have paid a high toll.

It is also one of the stories featured in the UN Women report Progress of the World’s Women 2015-2016: Transforming Economies, Realizing Rights, launched on Apr. 27.

All too often women fail to enjoy their rights because they are forced to fit into a ‘man’s world’, a world in which these rights are not at the heart of economies.
Coming 20 years after the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, China, which drew up an agenda to advance gender equality, Progress of the World’s Women 2015-2016 notes that while progress has since been made, “in an era of unprecedented global wealth, millions of women are trapped in low paid, poor quality jobs, denied even basic levels of health care, and water and sanitation.”

At the same time, notes the report, financial globalisation, trade liberalisation, the ongoing privatisation of public services and the ever-expanding role of corporate interests in the development process have shifted power relations in ways that undermine the enjoyment of human rights and the building of sustainable livelihoods.

Against this backdrop, all too often women fail to enjoy their rights because they are forced to fit into a ‘man’s world’, a world in which these rights are not at the heart of economies.

What this means in real terms is that, for example, at global level women are paid on average 24 percent less than men, and for women with children the gaps are even wider. Women are clustered into a limited set of under-valued occupations – such as domestic work – and almost half of them are not entitled to the minimum wage.

Even when women succeed in the workplace, they encounter obstacles not generally faced by their male counterparts. For example, in the European Union, 75 percent of women in management and higher professional positions and 61 percent of women in service sector occupations have experienced some form of sexual harassment in the workplace in their lifetimes.

The report makes the link between economic policy-making and human rights, calling for a far-reaching new policy agenda that can transform economies and make women’s rights a reality by moving forward towards “an economy that truly works for women, for the benefit of all.”

The ultimate aim is to create a virtuous cycle through the generation of decent work and gender-responsive social protection and social services, alongside enabling macroeconomic policies that prioritise investment in human beings and the fulfilment of social objectives.

Today, “our public resources are not flowing in the directions where they are most needed: for example, to provide safe water and sanitation, quality health care, and decent child and elderly care services,” says UN Women Executive Director Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka. “Where there are no public services, the deficit is borne by women and girls.”

According to Mlambo-Ngcuka, “this is a care penalty that unfairly punishes women for stepping in when the State does not provide resources and it affects billions of women the world over. We need policies that make it possible for both women and men to care for their loved ones without having to forego their own economic security and independence,” she added.

The report agrees that paid work can be a foundation for substantive equality for women, but only when it is compatible with women’s and men’s shared responsibility for unpaid care work; when it gives women enough time for leisure and learning; when it provides earnings that are sufficient to maintain an adequate standard of living; and when women are treated with respect and dignity at work.

Yet, this type of employment remains scarce, and economic policies in all regions are struggling to generate enough decent jobs for those who need them. On top of that, the range of opportunities available to women is limited by pervasive gender stereotypes and discriminatory practices within both households and labour markets. As a result, the vast majority of women still work in insecure, informal employment.

The reality is that women also still carry the burden of unpaid work in the home, which has been aggravated in recent years by austerity policies and cut-backs. To build more equitable and sustainable economies which work for both women and men, warns the report, “more of the same will not do.”

At a time when the global community is defining the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for the post-2015 era, the message from UN Women is that economic and social policies can contribute to the creation of stronger economies, and to more sustainable and more gender-equal societies, provided that they are designed and implemented with women’s rights at their centre.

Edited by Phil Harris    

By Kerry Kennedy
WASHINGTON, Jul 9 2014 (IPS)

Visiting Bangladesh has been a lifelong dream of mine, but all that I had heard about a people who love freedom so much that they have withstood great armies, famine and intractable poverty could not prepare me for what I’ve seen in the last three days.   The Bengali patriots’ courage and endurance in the face of the Pakistani army forty years ago is the stuff of legend in our family. I remember your great uncle Teddy (Kennedy) telling us about his visit to the Calcutta refugee camps, where tens of thousands lived not in tents but in sewer pipes.

Kerry Kennedy

In a small wooden room packed with women in bright saris, we met a proud shareholder of the Grameen Bank – ­the transformative micro-lending institution founded by Nobel Peace Prize laureate Muhammed Yunus ­– who borrowed 5,000 taka (about 80 dollars) and bought a rickshaw, and then 20,000 taka (240 dollars) and bought a cow, and then 30,000 taka (480 dollars) and bought land.

Thanks to her hard work and the Grameen Bank, she now has a house full of furniture, a field full of food, water, a working toilet and a television set. She saves 100 taka a month, and this year she will receive 100,000 taka (750 dollars) from her savings.

We met a store owner and her husband, who borrowed from Grameen to buy solar panels, which have allowed them to expand their storefront and provide light to the brick house they share with three siblings and their in-laws. “I hope we can take inspiration from the people of Bangladesh and rededicate ourselves to democracy and freedom, knowing that the price may be high, but the sacrifice is well worthwhile” – Kerry Kennedy, President of the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights

We met a young woman on a Grameen scholarship who will be the first woman in her family to go to college. She is majoring in computer science and plans to start a business in the Information Technology sector that will transform her neighbourhood.

We met ten women who sit on the board of the Grameen Bank, all borrowers. They’re angry at the government and concerned for the future of the bank. The government recently ousted Muhammed Yunus from the board of his own bank on the pretence that he had overstayed the mandatory retirement age of sixty.

Then, finding no other legal way to do so, the government cajoled the rubber-stamp Parliament to change a banking law for the specific purpose of ousting the impoverished women from the Grameen board and replacing them with ruling party toadies, who, the women fear, will transform the multibillion-dollar bank that has helped so many escape poverty into just another slush fund for kleptocrats to draw upon.

We met a dozen women, many of them lawyers, all of them leaders of NGOs that address pressing issues like indigenous rights, due process of law, violence against women, dowry battles, rape and environmental justice. Many have been arrested, and many live under daily threat. One said her husband had been “disappeared” in apparent retaliation for her work. They are scared of the nation’s security forces, which are known for kidnappings, torture and extrajudicial executions.

And yet they wake up in the morning, kiss their children and their husbands, and return to work, a daily show of quiet courage.

We met a woman who worked at the collapsed Rana Plaza sweatshop who said she never wants to work in the clothing industry again. I met another who said the same thing but, he added, “we are poor, and we must work.”

They were among a crowd lining the hallway and sitting at intake tables at the offices of the Rana Plaza Claims Administration, the non-profit group charged with addressing reparations for the victims of the Rana Plaza disaster [which left more than 1,000 dead after its collapse in April 2013].

It is an impressive operation, manned by a team of dedicated professionals in labour, law and computer science, intent on making pay-outs to every single victim for physical and psychological injuries and to the scores of dependents who lost the family breadwinner in the tragedy. They have 17 million dollars to hand out, and calculate the need will be closer to 40 million dollars, but the fund is voluntary and no law compels the brands to pay their fair share. While some have been generous, too many others have refused to participate, because no law compels them to do so.

We met Adil Rahman Khan, who has organised a team of 400-plus human rights monitors and defenders across the country to investigate and report on violations of voting rights; on crackdowns on free speech and assembly; on torture, extrajudicial execution, disappearances; and, moreover, ­on holding the government accountable for its failures to protect the freedom that the Bangladeshi people won at such great cost 40 years ago.

Adil seeks accountability in a country where 197 anti-corruption officers are presently under investigation for corruption themselves. For his actions, Adil lives under constant threat of death. Last year, after issuing a report documenting a massacre by government forces of 61 protestors, he was taken away and held without trial for 62 days in a filthy cell, ridden with bedbugs and rotten food.

And, of course, we met with my dear friend  [Muhammed] Yunus. He invited us to come to Dhaka for Social Business Day, where people from scores of countries across the globe gathered to share their designs and experiences with creating businesses which seek not profits for shareholders but solutions to problems like housing or food access.

I have always been struck by the sense of peace and joy he conveys.  But I never appreciated how incredible that was until I saw him in Bangladesh.  He is under unremitting pressure from a government that seeks to destroy all he has given his life to build. And yet he endures, and invites us to somehow find peace amidst the chaos in our lives and find our joy through service.

What an amazing place, what an amazing country.  As we in America celebrate our own Independence Day these days, I hope we can take inspiration from the people of Bangladesh and rededicate ourselves to democracy and freedom, knowing that the price may be high, but the sacrifice is well worthwhile. (END/IPS COLUMNIST SERVICE)

* Kerry Kennedy is also a member of the IPS Board of Directors.

Excerpt:

Hasina, one of the 2,438 Rana Plaza workers that came out alive, by the remains of the factory on Sep. 25, 2013. Credit: Robert Stefanicki/IPS

By Carey L. Biron
WASHINGTON, Apr 24 2014 (IPS)

A coalition of 134 institutional investors are calling for global corporations to institute new transparency policies throughout their supply chains and to step up assistance to survivors and families still suffering a year after a major fire led to the collapse of a garments factory in Bangladesh, despite repeated warnings from workers.

The investors hail from a dozen countries and collectively manage more than four trillion dollars in assets. They are also pledging to strengthen their own pressure on international brands, urging them to facilitate a permanent strengthening of the voice of subcontracted garments workers in Bangladesh and beyond.“Big institutions are looking at this as a bellwether for where supply chain responsibility issues are going – looking at the risk to companies but also at the risk to workers.” -- David Schilling

Apparel brands and retailers need to “use the full measure of their influence to respect and protect the human rights of workers throughout their global supply chains, and to provide remedies when those rights have been violated,” the investors stated in an open letter released Thursday, the one-year anniversary of the Rana Plaza factory fire that killed more than 1,130 people.

“[W]e hope lessons learned from Rana Plaza and the new multi-stakeholder model in practice in Bangladesh will inform supply chain practices globally.”

The collapse, which took place on the outskirts of Dhaka, was one of the worst industrial disasters in modern history. Yet the new letter and related activity are highlighting the potentially potent influence that responsible investors can exert in pushing global brands to adopt policies that could influence labour standards and transparency approaches across the globe.

“Investors have a responsibility to be active owners of the companies that they hold in their portfolios,” David Schilling, senior programme director at the Interfaith Centre on Corporate Responsibility (ICCR), a U.S. coalition that organised Thursday’s letter.

“It’s important for our members and other institutional investors to make sure that we’re using our responsibility to respect human rights as institutions, to encourage not just palliative but systemic changes.”

The Rana Plaza collapse, alongside a string of previous disasters in the country’s garments sector, has focused a unique global spotlight on Bangladesh over the past year. Schilling and others say the result is a nascent model that could have ramifications for worker safety and rights far beyond Bangladeshi borders.

“There aren’t many other places in the world where labour and companies are working to really solve some of these systemic problems, and the approach being used there is being looked at as an emerging model for supply chain accountability elsewhere,” Schilling says.

“Big institutions are looking at this as a bellwether for where supply chain responsibility issues are going – looking at the risk to companies but also at the risk to workers.”

Twenty-five-year-old Razia, pictured here in the hospital on May 4, 2013, survived the collapse, but was permanently maimed. Credit: Naimul Haq/IPS

Corporate ‘landmark’

Bangladesh’s garments sector is among the largest in the world, and constitutes a critical part of the country’s economy and development. Over the past decade, it has attracted many of the most well-known apparel manufacturers, drawn to a particularly low-cost sourcing option.

Given the visibility of these brands, following the Rana Plaza collapse these multinational companies came under intense pressure to collectively institute stricter safety and labour guidelines in their subcontracted factories.

What emerged were two separate initiatives. The first was a fire and safety standards accord that received wide backing in particular from European manufacturers, currently covering around 160 companies and inspecting some 1,600 factories in Bangladesh.

The accord has also received significant support from labour advocates, in particular for being legally binding and for prominently incorporating collaboration by labour unions and civil society. The accord has now begun releasing its first reports, and the government has already closed down 10 factories on those recommendations.

Yet several prominent U.S. and Canadian manufacturers expressed concern over the accord, particularly regarding how legal disputes would be resolved. Around two-dozen North American companies subsequently created a voluntary alliance, responsible for oversight of nearly 700 factories.

Despite their differences, these two initiatives have since started to work towards harmonising their work, facilitated by the United Nations. Yet concerns have arisen over whether the Bangladeshi government has the political will necessary to force through important changes, particularly around institutionalising workers’ voice and further raising the minimum wage.

“Rana Plaza has been a landmark event in the history of corporate responsibility, particularly in the garment sector but also beyond,” Bennett Freeman, senior vice-president for sustainability research and policy at Calvert Investments, a responsible asset management company, told IPS.

“What it tells us is two things: one, that corporate responsibility on its own is insufficient without government responsibility. And two: the factory monitoring and inspection system that has been used for over two decades has really come under fundamental challenge.

Calvert is a founding member of the Interfaith Centre on Corporate Responsibility, and Freeman was one of the signatories of the new letter from institutional investors. He says that additional transparency of supply chains is of critical importance.

In the months after the Rana Plaza disaster, Freeman and his researchers began to look into how many companies disclose the countries where they source their products. He says the results were “astonishingly” low.

So, in July Calvert began to urge companies to engage in greater disclosure. Those that refused have faced shareholder resolutions on the issue.

“Tragic events like Rana Plaza, which may have potential reputational and legal damage, are prompting investors to take an even closer look at where countries are sourcing,” Michael Lombardo, Freeman’s colleague and a senior sustainability analyst at Calvert, told IPS. “Companies must take steps to be more transparent regarding country-level sourcing disclosure.”

Industry-wide responsibility

A “commitment to transparency at all stages” constitutes a key recommendation in the new ICCR letter. Other such forward-looking structural changes include full remediation once factories are inspected and the creation of new health and safety committees including both workers and management.

Yet the investors and others are also highlighting the still-urgent need for assistance for victims and families of those who were killed in the Rana Plaza collapse.

A 40-million-dollar trust fund for survivors and families has been set up under the auspices of the United Nations, and initial payments went to families earlier this week. Yet as of Wednesday just a third of this money had actually been pledged, according to the International Labour Organisation.

“Donating to the trust fund is not a question of who was in Rana Plaza at what time,” ICCR’s Schilling says.

“This is an equal responsibility for the whole industry. If you are an apparel company who has worked in Bangladesh, the fact is that you have benefited from this system.”

Hasina, one of the 2,438 Rana Plaza workers that came out alive, by the remains of the factory. Credit: Robert Stefanicki/IPS.

By Robert Stefanicki
DHAKA, Oct 30 2013 (IPS)

Six months after the worst man-made disaster in Bangladesh’s history, safety conditions in garment factories have a chance to improve. But not the lives of survivors or the victims’ next of kin.

On Apr. 24, the collapse of Rana Plaza factory building took 1,133 lives of mostly female workers. The disaster was too big to ignore. The unprecedented scale of the tragedy shocked people the world over, many of them dressed in clothes made in Bangladesh on request of giants such as Tesco, Carrefour, Benetton or Walmart.

Today, the site in the Dhaka suburb is enclosed by a barbed wire and metal fence covered with banners. ‘How long do we have to wait for compensation for the death of our parents ?’ asks one.“Foreign clients should not avoid responsibility, even if the workers’ imagination is too narrow to blame them."

What was left of Rana Plaza can be seen from the top floor of a neighbouring building. Debris has been cleared, but the bodies of two cars stick out of a vast pool of mud water.

“They were parked in an underground garage,” Hassan, one of the volunteer rescuers told IPS. His team, he said, took some 400 people out of the rubble.

A survivor, Hasina, pulled her scarf up showing a deformed right arm with extensive scars.

“That day I came to work at 8:30. I heard from my colleagues about the cracks in the wall. We did not want to enter the building, but the supervisor forced us,” she told IPS. “Then the power was gone and soon after it happened.”

A piece of the ceiling pinned Hasina down. She was rescued the same evening. Today the young woman can barely move her hand, and is unable to work.

Hasina received compensation of 36,000 taka (450 dollars). The Bangladesh Garment Manufactures & Exporters Association (BGMEA), a powerful guild, promised to pay survivors a salary, so Hasina still gets 10,000 taka a month.

She is undergoing rehabilitation. Treatment is free, but she complains that commuting by rickshaw costs 20 taka each time – an amount that adds up.

The Rana Plaza tragedy resulted in an outpouring of commitments from governments, local and global institutions, groups and individuals.

According to some reports, each family of the deceased and seriously injured received up to a million taka – but IPS did not meet anybody who got anything close to that amount.

The compensation was paid mostly by the government of Bangladesh. Irish retailer Primark (one of the brands whose clothes were produced at Rana Plaza) paid a short-term allowance of 16,000 taka (200 dollars) to each victim, in what unwittingly made Primark the most recognisable brand in Bangladesh.

Long-term compensation is still under negotiation. The bad omen was that in a September meeting on this issue organised in Geneva with the support of the United Nations International Labour Organisation (ILO), only nine of the 29 companies that ordered production at Rana Plaza were present.

With 3.6 million people working in the garment industry, Bangladesh is the world’s second-largest clothing exporter after China. About 60 percent of exports go to Europe and 23 percent to the United States. The minimum wage for a garment worker is 38 dollars a month, though after a massive street demonstration recently, an increase is imminent.

Yet the survivors are far from blaming the West for what happened at Rana Plaza. Usually they do not know which brand made an order for clothes they were sewing.

Abdulrahman, who lost his wife Sharifa in the collapse (he got a total of 136,000 taka, or 1,700 dollars, in compensation plus a rickshaw from local NGO Karmojibi Nari), does not even blame the owner of the building, since “he did not order the factory owners to place the power generators on the upper floor instead of on the ground floor.” It was the generators’ vibrations that caused the collapse.

Abdulrahman blames only the factory owners, who along with the building’s owner Sohel Rana, are under arrest, awaiting trial.

What penalty is appropriate for Sharifa’s death? “I don’t want the manufacturer to be hanged. A life sentence would be enough. And he should apologise,” the mourning widower said.

“Foreign clients should not avoid responsibility, even if the workers’ imagination is too narrow to blame them,” said Dr. Khondaker Moazzem of the Centre for Policy Dialogue in Dhaka.

According to the researcher, who co-authored the report ‘100 Days of Rana Plaza Tragedy’, the compensation paid to the victims so far is too small. “According to some independent calculations the injured workers should get an average of more than two million taka.”

Families of the missing are in the worst situation. So far, 332 workers have not been identified or found, and their relatives are in a limbo, with no right to any compensation.

For the garments industry, Rana Plaza seems to have been a wake-up call. Six months on, new deals to improve safety of the workers are in place.

One is called ‘The accord on fire and factory safety in Bangladesh’. It was signed (under pressure from customers and public opinion) by more than 100 retailers and brands, mostly from Europe. Before the end of this year they plan to start “independent” inspections at about 1,600 factories used by them.

In another measure, employees will be trained to exercise their rights, including the right to refuse entry into a building considered unsafe.

‘The alliance for Bangladesh worker safety’ has been set up, and 23 brands, mostly from the U.S., have joined. This factory safety deal is seen as less rigorous than the other accord because its signatories are not legally bound by their commitments, and it is not linked to unions or workers’ rights groups.

Not least, the government in Dhaka and the ILO, with the backing of the British and Dutch governments, have launched a 25-million-dollar plan to provide technical expertise for building and fire safety assessments in the country’s garment trade over the next three-and-a-half years.

Amid doubts on the supply of professional and incorruptible inspectors for the job, individual brands have already inspected more than 500 factories themselves.

Since the Rana Plaza disaster, the authorities in Bangladesh are more sensitive to any breach of safety rules and are keen to close unsafe factories as never before. The manufacturers themselves prefer to do that rather than to risk a new tragedy. The BGMEA has so far inspected 620 plants and ordered the closure of 20.

Everybody in Bangladesh agrees that such a tragedy must never be repeated. But the way ahead is far. Three weeks ago, a fire ripped through the Aswad garments factory in a Dhaka suburb. Ten workers died.

A memorial set up by the Communist Party of Bangladesh at the Rana Plaza factory in Dhaka where 1,133 workers died in April. Credit: Robert Stefanicki/IPS

By Robert Stefanicki
DHAKA, Oct 2 2013 (IPS)

On the industrial outskirts of Dhaka, which is dotted with big and small clothes factories, thousands of workers took to the streets demanding a minimum wage rise.

Last week, protestors blocked roads, set factories on fire and clashed with police, who responded with rubber bullets and tear gas. Some 200 apparel plants – which make clothing for some of the world’s top retailers such as H&M and Carrefour – had to remain closed for a week.

The last time the government raised the minimum wage for the garments sector was in 2010. Now the workers are demanding an increase from 3,000 taka (38 dollars) to 8,114 taka (100 dollars). That is more or less the price that a pair of brand name jeans made in Bangladesh sell for after it reaches the shopping mall shelf in Warsaw or Berlin.“Western consumers are partly responsible for the low level of wages in Bangladesh.” -- Reaz bin Mahmood, vice-president of the Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association

The employers agreed a 20 percent hike, increasing salaries to 3,600 taka or about 46 dollars. But most commentators considered the increase a mockery and this offer led to riots.

In Bangladesh the minimum wage is fixed for each sector separately. The differences are substantial: transport workers or shop attendants get twice as much as the average wage for three million Bangladeshi garment makers.

The latter are at the bottom not just nationally, but globally. According to a study by the Japan External Trade Organisation released in December, only in Myanmar do garment workers earn less.

In neighbouring India their wages (in dollars) are twice as high as in Bangladesh, in China five times as high.

The minimum wage is theoretical, everyone takes overtime. IPS interviewed some women working as sewing machine operators who positioned their monthly earnings at 8,000 to 9,000 taka (about 102 to 115 dollars). Usually their workday stretches over 11 to 12 hours.

But raising the bottom threshold is important, because this means an increase for everyone.

According to trade union leader Masood Rana, the wage demands are partly a result of a growing awareness among the workers. After the hype over the collapse of the Rana Plaza factory building in April that took the lives of 1,133 workers, workers began to realise how much Western consumers pay for clothes made by their hands.

But why were the demonstrations so violent? “This is because the protests are spontaneous, there is no leader,” Rana told IPS.

Reaz bin Mahmood, vice-president of the Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association (BGMEA) – and a factory owner himself – presents a different theory: protests are the work of political provocateurs. He did not explain whom he meant.

“This problem cannot be settled on the streets,” Mahmood told IPS. “There is a government panel working on new minimum wage level, expected to announce the results in November. But I’m afraid that this may not happen if the protests continue.”

Various payment models have been proposed. “We have carried out an economic analysis of the garment worker’s cost of living, with the assumption that his or her pay should cover the consumption of their family,” Dr. Khondaker Moazzem, additional research director at the Centre for Policy Dialogue (CDP) in Dhaka, told IPS. “And we came out with three options.”

The first is the poverty line that makes the pay 6,444 taka (80 dollars). CDP rejected this variant as unacceptable.

The second option was based on the “aspirational level”, which provides that the worker eats well and enjoys life, in which case the monthly wage should be 17,800 taka (220 dollars). This too was rejected, because the minimum wage cannot exceed the average salary in the country.

The third option, based on the current expenditure level, was worked out at 8,200 taka – which is exactly what the workers are demanding.

“After we sent this recommendation to the government, I received numerous calls from manufacturers,” smiled Moazzem. “They said they were ready to give me some factories and let me try to make a profit with such exorbitant salaries.”

“Costs of production increase every year by 13 percent,” said Mahmood of BGMEA. “Bangladesh has to import cotton, India has its own. The currencies of India, Indonesia and Turkey are losing their value, the Bangladeshi taka remains strong, so we lose competitiveness.

“The government does not support us: there are frequent power outages, and travel from Dhaka to Chittagong port should take six hours instead of 26.”

To this list Moazzem of CDP adds the high cost of loans, difficulties with buying land for investment, and political instability.

But the apparel plants may not lose competitiveness as easily as the entrepreneurs lament. The prices of clothes are down and production costs are up, but this is compensated by increased efficiency.

“I recognise that my workers should get paid more, but for that the retailers must pay me more,” Mahmood said, explaining that the price is decisive in gaining contracts. “Western consumers are partly responsible for the low level of wages in Bangladesh.”

According to Moazzem, retailers make the most from clothes made in Bangladesh: 55 to 65 percent. About 25 percent is the cost of material. The rest, about 15 percent, is divided evenly between workers and employers.

It is not certain that the workers will get what they want. Shipping minister Shahjahan Khan has openly supported their demands, but the government is believed to be on the side of manufacturers. Nobody wants to harm the goose that lays the golden eggs – garment production provides Bangladesh with 80 percent of its export earnings, 22 billion dollars annually.

What is more, 30 percent of MPs in Bangladesh are businessmen, mostly from the apparel industry. They sponsor both major parties.

After talks with the leaders of more than 40 trade unions, Bangladeshi garment factory owners have promised to raise wages as soon as a government panel sets a figure, without bargaining.

Most commentators predict that the new minimum wage to be announced soon will be set on a “compromise” level.

Twenty-five-year-old Razia is one of 2,500 survivors of the factory collapse in Bangladesh. Credit: Naimul Haq/IPS

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Jun 27 2013 (IPS)

Citing Bangladesh’s alleged failure to respect international labour rights, U.S. President Barack Obama Thursday suspended trade benefits for the South Asian country’s exports under the Generalised System of Preferences (GSP).

The move came two months after the collapse of a building, the Rana Plaza, in Dhaka that killed more than 1,200 textile and garment workers.

The disaster, which followed last November’s fire that killed 112 workers at the Tazreen garment factor, drew unprecedented attention to labour conditions in Bangladesh’s fast-growing apparel industry and to the major western retailers that are its chief customers.

“I have determined that it is appropriate to suspend Bangladesh’s designation as a beneficiary developing country under the GSP program because it is not taking steps to afford internationally recognised worker rights to workers in the country,” Obama, who is currently on a tour of Africa, said in a statement issued by the White House.

“The recent tragedies that needlessly took the lives of over 1,200 Bangladeshi garment factory workers have served to highlight some of the serious shortcomings in worker rights and workplace safety standards in Bangladesh,” said U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) Michael Froman after the White House announcement.

He noted that Washington would begin “new discussions with the government of Bangladesh regarding steps to improve the worker rights environment in Bangladesh so that GSP benefits can be restored and tragedies like the Rana Plaza building collapse and Tazreen Fashion factory fire can be prevented”.

A broad indirect impact

The direct impact of Thursday’s decision, which followed a multi-year USTR review initiated by U.S. labour unions that have long complained about working conditions in Bangladesh, is likely to be minimal, since the country’s apparel exports – its biggest industry by far – are not covered by Washington’s GSP programme.

“GSP doesn’t cover sensitive products like apparel,” said Dan Anthony of the Coalition for GSP, a lobby group for U.S. companies that benefit from GSP, which provides about 750 million dollars a year in tariff relief for products from developing countries. Last year, importers of Bangladeshi products received about 35 million dollars in GSP benefits.

Of that total, the tobacco sector was the largest beneficiary, accounting for over 11 million dollars in exports. Exports of golf equipment, porcelain and china hotel and restaurant tableware, and plastic bags each received around five million dollars in GSP benefits, according to Anthony.

While the total represented less than one percent of the more than four billion dollars in apparel goods imported to the United States from Bangladesh last year, the indirect effects of the GSP suspension are likely to be much greater, according to labour activists and their supporters.

“The decision to suspend trade benefits sends an important message to our trading partners,” according to a statement released by the Richard Trumka, the head of the AFL-CIO, the largest U.S. trade confederation which initiated the government’s review of Bangladesh’s labour conditions more than six years ago.

“Countries that benefit from preferential trade programmes must comply with their terms. Countries that tolerate dangerous and even deadly – working conditions and deny basic workers’ rights, especially the right to freedom of association, will risk losing preferential access to the U.S. market,” he said.

Others stressed that the decision will exert renewed pressure on U.S. apparel companies to adhere to binding agreements regarding their responsibility to improve and oversee working conditions in the garment factories, including the Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh (Safety Accord) that has been signed by several dozen mainly European retailers, such as H&M, Primark and the Benetton Group, since it was concluded last month.

“While the decision is an important step by the U.S. government, the decision alone may not ensure that action will be taken to end the epidemic of senseless deaths of Bangladesh’s garment workers,” said Liana Foxvog, organising director at the International Labour Rights Forum (ILRF) here.

“As a next step, we ask the U.S. government to call on U.S. companies like Gap and Walmart to make legally binding commitments to invest in the future of Bangladesh garment workers by joining the Safety Accord,” she said.

Most major U.S. companies have so far declined to sign the accord due to concerns that disputes could wind up before U.S. courts that could grant huge damages for non-compliance.

Safety considerations

Bangladesh is currently the world’s second biggest apparel exporter, with an estimated 5,000 textile plants. Since last November, more than 1,500 workers have died in fires and the Rana Plaza collapse.

In documents submitted to the USTR, the Bangladeshi government itself admitted that the rapid expansion of the textile industry “has outstripped the pace of our progress” in ensuring adequate regulation and oversight.

For all of the country’s plants to meet minimum safety standards, improvements will cost on the order of about three billion dollars – or an average of 600,000 dollars per factory, according to labour activists who worked on the Safety Accord. That accord requires signatories to pay for all of the improvements.

The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday that major U.S. retailers, including Wal-Mart and Gap, are expected to reach their own accord next month that would establish a 50-million-dollar, five-year fund to support the needed improvements.

Unlike the Safety Accord, the proposed plan would strictly limit the circumstances under which any disputes could be taken up by U.S. courts and limit the liability they could face there.

Activists consider the U.S. plan, which is being negotiated with the help of the Bipartisan Policy Centre, to be inadequate in almost every respect.

Last week, 113 organisations sent a letter to Secretary of State John Kerry urging the administration to support the Safety Accord. Public demonstrations against the recalcitrant companies are being organised in front of their stores in 30 U.S. cities as part of the International Day of Action to End Deathtraps.

“No one will want to wear clothing that is ‘Made in Bangladesh’ if it is made on the blood of workers,” said Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman Robert Menendez, who held a hearing on labour issues in Bangladesh earlier this month. “It’s time for American industry to show leadership and work with their European counterparts on a global standard for safety.”

Labour activists stress that safety is not the only challenge workers in Bangladesh face. Threats and violence against union organisers are also common.

Last month, the International Labour Organisation and the World Bank rejected Bangladesh’s application to join their “Better Work” programme, which carries out unannounced inspections of textile factories, complaining that the countries labour laws were too weak and repression against union organisers too great to warrant the country’s membership.

Garment worker at a Bangladesh factory. Credit: B A Sujan/Map/IPS

By Kalinga Seneviratne
SYDNEY, May 25 2013 (IPS)

Australia’s largest textile workers’ union and activist groups are up in arms that the country’s leading retail chains, who source most of their fashion labels from Bangladesh, are refusing to sign a legally binding accord that will help to improve labour and safety standards in Bangladeshi garment factories.

Local Bangladeshi unions and international human rights groups have approached international clothing manufacturers to join the global initiative for improved building and safety conditions following the collapse of the eight-storey Rana Plaza on Apr. 24 that killed almost 1,200 factory workers.

“Companies that search the globe to find the lowest labour costs cannot claim ignorance (of) the consequences of that decision.” -- Michele O’Neil
As rescue teams pulled corpses and survivors from the debris in the town of Savar, about 25 kilometres from Bangladesh’s capital, Dhaka, they also found the charred remains of clothing labels bearing the names of major Western retailers like Walmart, H&M, Gap, Primark and many others who outsource their production to Bangladesh to avail themselves of cheap labour in the impoverished country of 150 million.

As a result, the proposed Bangladesh Building and Fire Safety Agreement requires companies to conduct independent safety inspections, make their reports on factory conditions public and cover the costs for needed repairs.

It also requires them to stop doing business with any factory that refuses to make safety upgrades and to allow workers and their unions to have a voice in factory safety.

Major Australian retail chains that source garments from Bangladesh, like Kmart, Target, David Jones and Big W, have not been connected with the Rana Plaza tragedy; but in the spirit of creating a global culture of ethical production, labour unions and rights groups like Oxfam Australia are urging them to sign the agreement.

According to their annual reports, Target Australia’s total revenue in 2012 was about 70 billion dollars, while Kmart, which runs 170 retail outlets across Australia, had revenues of roughly 3.8 billion that same year. Big W (a branch of Woolworths) increased their sales revenues by almost five percent last year to 53 billion dollars.

“Those companies need to (publicise) what they’re making in Bangladesh and they need to be completely transparent about their supply chain,” said Michele O’Neil, national secretary of the Textile, Clothing and Footwear Union of Australia (TCFU).

To date, “No Australian company has agreed to publish the location of their supplier factories,” Oxfam Australia’s Labour Rights Coordinator Daisy Gardener told IPS.

“This is important because it would allow independent verification of conditions by researchers, NGOs or unions who could visit the factory site and speak to the workers about wages, health and safety and other issues.”

She said it was “important that all Australian companies sourcing from Bangladesh” sign onto the accord, which gives workers the right to refuse dangerous working conditions.

It is possible that if the accord had existed prior to Apr. 24, the death toll would have been significantly lower: days before the disaster, huge cracks had appeared on the ceilings and beams of the building, which was intended to house just five floors.

Despite these clear signs, and warnings from engineers that a collapse might be inevitable, factory managers threatened workers with dismissal if they stayed away due to safety concerns.

Thirty international companies, including the Italian fashion brand Benetton, Spanish retailer Mango and British retailer Marks & Spencer, have so far initialed the binding agreement, along with other big names like Tesco and PVH (the parent company of Tommy Hilfiger and Calvin Klein).

In an angry email response to IPS’ queries, Kmart’s general manager of corporate affairs and sustainability, Tracie Walker, said, “We have not refused to sign the accord.” She referred IPS to the company’s “strong ethical sourcing code”, which is supported by “very stringent policies.”

Kmart says that none of the recent tragedies in Bangladesh occurred in factories that make clothes for them. The company says it organised a forum with its suppliers and auditors, and has also visited factories there.

“One of the key outcomes of the audit process was the identification of ‘high risk buildings’, which are those located above market places and factories located in multi-storey buildings with shared ownership,” the company noted. “Kmart no longer places orders with factories in these high risk locations.”

But activists like O’Neill do not believe that “brand-specific codes, self-regulation and private sector audits” will do the job, echoing activists in the U.S. who say refusals to sign the accord amount to admissions that companies “do not want to be held accountable for workers’ safety.”

According to O’Neill, only consumers have the power to force retail chains to sign the labour accord.

“The results of not having strong laws and unions is clear: look no further than Rana Plaza,” O’Neill noted in a statement on TCFU’s website. “Companies that search the globe to find the lowest labour costs cannot claim ignorance (of) the consequences of that decision.”

About 49 percent of Bangladesh’s population lives below the poverty line. Desperation drives many, particularly women, to seek work in one of the country’s 5,000 factories, taking on 10-hour shifts, seven days a week, in exchange for little more than 30 dollars a month.

Speaking on ABC national radio, Bret Inder, a development economist at Melbourne’s Monash University, said that Bangladesh has grown to be the world’s second biggest garments manufacturer precisely because it offers such a cheap workforce.

“Western buyers have been contracting out to producers all over, particularly in Southeast Asia and South Asia, moving from one country to the next (in search of) the cheapest labour,” he noted.

“There’ll be another country waiting in the queue if Bangladesh prices itself out of the market. To make an accord that is specific to Bangladesh doesn’t make any sense at all,” he added.

Others argue that Bangladesh is a special case that deserves targeted policies. Since 2005, at least 1,800 garment workers have perished in factory fires and building collapses, according to research by the International Labour Rights Forum.

The incident on Apr. 24, the industry’s worst disaster in history, came just months after a fire at a different factory, in November 2012, killed 112 workers.

Oxfam believes that the Better Factories Cambodia project, through which Cambodia gets easy access to U.S. markets in exchange for improved working conditions in the garment sector, may be a good model for Australia to follow.

“There have been international calls for garment companies to ensure they are paying factories enough to ensure workers (receive) a living wage,” notes Oxfam’s Gardener. “The Australian government can help educate Australian businesses about their responsibility to uphold the human rights of the people working in their supply chains.”

She added that the labour cost compared to the overall retail price is very small, sometimes just a few cents per garment, meaning Australian retail companies are able to pay their suppliers more without it having a significant impact on their bottom dollar.

Twenty-five-year-old Razia is one of 2,500 survivors of the factory collapse in Bangladesh. Credit: Naimul Haq/IPS

By AJ Correspondents
DOHA, May 23 2013 (Al Jazeera)

Those responsible for the Bangladesh building collapse that killed more than 1,000 garment workers should be given life in prison, a government-appointed committee has said.

The investigating committee, appointed by Bangladesh’s interior ministry, recommended life in prison for the owner of the five factories based in the building on the outskirts of Dhaka.

The Apr. 24 collapse of the Rana Plaza building, the deadliest garment industry accident in history, highlighted the hazardous working conditions in Bangladesh’s 20 billion dollar garment industry and the lack of safety for millions of workers, who earn as little as 38 dollars a month.

The committee found that the ground on which the Rana Plaza was built was unfit for a multi-storey building and the construction itself was “extremely poor quality”.

“A portion of the building was constructed on land which had been a body of water before and was filled with rubbish.” Khandaker Mainuddin Ahmed, the committee head, told the Association Press news agency on Thursday.

Ahmed said Sohel Rana, owner of Rana Plaza was “the main culprit, and because of him 1,127 people have died.”

The report found that Rana ignored construction codes by converting the originally designed six-storey building meant for a shopping mall and commercial space into an eight-storey factory complex where over 3,000 labourers toiled.

Khandaker said Rana, and the factory owners, four of whom have been arrested, forced employees to go to work on Apr. 24 despite cracks which appeared in the building the day before.

“They threatened the workers that they would be fired and that their salaries would be cut if they refused to go to work.”

The committee also said the owners used generators in upper floors, defying building regulations. Combined with other industrial machinery the weight of the generators triggered the collapse.

New safety reforms

A U.S. delegation is to arrive on Sunday led by Wendy Sherman, the State Department’s under secretary for political affairs. They will meet officials from the Bangladeshi government.

“They’ll talk about labour law reforms,” U.S, ambassador Dan Mozena said.

“They’ll talk about fire safety standards, a minimum standard for every factory, and they’ll talk about minimum structural soundness standards.”

If the proposals are accepted, “it will become the largest ‘better work’ programme in history,” Mozena said.

The Bangladeshi government has already pledged to tighten factory safety inspections and make it easier for workers to form unions and set up a panel to raise wages for the three million garment workers.

Mozena said there were still “some outstanding issues” to be addressed, without elaborating.

Poor wages and repeated fatal accidents have led to a string of protests in the main garment-manufacturing hubs, halting shipments and forcing some retailers to divert orders to other countries.

More than 2,500 people were rescued after the disaster and the committee has urged the government to provide them with free medical treatment.

*Published under an agreement with Al Jazeera.

Many of the workers who survived the factory collapse in Bangladesh have lost their limbs. Credit: Naimul Haq/IPS

By Naimul Haq
DHAKA, May 20 2013 (IPS)

“It was dark and hot with choking dust all around. The air was filled with the smell of decomposing corpses,” recalled Nasima, a 24-year-old factory worker who spent four days buried under the rubble of an eight-storey building that collapsed in a suburb of Bangladesh’s capital Dhaka last month.

The young woman recounted the terror that she and four fellow female workers experienced as they lay beneath glass and concrete, just “inches” from death. Rescue teams found them sandwiched between the fifth and sixth floors of the massive Rana Plaza that had housed five garment factories.

“I will resort to begging if I have to, but I’m not working in a garments factory ever again." - Mariam, a 25-year-old survivor of the Rana Plaza tragedy.
Nasima told IPS she was “too scared” to remember all the details of those 96 hours. “I saw my colleagues die, just a few yards from me, one after the other.” Her only indication that they were dead was when she could no longer hear their voices calling out to her in the dark.

Nasima had joined Ether Garments, one of the many companies housed in Rana Plaza, only 20 days before the tragedy, Bangladesh’s worst industrial accident, which killed 1,127 workers according to the latest count.

While families searched desperately for loved ones in the ruins in the town of Savar, 25 kilometres from Dhaka, reports of negligence and lack of workplace safety emerged. It became clear that factory owners had been warned of a possible collapse of the building that was only legally permitted to house five floors.

As survivors came to and began to speak out, they reported that management personnel had ignored recommendations by engineers to keep factories shut on Apr. 24, going so far as to threaten workers with dismissal if they failed to report for duty as usual.

The revelation sparked international outrage and shed light on the inner workings of Bangladesh’s garments sector, the country’s largest foreign exchange earner, which brings in about 20 billion dollars a year.

Multinational retailers like H&M, Gap, Walmart and Primark, which have outsourced most of their production to Bangladesh to take advantage of cheap, mostly female, labour, came under fire for failing to enforce safety standards.

While these accusations are not new, rights groups hope this latest tragedy will jolt the industry into implementing better labour laws and adhering to safety standards.

They say the roughly 2,500 rescued workers, many of them women, are living proof that Bangladesh must not repeat the mistakes that led to the Savar tragedy.

Living proof of negligence

Speaking to IPS from her hospital bed in the National Institute of Traumatology & Orthopaedic Rehabilitation (NITOR), 19-year-old Shapla, whose left arm was so badly injured that it had to be amputated on the site, recalled surviving for several hours squeezed between the second and third stories of the building, “with blood and corpses all around.”

Shapla’s husband, Mehedul, who worked as a sewing operator on the same floor, told IPS he survived by sheer luck, as he had been at the back of building at the moment the massive structure pitched forward.

Most of those working at the front of the building were crushed under the full weight of falling concrete slabs and crumbling walls.

Others, like 21-year-old Razia, say it is too painful to go on. “Someone give me poison. I want to die,” she cried out in the hospital ward where she and 121 other survivors are being treated free of cost.

She told IPS she and a few other girls had been “gossiping about the previous day’s decision to keep the factory open,” despite large cracks appearing on the pillars the day before. The next minute she heard what sounded like a huge explosion; then everything went dark.

For the next 14 hours, she struggled to breathe through the thick dust that hung around her.

In the hospital bed beside her lies Shamsul Alam, a 28-year-old quality inspector whose doctors say his spinal injuries are “too dangerous to operate on” and may end up being fatal.

Though he has not been informed of their bleak diagnosis, he told IPS he now “knows what its like to be in a coffin”, explaining the helplessness of being trapped and listening to people die around you.

Meanwhile, the trauma has wiped some survivors’ memories clean. An operator named Runu, unable to recall a single thing about that fateful day, stares vacantly into space while her sister tells IPS that Runu spent a full two days under the rubble before finally seeing daylight.

Those who can remember have vowed neither to forget nor to step foot into a factory again. “I will resort to begging if I have to, but I’m not working in a garments factory ever again,” 25-year-old Mariam, whose legs and arms were pulverised by concrete and iron rods, told IPS.

“My freedom means I was born again,” added a former worker named Shakhina. “I will not make the mistake of stepping back into that death trap.”

Meanwhile, major players in the industry are finally taking heed.

A.K.M Salim Osman, president of the Bangladesh Knitwear Manufacturers and Exporters Association (BKMEA), one of the industry’s apex bodies, told IPS that the incident in April was a “wake up call for us who depend on the labourers for business.”

“If we continue to ignore strict ethical standards (around) safety issues we will fail again,” he warned.

Osman said the recently ratified Bangladesh Building and Fire Safety Agreement is a step in the right direction. Under the accord, a tripartite committee comprised of company representatives, trade unions and a neutral inspector chosen by the International Labour Organisation (ILO) will monitor progress in implementation of safety standards as laid out in previous protocols such as the 2006 Occupational Safety and Health Convention.

Initiated by the IndustriALL and UNI Global Unions, the regulations insist that all buildings vulnerable to minor or major cracks be inspected and recommendations put forth by engineers adhered to immediately.

“If necessary we will force factories (with defects) to shut down until standards are met,” Mohammad Shafiqul Islam, former president of the Bangladesh Garments Manufacturers and Exporters Association (BGMEA), the largest body in the business, told IPS.

In a cabinet meeting on Apr. 29, the Bangladesh government decided to form a committee tasked with carrying out regular inspections of factories, installing fire safety devices and ensuring that companies conduct regular fire drills for the workers.

According to a statement by the American Apparel and Footwear Association, the agreement has also won support from all major locals unions, which represent the roughly 3.5 million workers employed in over 5,000 factories housed in and around Dhaka, and in the port city of Chittagong.

Labour groups here are stepping up pressure on U.S. firms to sign a binding building safety agreement for Bangladeshi factories after 10 major European garment companies signed onto the landmark agreement.

H&M, a major European apparel chain, signed the agreement Monday, and Benetton, which was under fire from activists after their clothing was found in the ruins of the Rana Plaza factory which collapsed in late April, signed on Tuesday.

The ruins of the eight-story Rana Plaza factory. Credit: Rijans/CC BY-SA 2.0

The nearly month-long search for victims in the wake of the Rana Plaza collapse ended Monday, after the death toll had reached 1,127.

“H&M’s decision to sign the accord is crucial,” Scott Nova, executive director of the Worker Rights Consortium (WRC), an independent labour rights watchdog group based in Washington, said in a press release.

“They are the single largest producer of apparel in Bangladesh, ahead even of Walmart. This accord now has tremendous momentum.”

Other European companies that signed the accord, known as the Bangladesh Building and Fire Safety Agreement, included Inditex, C&A, Primark and Tesco. By Tuesday evening, the only U.S. company to agree to the accord was PVH, the parent company of Tommy Hilfiger and Calvin Klein, which signed last year.

According to the International Labor Rights Forum (ILRF), an advocacy organisation, the new agreement covers all major areas needed to ensure its effectiveness: “independent safety inspections with public reports, mandatory factory building renovations, the obligation by brands and retailers to underwrite the cost of repairs, and a vital role for workers and their unions”.

The pact also calls for participating companies to pay up to 500,000 dollars a year toward building maintenance and safety in Bangladeshi factories, to bring them up to a specified standard. According to Liana Foxvog, ILRF communications director, the associated costs would translate into about ten cents per garment.

The agreement between several major European companies has also been significant in that it now focuses a spotlight on the relative inaction of their U.S. counterparts – and narrows and intensifies the pressure from labour groups on U.S. companies to sign the pact.

“The fact of European brands signing on is very important for the Bangladesh garment industry,” Foxvog told IPS. “It’s time for U.S. companies to sign on as well.”

Labour groups are particularly focused on Walmart and Gap, two of the largest and most influential companies that source from factories in Bangladesh. Foxvog said that “If Gap changes its mind, we expect that more U.S. companies will sign on.”

Gap, which was close to signing the agreement last year before starting its own non-binding, voluntary agreement with factories in Bangladesh in October 2012, said Monday that the company was concerned about possible “legal liability” issues that could arise.

The company said Tuesday that it was “six sentences away” from signing the accord and would accept if those proposed sentences, which lessen its liability concerns, were accepted.

But critics say such arguments have little substance behind them.

“They’re nonsense,” WRC’s Nova told IPS. “Ask Gap wherein the legal liability lies; ask them to point to the language in the agreement that creates legal liability for them – they can’t do it. What Gap wants is an agreement that can’t be enforced. The stuff about legal liabilities is a ruse.”

Foxvog expressed similar sentiments.

“Gap is saying it doesn’t want to be held accountable for the working conditions (in the factories) and other commitments of the safety agreement,” she said.

Company-led change

Still, labour rights groups are growing increasingly optimistic, as companies seem to be facing increasing pressure to conform to multi-stakeholder agreements, and the Bangladeshi government has shown signs of committing to stronger labour standards.

On Monday, Bangladesh’s cabinet lifted restrictions on forming unions, reversing a 2006 law that required employees to obtain permission from an employer before organising.

And the previous day, the government set up a new minimum wage board that will include factory owners and workers, and government officials, and will recommend pay raises. However, the decision to implement these new standards will still need to be approved by the cabinet.

But for broader change, advocates argue that the active participation of multinational companies is key to bringing about permanent change in the Bangladeshi garment industry. Proponents are now hoping that the announcement by the 10 European companies – with more, perhaps, to come – could now create a transatlantic ripple effect.

“This is a really tremendous advance to have … global brands and retailers make a binding commitment to worker safety,” Judy Gearhart, executive director of the ILRF, said in a statement. “Now we need major U.S. brands and retailers such as Walmart, Gap, and JC Penney to join in the same agreement.”

Walmart has said its own safety plan meets or exceeds the building and fire safety code’s standards, but added that it would continue to discuss the plan.

Howard Riefs, spokesman for Sears, also a large producer in Bangladesh, said late Tuesday that while the company is still in discussions over the plan, it is not yet ready to sign on. JCPenney and The Children’s Place are also reportedly still evaluating the plan.

Last week, the ILRF and United Students against Sweatshops, an advocacy group, launched a new website, designed to ramp up pressure on Gap to sign the Bangladesh Fire and Building Safety Agreement.

“I find it hard to believe that Gap is irresponsible enough to continue on this course of action (of avoidance) any longer,” Nova told IPS.

Eighteen-year-old Shapla, a garment worker who survived the Apr. 24 factory collapse, lies on a hospital bed in Dhaka. Credit: Nari Uddung Kendra (the Centre for Women’s Initiative)

By Suvendrini Kakuchi
DHAKA, May 10 2013 (IPS)

Last month, 18-year-old Shapla was just another one of thousands of garment workers employed in a factory in Savar, a suburb of Bangladesh’s capital Dhaka.

Today she is a handicapped survivor of one of the worst industrial accidents in history: the collapse on Apr. 24 of the massive Rana Plaza, a building housing five factories, that buried scores of workers under a wave of cement and glass.

The death toll reached 996 on Friday, though officials and families are still counting the bodies and searching for others beneath the rubble.

“I am desperate about the future,” Shapla said, echoing the sentiments of hundreds of female apparel workers like her who lost their limbs on that fateful day.

The young mother is now recovering in a hospital in Dhaka after her hand was amputated. Having survived the collapse, Shapla is considered one of “the lucky ones”, but she is loath to see the bright side, as her handicap will almost certainly prevent her from finding work.

Experts say that women, who make up 80 percent of the workforce in this country’s booming garments industry, have borne the brunt of this tragedy. According to initial reports, over 80 percent of those who lost lives and sustained injuries in the collapse were women.

“They are now socially and economically heavily disadvantaged,” said Mashud Khatun Shefali, founder and head of Nari Uddung Kendra (the Centre for Women’s Initiatives).

A leading advocate for female garment workers’ rights, Shefali says her organisation, which has lobbied for better conditions such as safe housing for workers, is now focusing on helping female survivors overcome the trauma of the accident.

Some of the workers are “so badly affected that they say they never want to work in factories again,” Shefali told IPS. “They need long-term physical and mental rehabilitation…and they need to be accepted as disabled persons by their families and society.”

A woman named Nazma Begum, whose legs have been amputated as a result of her injuries, told a local television station this week that she “worried incessantly” about how she would handle her disability, until her husband assured her of his continued support and love.

The dark side of manufacturing

Over the last decade, Bangladesh – a country of 150 million of which 49 percent live below the poverty line – has become a crucial player in the international apparel trade by providing a vast supply of cheap labour.

Bangladesh’s garment industry is now the third largest in the world after China and Vietnam, bringing in 20 billion dollars or roughly 80 percent of the country’s annual foreign exchange.

Major apparel companies based in the West and wealthy Asian countries like Japan and South Korea began shifting their production centres to Bangladesh when old manufacturing hubs like Thailand began to raise wages.

Mass-produced and bargain clothes that include such labels as Gap, Primark, HMV, Walmart, Sears and American Apparel are all manufactured here and then sold in the importing countries.

The biggest to the smallest of these factories are staffed by mostly young women hailing from rural areas, who come to the cities in the hopes of acquiring skills they have no access to in Bangladesh’s agricultural regions.

When they arrive in the city, they often live together in close quarters, sharing bathrooms and food.

Uneducated and illiterate, these women have few means by which to earn a steady income; their vulnerability makes them easy prey for manufacturers who claim that, in order to remain “competitive” on the world market, they must hire the cheapest possible workforce.

According to Shefali, young women often start off as interns, meaning they do not receive a wage but instead labour for a stipend that can be as low as a dollar per month.

Within a year, they move on to operating more sophisticated machinery and drawing a regular salary, she added.

Most women sew, wash and pack garments for roughly 30 to 40 dollars a month, working a daily average of 10 hours, seven days a week. In contrast, men tend to be hired for high-level positions, such as quality control and management.

The garment sector has been hailed as one of the country’s biggest employers, bringing a steady wage to thousands of women. But a string of tragedies has recently highlighted the hazardous nature of this work.

Last November, over 100 garment workers perished in a fire in the Tazreen Fashion Factory on the outskirts of Dhaka. Survivors of that tragedy claim they tried to escape, but were locked in by the factory managers.

Similarly, on Apr. 24, employees were threatened with dismissal if they failed to come to work, despite warnings that the eight-storey building, which only had a permit to house five floors, was unsafe. A week before the incident large cracks had begun to appear on the ceilings, prompting engineers to issue warnings that a collapse might be inevitable.

Negligence of workplace safety is just one of many labour violations women workers face. Sometimes they are forced to work 14-hour shifts in order to turn around a quick profit for the factory owners.

Still, activists point out that in a Muslim country with high poverty rates, the garment industry provided a rare opportunity for women to leave their homes and raise their status from housewives to breadwinners.

This increased economic independence enabled them to exercise more autonomy in their own lives, to choose their own husbands and enter into marriages on more equal terms.

But the Savar tragedy has dealt a hefty blow to this hard-earned status.

Sharmin Huq, a retired professor at the Dhaka University who specialises on the handicapped sector, fears that social discrimination will make life harder for women than ever before.

Those who survived the tragedy will likely lose their jobs, as their injuries will prevent them from performing at the level demanded by factory owners.

Huq told IPS that generous donations pouring in from countries like the United States and Germany to help the survivors must be channeled directly towards “the large number of (affected) female workers, to help them re-start their lives.”

This includes support for everything from acquiring artificial limbs to accessing regular counseling to deal with the trauma of the tragedy.

Protestors armed with bamboo sticks faced police in riot gear in Dhaka on May 4, 2013. Credit: Kajul Hazra/IPS

By Naimul Haq
DHAKA, May 8 2013 (IPS)

Adding to a long list of domestic woes, including a factory collapse that left hundreds dead last month, Bangladesh is now grappling with a wave of violence that threatens to deepen the gulf between secular sections of society and religious fundamentalists.

Earlier this week at least 27 people were killed on the streets of the capital, Dhaka, as police clad in riot gear clashed with Islamic hard-liners calling for radical changes to the country’s constitution.

“We have not witnessed violence of this magnitude since the Liberation War in 1971." - Shyamal Dutta, editor of the leading Bengali newspaper ‘Bhorer Kagoj'
Sparked by a massive rally organised by the religious group Hifazat-e-Islam (Protectorate of Islam) on Sunday, May 4, the violence left hundreds injured with bullet wounds, fighting for their lives in hospitals across the city.

Chanting “Allahu Akbar” (God is great), the nearly 100,000 demonstrators wielding bamboo sticks and banners demanded implementation of the Hifazat’s 13-point programme, which calls, among other things, for the execution of “atheists” or anyone accused of blaspheming the Prophet Muhammed.

Aware of the group’s plans, the government had requested Hifazat leaders to postpone their mass rally in light of the national tragedy that occurred on Apr. 24, when a building in the Dhaka suburb of Savar housing several factories collapsed, leaving over 800 dead.

Undeterred by a daily mounting death toll from the Rana Plaza catastrophe, the worst garment sector disaster in history, the group pushed ahead with what it called the “Dhaka Seize”, cutting off access to all six entry-points into the capital and occupying all the main thoroughfares.

Witnesses to the street battles, which carried on into Monday, say protestors vandalised buildings, torched scores of businesses and looted shops, all the while chanting anti-government slogans.

Shyamal Dutta, editor of the leading Bengali newspaper ‘Bhorer Kagoj’, described the violence as a veritable “war against the state”.

“We have not witnessed violence of this magnitude since the Liberation War in 1971,” he told IPS, referring to the bloody independence struggle that resulted in the secession of what was then East Pakistan from the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, leaving at least three million dead, by the most conservative estimates.

Ever since the creation of Bangladesh as a sovereign state, this Muslim majority country of 160 million has been governed by a secular constitution.

Dutta believes Hifazat-e-Islam, an alliance of about 12 religious groups, is now seeking to dismantle the pluralism that has for years been enshrined in the constitution and “destroy the nation’s social, cultural and democratic values”.

Other demands on the group’s 13-point agenda include bans on anti-Islamic “propaganda” (in the form of social media) and the “intermingling” of men and women in public spaces, as well as mandatory religious education from primary to higher secondary levels.

Though the group claims to uphold the Islamic faith, many religious scholars like Moulana Ziaul Ahsan, president of the Bangladesh Sammilita Islamic Jote, have denounced their actions as “unconstitutional”.

Meeting violence with violence

Soon after the official rally ended late Sunday night, police tried to disperse the crowds, but activists hailing mostly from madrashas (religious schools) refused to clear the streets until the government agreed to implement a new anti-blasphemy law.

While many eyewitnesses say the protestors provoked police reprisals by throwing homemade explosives, bricks, stones and sticks, other sources claim the government must be held accountable for deploying the elite Rapid Action Battalion (RAB) police force and the paramilitary Border Guard Bangladesh (BGB) with instructions to “shoot to kill”.

“I have never seen such violence before,” Kajul Hazra, a photojournalist who has 22 years of experience working in Bangladesh, told IPS, adding that over 12,000 police were dispatched to quell the riot.

“The protestors used drums of petrol to torch trees cut from islands on the streets, broke window panes and set fire to parked vehicles, banks and offices…ambulance sirens, flames and tear gas smoke filled the air of Motijheel area (Dhaka’s commercial hub),” he recalled.

Police Spokesman Masudur Rahman told the press on Monday that his men were “forced” to use “rubber bullets, tear gas and sound grenades to control the violence.”

But human rights advocates say the decision to fire on unarmed protestors amounts to a violation of democratic principles.

“They (the police) fired on the demonstrators late at night, into the darkness, which was really cruel,” Farida Akhter, a leader of the United Women’s Forum, told IPS, adding that such actions “are those of a dictator government and completely unacceptable in a democratic society.”

A visibly shaken public sees the incident as a frightening reminder of the deep divisions in the political sphere.

According to Rokeya Prachy, a prominent social activist, Hifazat enjoys the support of the main opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), as well as the Jamat-e-Islami, whose leaders are currently being tried for war crimes allegedly committed on behalf of the West Pakistan military junta during the 1971 Liberation War against pro-independence activists.

In February and March, tens of thousands of civilians took to the streets when the International Crimes Tribunal of Bangladesh failed to mete out the long-anticipated death penalty to former Jamat leader Abdul Quader Mollah.

Hifazat and its supporters have called attention to the discrepancies between the government’s acceptance of the anti-Jamat rallies earlier this year – popularly known as the ‘Shahbag protests’– and its violent response to this week’s Hifazat march.

Others say the different government tactics were based on the nature of each protest, with the demonstrations in Dhaka’s Shahbag Square being peaceful sit-ins, compared to the Hifazat’s vandalism and aggression.

“Why should the government’s actions (on Sunday and Monday) be termed undemocratic when security forces acted to protect the lives and properties of innocent people?” asked Abul Barkat, chairman of the economics department at the University of Dhaka, in an interview with IPS.

“I think the police were very careful in their operation to save lives,” he said.

Political parties, meanwhile, have fallen back on the usual blame game: at a press conference at the BNP’s Dhaka branch Monday, spokespeople for the opposition accused members of the ruling Awami League of instigating the violence, a claim the latter has stoutly denied, insisting that the BNP and its ally, the Jamat, were behind the chaos.

While political leaders pointed fingers, the violence quickly spread to the southern city of Khulna, to Sylhet in the north-east, Rajshahi in the north-west and to the southeastern port city of Chittagong, where a day-long clash with law enforcers left at least seven people including one police officer dead, with over 50 people still suffering from severe bullet wounds.

Sixteen-year-old Parul, hailing from Dhaka's Batara slum, is paid about 15 dollars a month for her work in a garment factory. Also in the picture are her younger brothers and a cousin. Credit: Naimul Haq/IPS

By Katelyn Fossett
WASHINGTON, May 3 2013 (IPS)

Worker advocacy groups here are calling on some of the most high-profile U.S.-based clothing companies to make drastic reforms to their international labour practices in the wake of the factory collapse that killed more than 420 workers in Dhaka last week.

But critics say U.S. companies appear to be “meeting” these demands with increasingly creative ways to circumvent their core recommendations, by forming their own safety initiatives that rights groups say are essentially meaningless, or pulling out altogether to avoid the risk."What we see are token donations and empty promises that can’t be enforced." -- Scott Nova of the Workers Rights Consortium

“Any meaningful programme needs to be legally binding,” Liana Foxvog, communications director at the International Labor Rights Forum (ILRF), an advocacy group here, told IPS.

“It needs to pay prices sufficient for ensuring compliance and needs to include worker representation so that worker voices on what they truly need are at the table.”

The collapse of an eight-storey factory building known as Rana Plaza was initially reported to have killed more than a hundred workers. As the week progressed and a major fire broke out, that figure quadrupled, setting off a public relations storm as human rights companies scrambled to identify the companies that sourced from the factory.

U.S.-based companies The Children’s Place and Cato Fashion have both been tracked as sourcing from the factory, but companies such as JCPenney, which sells European brands manufactured at the factory, are also under pressure from activist groups.

“Deadly psychology”

As critics strengthened calls for substantive changes in business practices to prevent another Dhaka tragedy, multinational companies responded this week with a flurry of press releases and attempts at deflecting blame.

“We did not have any ongoing production at the time of the incident,” Cato said in a statement.

The Children’s Place issued a similar statement, saying “none of our apparel was in production” there at the time of the collapse.

Activist groups also point to companies’ reluctance to sign onto a binding agreement known as the Bangladesh Fire and Building Safety Agreement as a lack of commitment to worker safety.

“The clothing brands’ insatiable hunger for lower prices and faster delivery by factories cultivates this deadly psychology in Bangladesh,” the Workers Rights Consortium (WRC), an independent monitoring group, said in a statement.

According to the WRC, the agreement would obligate participating companies to “open the doors of their Bangladesh factories to independent inspection and … pay for a country-wide program of renovations and repairs to make these buildings safe.”

The agreement, negotiations over which began in December 2010, needs four companies to become binding; so far, it has only attracted two.

One of the most notable instances of a prominent company bowing out of the negotiations was GAP, Inc., which owns GAP, Old Navy, and Banana Republic, among others. The company chose instead to create their own programme in October 2012.

Yet critics say that GAP’s alternative plan is inadequate. The plan carries no provisions about paying more to factories so they can abide by safety standards, for instance, and does not involve workers or unions in oversight and implementation.

Most importantly, the plan is voluntary and has no teeth for enforcing the measures. IPS contacted GAP for comment but did not receive a response.

Walmart, one of the largest retailers in the United States, denied a connection to Rana Plaza to IPS, but had been listed on the factory website, raising questions from activists. It has taken a similar route to that of GAP.

In an e-mail from the company’s international corporate affairs office, IPS was referred to a description of the store’s 1.6-million-dollar donation after the Tazreen fire in 2012 to establish the Environment, Health and Safety Academy in Bangladesh. The Academy would give “comprehensive training” on workplace safety to apparel workers.

Walmart also pointed IPS to a press release about the company’s “strengthening” of fire safety regulations in January 2012 in its factories.

Those regulations include “conducting regular fire drills, ensuring adequate number of exit routes and mandating fire safety training to all levels of factory management”, which critics say underscore a weak and inadequate commitment.

All a game

Missing from both GAP’s and Walmart’s plans is any mention of higher pay to suppliers to pay for safer buildings, which some critics say would be the first line of response if the companies were genuinely committed to the safety of their workers.

This is all just part of a “game” these companies play, Scott Nova, executive director of the Workers Rights Consortium, told IPS.

“These companies recognise they have to claim they’re doing something in order to avoid damage to the image of the brand, but they don’t want to have to do anything,” he said.

“So what we see are token donations and empty promises that can’t be enforced. They weather the public relations crisis and expect [the media spotlight] to fade.”