Bangladesh Fire Raises Pressure to Improve Factory Safety

AP Photo: Labor groups say more than 500 people have died in Bangladesh factory fires since 2006. Above, garment workers in a factory outside of Dhaka

SYED ZAIN AL-MAHMOOD in Dhaka, KATHY CHU in Hong Kong and TRIPTI LAHIRI in New Delhi

THE BANGLADESH government, factory owners and foreign retailers are facing pressure from workers to overhaul workplace safety in the aftermath of last month's deadly factory fire.

More than 500 people have died in Bangladesh factory fires since 2006, according to estimates by labor groups. The late-November fire in the Tazreen Fashions Ltd. factory that killed 112 people, the country's worst industrial accident, was a tipping point.

Garment workers have clashed with police weekly in Ashulia, the northern industrial suburb of Dhaka where Tazreen is located, demanding compensation for victims' families and safer working conditions. Pressure is mounting on big buyers such as Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and Hennes & Mauritz AB to tighten systems for monitoring factory safety in Bangladesh.

Fearing social unrest and lost orders, Bangladesh's government is promising action. The stakes are large. The country exported $19 billion in garments last year, second only to China, according to government reports. A recent report by consulting firm McKinsey & Co. estimated that the figure could double in less than a decade.

"The prime minister has ordered us to make sure this never happens again," said Mikail Shiper, an official in Bangladesh's labor ministry. Authorities have begun to review the nation's 5,000 registered garment factories and will rescind permits from those that fail safety evaluations, Mr. Shiper said. The government also is looking to install more fire hydrants in industrial areas, he said.

Skeptics have said Bangladesh's niche as among the world's least-expensive place to make clothing—the minimum wage for garment workers is less than $37 a month—is an obstacle to progress. The country's economy in recent years has been propelled by churning out low-cost garments for the West, which labor groups said has come at the cost of worker safety.

As foreign retailers slash prices to attract shoppers, Bangladeshi factories have to produce for less. A Bangladeshi supplier said prices retailers pay for clothes had fallen 3% in the past five years, while production costs had increased 10%.

"It's hard to continue to improve factory compliance and safety when there's ever-increasing downward pressure on the prices that global retailers are willing to pay," said Ifty Islam, managing partner at Asian Tiger Capital Partners, a Dhaka-based asset-management company.

Pierre Börjesson, the sustainability manager for social issues at fashion retailer H&M, said his company does its own safety inspections in Bangladesh, rather than rely on third parties, as many retailers do. H&M, the largest buyer from Bangladesh by volume, has conducted more than 500 inspections at about 200 Bangladesh factories this year, he said.

"The absolute root cause of fires in Bangladesh factories is the electrical situation," Mr. Börjesson said. Fire-safety authorities need to increase safety standards for electrical wiring, for new as well as old structures, he said.

Labor groups said factory owners, a number of whom sit in Parliament, have blocked efforts to improve working conditions and have sought to ensure that a ban on unionization in garment factories remains in place.

"When we spoke up, we had our [nongovernmental organization] license revoked," said Kalpona Akter, executive director of the Bangladesh Center for Worker Solidarity. She said the organization has applied to have its license renewed.

Factory owners this year resisted an order from the fire department to dismantle unauthorized rooftop tin structures, according to Ashulia fire inspector Mahbub Hossain. He said fire officials changed the order to allow such structures on three-quarters of a roof, after owners complained they needed the structures for workers' dining areas.

Manufacturers said they improved workplace conditions in recent years, spurred by demands from foreign buyers. "A minority of factories give us a bad name," said Shahriar Alam, a member of Parliament and the managing director of Renaissance Group Ltd., a large Dhaka-based garment manufacturer.

Pressure from retailers has helped improve some working conditions, including the near eradication of child labor in the garment industry, workers' groups acknowledged. But labor activists said about five new factories open each month to meet rising demand, making it difficult for Western retailers to keep tabs on where their clothes are coming from.

About 70% of Bangladeshi factories comply with the country's labor and safety standards, said Belal Hossain, a senior official with Bangladesh's labor directorate. "Compliance is going up," he said. "But the rise in the number of compliant factories is still behind the curve when matched against the volume of orders."

Retailers often rely on third-party suppliers to get garments made. The suppliers are supposed to ensure that items come only from factories that pass regular inspections for safety and working conditions, carried out by global auditing firms.

Wal-Mart disputed that there aren't enough auditors but said it is looking for ways to strengthen its system to avoid subcontractors using factories without the retailer's authority.

"We can put all kinds of controls in place, but if they don't tell us where they're putting our order, then that is a problem" said Wal-Mart spokesman Kevin Gardner. "The lack of transparency down the supply chain represents a challenge not just for Wal-Mart, but for the industry overall."

Tazreen, the site of last month's fire, supplied clothes to Wal-Mart and other companies after failing audits. Wal-Mart said after the fire that suppliers did business with the factory without authorization and that Wal-Mart has stopped using the suppliers. Tuba Group, Tazreen's parent, said it wasn't aware that the factory had been deauthorized.

The fire is likely to push retailers to buy more of their goods directly from factories, rather than through suppliers, and to conduct more of their own audits, said Rubana Huq, managing director of Mohammadi Group, a Bangladeshi garment manufacturer. "We are already experiencing retailers tightening their audit processes through their local offices," she said.

—Shelly Banjo contributed to this article.

First appeared in The Wall Street Journal, December 15, 2012

Progress and Globalization in Bangladesh: The Tazreen Fashions Garment factory fire

ZAFAR SOBHAN

BANGLADESH HAS long been a byword for calamity in the rest of the world, a punch line, a metonymy for doom and disaster. It is only when something catastrophic occurs that the world pays attention to our small delta nation on the Bay of Bengal. A quick search for "Bangladesh" on the New York Times or another publication's website uncovers a litany of chaos and misery: labor unrest, murder, pitched street battles between police and political protesters, flash floods, landslides, death, and destruction. Tragedy in Bangladesh. That’s a story everyone gets.

It’s in this context that we meet last week's tragic fire at Tazreen Fashions, a garment factory just outside the capital Dhaka. At last count, over 120 people perished. They died in the some of the most gruesome ways imaginable, either asphyxiated by smoke, being burned alive, or leaping to their deaths in a vain attempt to save themselves. Of the dead, 53 were charred beyond recognition.

But why do these things happen in Bangladesh? Is this just another story illustrating the sufficiency of misery in that benighted country, or is there more to the story that we are missing?

There is more. And it's a familiar narrative of "progress" and globalization. Today Bangladesh is the second-largest garment manufacturer in the world, lagging behind only China, with garment exports of over $18 billion annually. Check your wardrobe. If you don’t have at least one item made in Bangladesh, I’ll eat the whole damn collection.

And it is this dehumanizing, soul-destroying, exploitative trade that has provided employment to over 3 million impoverished Bangladeshis, the vast majority of them women, and utterly transformed the economic and social landscape of the country. In the 40 years since independence, the poverty rate has plummeted from 80 percent down to less than 30 percent today, GDP growth has averaged around 5-6 percent for over 20 years, and the garment industry has had a lot to do with it. Capitalizing on wages that were and remain among the lowest in the world, globalization brought the garment trade to Bangladesh in the 1980s, kicking off decades of growth.

The garment trade is at the forefront of the kind of industrial revolution that we are experiencing in Bangladesh today, which is why, if from the outside, we look like some Dickensian hell-hole of sweatshops and smokestacks, the image is not altogether inapposite. If the Tazreen Fashions story reminds you of the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire that killed over 140 garment workers some 100 years ago in New York, it is because we are just now going through the ugly industrialization that we hope will turn us into a middle-income country within a few decades.

The harsher and even more difficult truth is that, as appalling as they are, these sweatshops are signs of a kind of advancement. In 2012, few Bangladeshi starve to death any more. This wasn’t the case a generation ago when 80 percent of the country subsisted on agriculture, survival being by no means guaranteed.

But burning to death is not an improvement over starving to death, and none of the above should serve to lessen the horror of the deaths at Tazreen Fashions, nor be seen as any kind of explanation let alone justification for the criminal derelictions of responsibility that caused the catastrophe.

There can be no excuse for factories housing thousands of workers without fire escapes. There can be no justification for the chilling reports that, when the fire alarm went off, factory supervisors told the workers that it was a drill, locked the only doors to the outside, and pushed them back up the stairs to the higher floors, where, once the stairwells filled with smoke and fire from the ground floor, they were doomed to perish.

There can be no excuse for the authorities’ failure to ensure that the factory was not up to code, and that few of the 4,000-plus garment factories in the country comply with the fire safety laws.

And there can be no excuse for companies such as Walmart—now busy distancing themselves from the tragedy—that did not bother to ensure the rights and safety of workers making their clothes, and, in fact, trawl the world looking for the cheapest options to make their clothes, turning a blind eye to the corners that are cut to maintain their margins.

The real tragedy is the utterly unnecessary greed that leads to such misery. The garment trade is so profitable that there is enough to go around for everyone. The factory owners can easily afford to ensure that their factories are not death-traps, the Bangladesh government can easily enforce laws for the protection of workers without hurting the industry, and the buyers can easily afford to pay the few pennies more per item that such measures might necessitate, as well as use their bargaining power to follow through and demand compliance, in accordance with US law.

Yes, last week’s fire was just the latest in a long line of similar tragedies that have taken over 400 Bangladeshi lives in the previous decade. And yes, the fire was in some ways a consequence of a global culture where some lives are evidently deemed cheap. Mortality rates in Bangladesh from so-called accidents are among the highest in the world: 85 road deaths a year per 10,000 registered motor vehicles (more than 50 times the US rate), almost 100 deaths due to residential fires in the past three years, at least 140 people drowned this year in ferry capsizings.

But that doesn’t mean that the fire or other similar tragedies are not avoidable. Bangladesh’s economic advancement (and affordable prices for the American consumer) should not come at the cost of ensuring basic worker safety. Anyone trying to tell you so probably has some clothes he wants to sell you.

Article first published in Vice.Com

Zafar Sobhan is a Dhaka-based editor and columnist