Bangladesh factory disaster: How culpable are Western companies?

Photo: Paul Hackett/Reuters: A Primark clothing shop in central London on April 25, 2013. U.K. clothing retailer Primark, which has 257 stores across Europe and is a unit of Associated British Foods, confirmed that one of its suppliers occupied the second floor of a building that collapsed in Bangladesh killing at least 370 workers

BRIAN MONTOPOLI / CBS NEWS

The horrible collapse of a garment factory building in Bangladesh has renewed questions over whether Western companies should be held accountable for lax safety standards in the factories where their products are made. Below, we get you up to speed on the debate.

First off, what's the latest?

The news keeps getting worse. Two days after the collapse, the death toll is now above 300; some workers remain trapped beneath the wreckage, with rescuers working frantically to save them - sometimes cutting off limbs to get people free. While officials say that 2,200 people have been rescued, the Associated Press has reports the "smell of decaying bodies" amid the wails of workers' relatives at the scene, and the death toll is expected to rise. More than 3,000 people worked at the site. 

Could the tragedy have been avoided?

Absolutely. Police ordered the building evacuated the day before the collapse, after workers reported cracks in the structure. But authorities said the building owner assured factory owner required the workers to come to work despite the order.

Al Jazeera reports that thousands of protesting workers have clashed with police since the collapse. Police firing tear gas and rubber bullets to keep protesters at bay. One deputy police chief said workers are demanding the arrest and execution of the owner of the building - who has reportedly gone into hiding - and those who owned the factories it contained. Some protesters have set fire to factories and smashed vehicles. 

Has anything like this happened before in Bangladesh?

Based on calculations by the International Labor Rights Forum, an advocacy group, more than 900 people have died in factory fires in Bangladesh since 2005. In November, more than 100 people were killed in a fire at a factory that was producing clothes for Wal-Mart, Disney and other Western companies. Workers said the exit doors to the factory, which had lost its fire safety certification months earlier, were locked and bolted, prompting some to leap to their deaths from the burning building. In January, seven workers died at another factory fire in the country, amid reports that the emergency exit was locked from the outside. It was just one of dozens of fires since the 2005 tragedy.

Why Bangladesh?

Because it's a cheap place to make clothes. The country's minimum wage is roughly $38 per month - as the BBC reported last year, China has turned to Bangladesh for manufacturing as its labor costs have risen. 

Garment manufacturing is a crucial component to the country's economy: More than 4,000 garment factories generate 80 percent of Bangladesh's exports, worth about $20 billion per year. The nation is among the biggest exporter of garments in the world, with most going to the United States and Europe.

Government officials have pledged to improve worker safety, but they are also skittish about taking steps that would increase production costs and potentially result in the industry moving somewhere even cheaper. According to Human Rights Watch, there are just 18 inspectors monitoring thousands of factories in the Shaka district, the center of the industry. The group also said that factory owners - a powerful force in Bagladesh, with ties to government officials - are usually given advanced notice before an inspection. 

Those factory owners, meanwhile, face pressure not to slow or cease operations when there are safety issues because they face pressure to fill orders from Western retailers by strict deadlines. That pressure has been exacerbated since the start of February by ongoing strikes, protests and violence which, the Financial Times reports, has effectively shut down transportation routes. 

"Working conditions in Bangladesh are poor, as many plants operate on an illegal basis without having a license and clearance from the fire department," the European Union said in calling for improved working conditions in February. "Western retailers already criticized the conditions of the Bangladeshi garment plants for not complying with safety rules, but the major Western brands still place orders." 

Was there any progress after earlier tragedies?

Not much, at least as far as workers' advocates are concerned. After the January fire, the country ordered that all its factories be inspected and insisted that the owners stop locking exit doors. But the tragedies have not prompted major reforms by the Bangladeshi government.

Frustrated by a lack of action by the government, worker advocates have pressured the companies importing the garments to take steps to make workers safer. One proposal, called The Bangladesh Fire and Building Safety Agreement, would create a legally binding and rigorous independent inspection and oversight system. It would also allow workers to refuse to work in dangerous conditions. (Efforts to unionize workers in Bangladesh have largely been met with hostility or worse; last year labor rights activist Aminul Islam was tortured and murdered.) Inspections would be funded by as much as $500,000 per year from each company.

But only two companies have signed onto the agreement, short of the four necessary for it to take effect. Wal-Mart, Gap, H&M, JCP, Abercrombie and Kohl's are among the companies that have refused to sign on, instead taking their own steps to address worker safety. (The companies that have signed on are Tchibo, a German retailer, and PVH Corp., which owns Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger.)

Gap announced in March that it would spend up to $22 million to improve safety at its factories in Bangladesh, and it has hired its own indipendent fire inspectors in the country. Bill Chandler, Head of Public Affairs for Gap Inc., told CBSNews.com it "did not have a business relationship with any of [the] factories in the building that collapsed this week."

"Nonetheless, Gap Inc. takes our commitment to improving working conditions in Bangladesh seriously," he said, adding: "To see tragedies like this become a thing of the past, it will take a collective effort of all retailers, all stakeholders, the U.S. government and the Bangladeshi government to significantly improve the working conditions in this country."

Wal-Mart said in January that it would cease working with contractors that use unsafe practices, and recently vowed to spend $1.8 million to train factory managers in Bangladesh about fire safety. "We are saddened by this tragic event," the company said in a statement to CBSNews.com. "...We remain committed to promoting stronger safety measures in factories and that work continues."

Advocates say private audits and other efforts by these companies has done little to improve the situation. "Global companies and consumers profit from cheap labor in Bangladesh, but do little to demand the most basic and humane conditions for those who toil on their behalf," said Brad Adams, Asia director at Human Rights Watch. "It is time for companies to say that they will take no clothes from companies that do not meet minimum standards." 

One complicating factor in oversight is the fact that owners often use subcontractors to produce garments. Wal-Mart said that while its "investigation has confirmed Walmart had no authorized production in this facility," it will act if it learns there was production through subcontracting, saying it has a "zero-tolerence policy" for unauthorized subcontracting. The New York Times reported that activists searching the rubble have found tags and documents suggesting that production for Mango and Benetton, among other companies, though those brands are distancing themselves from the disaster. (The maker of Joe Fresh and Irish retailer Primark have admitted to using the facility.)

Advocates hope that the latest tragedy will spur companies to increase their efforts to keep workers safe. There is speculation that the latest tragedy and the ongoing strikes and violence will spur companies to move manufacturing away from Bangladesh. But that could simply shift the fundamental problem elsewhere in what critics call a "race to the bottom" by global brands. 

"How many more workers have to die," said Stott Nova of the Worker Rights Consortium, "before these corporations are willing to take the steps necessary to put an end to this parade of horror?" 

First published in CBSNEWS, USA, April 26, 2013

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