Sheikh Hasina hints at dealing with sanctions after the election

SALEEM SAMAD

Looming threats of sanctions on labour issues have raised eyebrows among the government, policymakers, garment entrepreneurs and industrial bodies.

Most ready-made-garments (RMG) factories have failed or partially implemented international compliance and ethical practices, which has ignited labour unrest.

Recently, Bangladesh has witnessed intense labour unrest and violent protests related to wage disputes in the garment industry. The dispute on fair wages for RMG workers has sparked widespread protests demanding against the government’s Wage Board decision to increase BDT 12,500 ($113) per month for garment workers, effective from 1 December.

The labour groups rejected the new wage structure due to its inadequacy in addressing their financial needs. The unions dismissed the decision, arguing that the pay hike does not adequately address the rising costs of food, housing, healthcare, and school fees for their children.

The prices of essentials have dramatically risen and the wages of workers cannot meet both ends. Inflation in Bangladesh rose to 9 per cent between 2022 and 2023, the highest average rate in 12 years.

The garment industry employs some of the poorest and most vulnerable people recruited from rural areas. Ensuring fair wages and safe working conditions remains a critical challenge for the industry.

The garment industry in Bangladesh employs some of the poorest and most vulnerable people, making fair wages and safe working conditions critical issues.

Thousands of garment workers took to the streets, demanding better wages for the country’s four million garment workers. The worker’s agitation escalated and clashed with the riot police.

Police lobbed hundreds of tear gas shells and fired rubber bullets which failed to contain the riots.

The worker’s protests led to shut down of scores of factories, paralysing Bangladesh’s position as the world’s second-largest garment manufacturing hub after China.

At least three workers were killed during the protest and 70 factories ransacked since. Tragically, protesters set fire to a factory, resulting in the death of a worker named Imran Hossain.

The police shot and killed another worker, Rasel Howlader. Among them was Anjuara Khatun, a 26-year-old machine operator at a factory in Gazipur, north of the capital.

The worker’s protest has coincided with other anti-government demonstrations when the opposition is demanding that Hasina step down, cancel the election schedule and hold the national election under an interim government. The demands seem to have fallen flat.

Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina urged the garment workers to return to work with the newly-announced wages. Bangladesh’s 3,500 garment factories contribute to approximately 85% of the country’s USD 55 billion in annual exports, supplying major global brands including Levi’s, Zara, and H&M.

Hasina threatened the workers, that if they continue to abstain from work despite the wage increase, she stated, “If they take to the streets to protest at someone’s instigation, they will lose their job, lose their work, and will have to return to their village. If these factories are closed, if production is disrupted, and exports are disrupted, where will their jobs be? They (workers) have to understand that.”

The majority of the workers slowly returned to work. Which means they have accepted the new wage announced by the government.

Immediately, the US State Department expressed concern about the ongoing repression of workers and trade unionists. Washington urged a tripartite process to revisit the minimum wage decision to address the economic pressures faced by workers and their families.

The Bangladesh embassy in Washington DC on 20 November raised concerns that Bangladesh might face stringent measures, including sanctions, trade penalties, and visa restrictions outlined in the US Presidential Memorandum on labour rights.

While the memorandum has global implications and is not specifically targeted at Bangladesh, recent weeks of labour unrest in the country’s readymade garment industry, centred on demands for improved pay and marked by violent clashes with the police resulting in at least four worker fatalities, have prompted the embassy to issue a warning to Dhaka.

After the call from the USA, good sense prevailed upon President Mohammad Shahabuddin has sent back the Bangladesh Labour (Amendment) Bill, 2023 without giving his assent.

The two sub-sections of Section 294 of the Labour Act, 2006, propose to amend some of the penalties for illegal labour strikes and illegal lockouts by employers.

The law provides for imprisonment of up to six months or a fine of up to BDT 5,000, or both if a worker goes on an unlawful strike. There is a legal provision that any factory owner will also face the same punishment if he makes an illegal lockout.

Interestingly, in 2023, the amendment to the law, which was passed in Parliament, increased the fine in case of illegal strike of workers from BDT 5,000 to 20,000. But in the case of the owners, the fine has been kept at the same as before (BDT 5,000).

In the national election fever, there will not be any parliament session. The fresh bill will have to be placed in the parliament next year.

On the other hand, many garment industries have fallen short of fully implementing international compliance guidelines. In the context of the garment industry, adherence to international compliance guidelines is crucial for ensuring ethical and safe working conditions. While some garment industries fully implement these guidelines, others may only partially comply.

Additionally, compliance covers various other aspects such as equal remuneration, anti-discrimination policies, child labour abolition, and safety measures to ensure adherence to guidelines, which create a favourable working environment for their employees.

Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association (BGMEA), Bangladesh Knitwear Manufacturers Export Association (BKMEA), and Bangladesh Employers Federation (BEF) are expected to play a crucial role in monitoring factories to ensure ethical practices, fair wages, and safe working conditions in RMG industry.

A recent survey by Quality Inspection, Management, and Assurance (QIMA), a global company that offers quality inspections, audits, and testing services, ranked Bangladesh second in “Ethical Manufacturing,” just behind Taiwan.

Bangladesh’s local suppliers in the international supply chain have been recognised for their good practices.

A day ago, ruling Awami League’s President Sheikh Hasina told the leaders of the 14-party that a conspiracy was being hatched over the election. Without naming Uncle Sam, she said that sanctions may come.

Hasina, pointing fingers towards the United States said, is trying to make the Awami League government uncomfortable over the labour issue. “Where will you find cheap labourers producing at competitive prices? I will also see. I am not afraid of domestic and foreign conspiracies.”

She warned that a new crisis may arise after the election. “If I survive, I will overcome this,” Hasina snapped.

First published in the Northeast News,  5 December 2023

Saleem Samad is an award-winning independent journalist based in Bangladesh. A media rights defender with the Reporters Without Borders (@RSF_inter). Recipient of Ashoka Fellowship and Hellman-Hammett Award. He could be reached at saleemsamad@hotmail.com; Twitter: @saleemsamad

Bangladesh building collapse: How many still missing? Who knows?

Photo: Relatives search for names of missing garments worker

Photo: Still missing

SABIR MUSTAFA

Numbers have always been a tricky issue in Bangladesh, so much so that there is disagreement over even the total population of the country.

There is always someone ready to raise questions about any "official figure" , whether it is the voter list or death figures from a road accident.

Not surprisingly then, when the eight-storey Rana Plaza collapsed on 24 April with thousands of people working in five garment factories, numbers became a hotly contested issue.

Two sets of figures are now accepted as accurate. Firstly, the number of people rescued alive, which stands at 2,438 and secondly, the number of bodies recovered from the rubble, which stands at more than 1,000 and keeps rising every day.

Calculating in the dark

But there is disagreement over how many are still missing - and hence, the total number likely to have died.

Nearly 3,500 people have already been accounted for, with unknown numbers still buried under the rubble”

More than two weeks after collapse, there is still no agreement on exactly how many workers and staff were present in the building. This has left officials calculating in darkness.

The Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association (BGMEA), initially said that 3,200 people may have been employed by the five factories located on the upper floors of the building.

But that figure now looks unrealistic. Nearly 3,500 people have already been accounted for, with unknown numbers still buried under the rubble.

Distrust

Five days after the collapse a woman named Shahina was found alive.

But Shahina could not be rescued, as a fire sparked by metal cutting machines killed her on 28 April. One of the rescuers later died in hospital from burns sustained during the abortive rescue.

It was not expected that more survivors would be found, and rescuers switched their focus to recovering bodies.

Then another round of distrust about numbers was kicked off by none other than Maj Gen Hasan Suhrawardy, the man in charge of the recovery operation at the site.

On 1 May, he told journalists that only 149 people were missing, raising heckles across the social landscape. Even senior government officials expressed doubts about the figure.

Fake names?

Workers rescued from the site said many people had tried to escape down a stairway at the back of the building. They insisted that many bodies lay in that part of the building.

It appeared the general had used a list which local administration officials had stopped using. The police had their own, much larger list, based on people registering names of their missing relatives.

Officials worried that many names were appearing several times in different lists. They also worried that fraudsters might be at work, registering fake names to get compensation.

As a result of the confusion, all lists were taken down and officials stopped talking about the number missing.

'Disappearing' bodies

But more fuel was added to the fire by former Prime Minister Khaleda Zia, leader of the main opposition, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party.

Addressing a big rally in Dhaka on 4 May, Mrs Zia accused the government of ''disappearing'' 900 bodies.

The opposition leader did not quote any source, but it reflected a sense of frustration and distrust among relatives of those missing.

Hundreds of relatives of the missing waited at the site everyday, desperate to ensure they at least got the body of their loved one so they could be buried properly.

But rumours soon spread that the army was about to bulldoze the site. Rumours were also spread that trucks removing debris from the site were being used to take away dead bodies.

Anger and frustration spilled over on one or two occasions and relatives, aided by locals, blocked army vehicles carrying debris.

Painstaking work by officials finally calmed the situation. The army made it clear there would be no bulldozing and that every effort would be made to recover any remaining bodies.

The military and fire brigade decided to use heavy equipment sparingly, only after ensuring that no body was left to be recovered.

It is perhaps this painstaking, time-consuming, brick-by-brick search for bodies that has allowed the rescuers to find a woman alive in the rubble on Friday, 12 days after the last survivor was found and 17 days after the building went down.

First appeared in BBC online, 10 May 2013

Sabir Mustafa, Editor, BBC Bengali service

From Boston to Bangladesh: 'My heart hasn't stopped breaking'

MONI BASU, CNN iReport, CNN's Saeed Ahmed contributed to this article

Somewhere high above the clouds over Africa, in seat number 17K, Laura Sherburne learned the awful news of the Boston bombings.

She was supposed to have been there, right at the finish line, captain of a team of volunteer nurses who triage exhausted runners in medical tents. She'd done it last year and signed up again.

But shortly before the race, Sherburne learned she had won an international fellowship and would have to be on a plane the day of the marathon. She cajoled her friend Jane Keefe Chiang to take over the nurses team.

Panic set in on that never-ending Emirates flight from New York after she caught a news flash on an in-flight channel. "Deadly explosion at Boston Marathon finish line."

There was so little information at first. She imagined the worst.

The ache turned to guilt that she wasn't there to help -- guilt squared because she was a nurse.

As her plane landed, Sherburne's head was an emotional cocktail: grief, anger and anxiety, mixed with excitement of being in a foreign land.

It was all about to magnify.

She'd arrived in Bangladesh, one week before that nation's worst industrial tragedy. She did not have to witness the horror in her hometown. But 8,653 miles away, she would not be spared.

A medical mission half a world away

Sherburne, 25, made the journey to Bangladesh with Maryanne Meadows, a neurosurgery nurse she'd befriended at Simmons College in Boston. After nursing school, the two women went to work at Massachusetts General Hospital, where many of the bombing victims were treated.

The pair were part of a rotating team the hospital has been sending to Dhaka to help set up the first bone marrow transplant unit in Bangladesh. Massachusetts General has 60 health projects in 40 countries. The Bangladesh government had approached the hospital to help set up the facility, scheduled to open around August.

Sherburne had never traveled to South Asia before. She experienced the shock that almost every Westerner does after leaving the airport. The assault of hot, heavy, damp air. The unsightly piles of garbage tossed in heaps in open lots, their stench mingling with the heady smells of mustard oil and onion from cooking on the streets.

At her apartment, palmetto bugs scurried across the living room floor and geckos shuttled along the walls.

She might have been reeling from it all had Boston not filled her mind.

After she saw the news on the plane, she'd woken up Meadows, and the two immediately purchased in-flight Wi-Fi so they could get on e-mail and Facebook and check on their friends and family.

Luckily, everyone seemed to be fine.

"It was really hard. I was just trying to focus, but it just kept getting worse," she said. Her brother lives in Watertown, where police finally caught up with bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.

Through it all, Sherburne was so immersed in the news that she almost forgot she was not actually in Boston. That she hadn't just had a Dunkin' Donuts coffee or gone for a jog along the River.

In her first post on her new blog, "What Would Flo Do?" (named after Florence Nightingale), Sherburne wrote this:

"Given the horrific scenes of Monday, followed by the conclusive events on Friday, my head and heart are still somewhere lost over the Atlantic," she wrote. "I hope, however, to slowly drift back to the Bay of Bengal shores and the work at hand."

Welcome to Bangladesh

She and Meadows settled into their apartment in the neighborhood of Baridhara, which Sherburne described as the Beacon Hill of Bangladesh. It lacks the swank of blue-blood Boston but for Dhaka, it is a luxury. She even has remote-controlled air conditioning and a maid, Shilipi, who cleans and cooks for the two Americans.

Her father had worried so much about his daughter traveling to Bangladesh. The worries heightened after deadly riots erupted over a war crimes tribunal trying Islamist leaders for crimes committed during the nation's 1971 war for independence, when it was known as East Pakistan. Still, he'd been glad to hear his daughter's voice from the other side of the world. Thank God she wasn't on the finish line that day in Boston.

On some days, Sherburne and Meadows found themselves in lockdown in their new home because of security concerns. The opposition party, allied with Islamists, has been calling for nationwide strikes, and tensions have led to violent clashes on the streets. But the nurses were eager to get started with the work at hand.

The challenge of launching a bone marrow transplant unit seemed even greater when Bangladesh decided to put it in a public institution: Dhaka Medical College Hospital.

Sherburne had signed up to do this because she wanted to be out of her comfort zone and to be able to remember always how lucky she was to be at Massachusetts General.

She was reminded the moment she walked into Dhaka Medical.

The hospital has 1,700 beds but on any given day, there could be as many as 4,000 patients sharing beds and spilling into hallways and stairwells. That's not uncommon for public hospitals in this part of the world. They are the only places where desperately poor people can afford medical care.

Sherburne's skills might even make her a doctor at the Dhaka hospital. Some nurses are barely one step above a maid. That's what a doctor told Sherburne upon her arrival.

She'd never been in a hospital so ill-equipped to treat severe cases. In Boston, she changed her latex gloves after seeing each patient. In Dhaka, the hospital could not afford so many gloves, so the nurses used one pair on several patients.

She was appalled by the workload of the nurses; each averaged 25 to 30 patients. In America, that number would likely be somewhere between four and eight.

Sherburne and Meadows began their lectures and their clinical training of 10 nurses.

A horrific industrial accident

On the morning of April 24, the two American women were advised to stay at home. A hartal, the Bengali word for a strike, had been called for that day, and there was potential for more strife.

But the employees at the garment factories housed in Rana Plaza in suburban Savar were exempt from the strike. They were ordered to work, even after an inspection the previous day found cracks in the nine-story building and the structure was deemed dangerous.

Shortly after thousands of men, women, boys and girls showed up that day, the building came tumbling down. They were trapped under a crush of mangled concrete and steel.

Sherburne received a U.S. State Department alert about the building collapse.

"When Boston happened, it was so hard not to be at the scene," she said Thursday from Dhaka. "When this happened, I said, 'Take me to the hospital.' "

But she couldn't leave because of the security risks. Stuck in her home, she watched tragedy unfold again on television.

"My heart hasn't stopped breaking," she said.

She watched as rescue workers pulled out survivors, as time grew short. She knew that after 72 hours, there was little chance of a person surviving without food and water. The death toll would eventually rise to more than 500.

She watched as the plight of the workers became public again; how so many worked under terrible conditions for paltry salaries.

And she watched as a 17-year-old girl was interviewed on a TV station. Rescuers had to amputate her arm to slide her out of the rubble.

When Sherburne was 17, she dreaded Saturdays when she worked a four-hour shift at a dry cleaning shop and made $40. Now, it was difficult to watch the teenage survivor.

"The station called her lucky, and I went numb thinking how at age 17, I would have defined lucky," Sherburne wrote.

"It would have incorporated more than a minimum wage of $38 a month, it would have indicated that if a building was deemed unsafe on a Tuesday, I would not have been forced to return on a Wednesday, and without question it would have included two hands."

Later she questioned why tragedy in her hometown was incessantly on the news but the headlines from Bangladesh had already started to fade even before the rescue operation was over.

"I could tell you more about how much the Boston Marathon bombers' mother shoplifted from a Natick, Massachusetts, mall than how many factory workers were still missing."

Finally released to help

Five days after the catastrophe, Sherburne was allowed out of her house. She went to Dhaka Medical, which had taken in so many of the injured, some now without limbs, some still in life-threatening situations.

She was about to see what she didn't have to in Boston.

She walked into a ward with 53 female patients, their beds pressed together to make room for them all. It was 101 degrees that day, and the electricity was off because of a national grid problem. Some parts of the vast hospital were dark; others parts were dimly lit by emergency generators.

Sherburne wanted to change the patients' dressings, but there wasn't enough bandaging material to do that. So she did what nurses are trained to do. She sat on their beds and comforted them, speaking through a translator.

"How's your pain?" she asked.

"No pain," one said. "Nice to meet you."

For Sherburne, it was another reminder of human resilience.

Each patient mumbled a number. Three. Five. Eight. At first Sherburne didn't understand why.

Then it hit her. They were telling her which floor they had been on when the building hurtled toward the earth.

She reached out and held a woman's hand and noticed they were both wearing the same shade of pink on their nails. They even had identical chips in the polish.

"That's when it stopped seeming American to Bangladeshi and (it) was just a young woman to (another) young woman," Sherburne wrote.

She walked out with the realization that the clothes she was wearing might have been made in one of those factories that collapsed.

She remembers someone asking her if she wanted to see the dead -- the ones who had been brought to hospital but did not survive.

Sherburne declined, politely, but caught a glimpse of a lifeless body being wheeled away. She figured the woman was around her own age.

First appeared in CNN.com, May 3, 2013

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Made in Bangladesh, Not in Bangladeshi Blood

ANUSHAY HOSSAIN

For me, nothing captures the human tragedy of the recent building collapse in Savar, Bangladesh more poignantly than the image of the man cradling a woman in his arms, her broken body balancing upon slabs of broken factory rubble. As their dead bodies lay in an embrace evocative of a Renaissance period sculpture, the one thing that is glaringly clear is the cost of cheap labor: real human lives.

As a child in Dhaka in the 1980′s, I grew up during the beginning of the Ready Made Garment (RMG) era. As the sector quickly expanded and developed, it thrust thousands of young women into the workforce. On our way to school every morning, we would always see throngs of young Bangladeshi women flood the roads in their neon colored traditional salwaar-kameezes, bright ribbon strings tied in their hair. They were all headed to work in the factories.

I did not know it at the time, but what was happening in Bangladesh was a social revolution, instantly empowering women by making them financially independent, many for the first time in their lives. Today, approximately 3 million women currently work in the sector, and while the extent to which they are exploited within the industry can be debated, few can argue that employment in a garment factory puts food in the mouth of workers, and their families.

Vidiya Amrit Khan, Director of Desh Garments Limited and Director of the Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers Exporters Association (BGMEA), says that the Savar tragedy unfairly casts blame on the garments industry just because of a “few bad apples.” Khan’s late father, M. Noorul Quader, pioneered the 100% export oriented Ready Made Garment (RMG) industry. Today, she runs her family business in Bangladesh, and states that we cannot scapegoat a sector we owe so much to:

I feel so sad and angry that people who are generally not employers of large numbers of people, or involved in mass production, have been making such harmful, and often vicious comments about an industry which has built Bangladesh, and has given so much independence to our women. This sector has grown into a $20 billion industry in about three decades, with 90% of its workforce being women. This is something to be very proud of. 

Verane Muyeed, LR Paris‘s Washington, DC Office Manager, worked in the Dhaka garment industry for over a decade, and says that while the sector is not perfect, the role the garment industry has played in empowering Bangladeshi women should not be overlooked:

The fact remains that though micro-finance is heralded as a triumph for helping Bangladesh alleviate poverty, factory work for young women across the country gives families the income, health, and independence that they need to get out of poverty.  In my 17 years of experience working with Bangladeshi garments factories, I have seen the evolution of the industry, as the making of garments, the compliances, the working conditions have improved, and are still improving, and empowering a new generation of workers.

Over the last thirty years, Bangladesh’s garment industry created a new burgeoning middle class in a country with one of the world’s largest economic gaps. The wealth generated from textiles is the single greatest source of economic growth in Bangladesh. While initially tea and jute were the most profitable sectors, that all changed in the 1980′s when the garment industry in Bangladesh became the main export sector, and a major source of foreign exchange.

Over the years, the list of global retailers who manufactured their clothes with cheap labor in Bangladesh grew endless, from JC Penny to Mango to Zara to Walmart to H&M to Tommy Hilfiger to Bennetton. Whenever I went abroad as a Bangladeshi, roaming through large Western department stores, and I would come across clothing with the “Made in Bangladesh” label, I would feel my heart swell with pride.

But for all these years, us Bangladeshis have kept a secret. We all have been compliant in covering up the dark underbelly of our country’s booming garment sector. Even though the string of garment fires caused international outcry last year, Bangladeshis knew this was nothing new. Fires had been breaking out in overcrowded factories for decades, long before social media and the Internet let the world know about the deaths.

Savar is different, not only because it is the worst industrial tragedy in Bangladesh’s history, but because it exposes how rampant and deep corruption run in a  country where a bribe can buy you what you want, and laws are generally not implemented. What does it say that today Bangladesh is at a point where we cannot even guarantee the workers, who are the backbone of our economy, that they won’t die at their job site from completely preventable causes?

We can point fingers at Western buying companies as much as we want, and of course they have a huge responsibility in all of this. The greed exists on both ends. But the fact of the matter is the responsibility lies with us, with Bangladesh & with Bangladeshis. Garments is the bloodline of our country, and blaming the sector along with its Western buyers is economic suicide Bangladesh cannot afford.

The truth is, we all have blood on our hands. From the Western brands to the Bangladeshis factory owners to the consumer hungry for cheap clothes, we are all guilty. But pointing the finger at the Western buyers is not the solution. If they cannot get their products made in Bangladesh, they will just go somewhere else, like the textile factories have done all through history.

The solution has to come from us. The change has to come from Bangladeshis because the Savar tragedy can happen again, and not just in the garment sector. It can happen anywhere in Bangladesh. Experts estimate currently there are over 6,500 vulnerable buildings in the country, and warn that Dhaka can become unlivable.

Ultimately, the responsibility, with outside help and pressure, must come from Bangladesh because only we the people can bring about genuine, real change. Boycotting products manufactured in Bangladesh is not an option, or the solution, and we all know it. As Sir Fazle Hasan Abed states in his recent editorial, ”Made in Bangladesh should be a mark of pride, not shame.”

But the label on our clothing must also ensure that “Made in Bangladesh” is not made in Bangladeshi blood. No piece of clothing will ever be worth that.

First appeared in Forbes.com, May 02, 2013 

Anushay Hossain is a Bangladeshi born-Washington based policy analyst & journalist. She writes the blog, Anushay’s Point

The bloodshed behind our cheap clothes

Photo: labels of brand trousers found among the debris

KALPONA AKTER, Special to CNN

For workers of Bangladesh, the worst kind of tragedy imaginable struck last week when the Rana Plaza garment factory building -- just outside my home city of Dhaka -- collapsed, killing more than 500 workers. Despite the many warnings of dangerous cracks in the walls reported to supervisors, police and the media earlier in the week, thousands were still sent to work on Wednesday to proceed with business as usual.

There's no question that this building collapse is tragic, but for garment workers, it's not surprising.

I began working in Bangladesh's garment industry at the age of 12, making just $3 a month. I went to work because my father had a stroke and the family needed money to cover basic living expenses. I worked 23 days in a row, sleeping on the shop floor, taking showers in the factory restroom, drinking unsafe water and being slapped by the supervisor.

By the time I was a young woman working at a factory that made clothing for a big U.S. retailer, I knew the time had come for change.

The factory owed my coworkers and me overtime wages, but it wanted to pay us only half of what we had earned, making it even harder for us to support our families. So I helped lead a strike to hold our manager accountable.

I was fired and blacklisted, but my work was far from over. I later learned labor law, English and computer skills so that I could help win justice for garment workers. Today I lead a worker education and advocacy nonprofit that counts tens of thousands of garment workers as members.

The sad reality is that tragedies like this have become business as usual, advanced by some of the most highly profitable American and international corporations in the world.

Last November, 112 workers lost their lives when the Tazreen Fashions factory, which produced garments sold by Wal-mart, Sears and other retailers, caught fire. Much like New York's infamous Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire more than 100 years ago, the workers at Tazreen were trapped inside, with many jumping from upper story windows to try to save themselves. The death toll at Bangladeshi factories stands at nearly 1,000 since 2006, based on estimates by the Bangladeshi government and an advocacy organization.

In the case of these two recent tragedies, there is plenty of blame to go around -- from the Bangladeshi government for looking the other way at safety violations, to the incredibly dangerous circumstances workers face when they try to unionize, to the pressure factory owners and managers are under to turn out high product volume at low prices no matter what.

It is the responsibility of the government of Bangladesh to make a sustained, concerted effort to rectify the dire situation. Strict, well-enforced factory codes and clear support for workers' rights are paramount to protecting Bangladesh's garment workforce.

But more tragedies can be prevented only if the multinational corporations and retailers whose goods are produced at these factories are willing to stand up and do what is right.

A coalition of labor and non-governmental organizations in Bangladesh, Europe and the United States has developed a protocol for an innovative two-year inspection and renovation program to finally make these factories safe -- the Bangladesh Fire and Building Safety Agreement.

In addition to facilitating government-supported employer-labor relations and stringent oversight of factory safety management, this protocol focuses on the responsibility of brand owners and retailers to support safety standards.

If Wal-mart and its fellow retailers that count on Bangladeshi labor demand change, we can be sure it will happen. As the protocol states, these corporations must verify that the factories they use comply with applicable safety standards. They must ensure that their pricing of garments makes it feasible for the factories to stick to standards. No longer should a Bangladeshi factory manager feel forced to pressure his employees to work in a deadly environment to meet a corporation's bottom line.

As for the tragedies that have already taken place, these brands should contribute to worker compensation funds for victims and victims' families, including those in the fire at Tazreen. To date, Wal-mart and Sears have refused to contribute. Both companies maintain that subcontractors had used the factory without their authorization, so they are not responsible. I single out Walmart because its past actions have been painfully inadequate. Walmart has refused to sign onto the protocol designed to enhance fire safety and improve factory structures, saying it is putting its own standards in place, which are perfectly adequate. Yet those are Band-Aid measures that are woefully insufficient.

Last fall, Wal-mart refused to admit its connection to the Tazreen factory until my colleagues and I went there the day after the fire and photographed products with Wal-mart's labels in the wreckage. We must no longer tolerate this willful ignorance on the part of multinational corporations about where their goods are produced.

It's high time that companies like Wal-mart, The Gap, and others step up and demand the safety of Bangladesh's garment workers. Too many Bangladeshi workers live and work in fear for their lives each day. The fire safety protocol is a critical first step to making real change, and I urge Wal-mart to become a leader in the fight to save Bangladeshi lives.

First appeared in CNN.com, May 3, 2013

Kalpona Akter, a former child laborer, is executive director of the Bangladesh Center for Worker Solidarity, a garments workers rights group

Bangladesh Fears an Exodus of Apparel Firms

Pics: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images: Demonstrators outside Gap’s offices in San Francisco, USA on April 25 sought better working conditions in Bangladesh factories

STEVEN GREENHOUSE, reporting contributed by JIM YARDLEY

A day after the Walt Disney Company disclosed that it was ending apparel production in Bangladesh, that country’s garment manufacturers expressed alarm that other Western corporations might follow Disney’s lead. They feared that could bring about a potential mass exodus that would devastate Bangladesh’s economy and threaten the livelihoods of millions of people.

Mohammad Fazlul Azim, a member of the Bangladesh Parliament and an influential garment factory owner, implored brands not to leave Bangladesh, noting that many factories did comply with safety standards.

“The whole nation should not be made to suffer,” he said. “This industry is very important to us. Fourteen million families depend on this. It is a huge number of people who are dependent on this industry.”

Factory owners in Bangladesh as well as Western apparel retailers have faced intense pressure from governments, consumers and labor groups to improve workplace safety there after a building containing five garment factories collapsed last week outside the nation’s capital, killing more than 430 people.

Several Western retailers indicated that they were considering new plans to ensure factory safety, efforts that would require investing in, rather than abandoning, their operations in Bangladesh. But few have made financial commitments to upgrade unsafe factory buildings or to endorse tougher and deeper inspections. So far, pledging money for relief efforts has been the most common response by big retailers.

Galen G. Weston, the chairman of Loblaw, a major Canadian retailer, said his company wanted more rigorous factory inspections that would for the first time examine the structural integrity of buildings housing these garment factories. He also said Loblaw, which makes the Joe Fresh apparel line, was trying to figure out what more it could do to improve workplace conditions there.

Mr. Weston said he was disturbed that factory managers saw fit to send apparel workers back into the building last week after it had been declared dangerous.

“What role does industry play in propagating a manufacturing culture that would take such risks with people’s lives?” he said. “I’m troubled by the deafening silence from other apparel retailers on this issue.”

Mr. Weston said he was upset that only two out of the nearly 30 Western apparel brands whose goods were manufactured in that building had spoken out about the disaster.

Officials from two nongovernment organizations who attended a meeting in Germany on Monday aimed at improving factory safety in Bangladesh said Thursday that they were confident that several major retailers would soon join a broad plan to ensure fire and building safety in Bangladesh factories. But so far, that plan has been embraced by just PVH, the parent company of Tommy Hilfiger and Calvin Klein, and the Tchibo Group, a German retailer.

“I’m quite confident that we will get some of the big retail players to sign on to this,” said Jyrki Raina, general secretary of the IndustriAll Global Union, a federation of 50 million workers from 140 countries. “The world will not forgive us. We will all look ridiculous if there is nothing done.”

If a few more retail giants sign on, labor groups are likely to turn up the pressure on others to join the effort or face protests, several officials said. Already, demonstrators have carried signs outside the stores and offices of major retailers that bought apparel from factories in the collapsed building. Mr. Raina said that at the Monday meeting worker advocacy groups and retailers sought to revise the PVH-Tchibo plan so that it would be acceptable to more retailers while still maintaining strong workplace protections.

Several labor advocates voiced optimism that two companies that have taken the lead in creating a compensation fund for the Bangladesh victims and their families — Loblaw and Primark, an Anglo-Irish retailer — would join that plan, which calls for Western retailers and brands to help pay for safety improvements at garment factories.

Walmart, Gap and numerous other retailers have balked at embracing the plan. Retail and labor officials say that is partly because the retailers are concerned about the plan’s binding legal commitments.

Some companies have taken steps on their own. In October, Gap announced a $22 million fire and building safety plan with its suppliers in Bangladesh, without identifying which factories it was using there or how many factories would be improved under the plan. And three weeks ago, Walmart pledged $1.8 million to train 2,000 Bangladesh factory managers about fire safety.

Michael H. Posner, a former assistant secretary of state of human and labor rights in the Obama administration, called Walmart’s contribution “a drop in the bucket when you consider you have a thousand faulty workplaces.”

Some nongovernment organizations estimate that it would cost $3 billion, or $600 million a year for five years, to make the needed fire safety and building improvements to ensure that Bangladesh’s more than 4,000 garment factories were safe. Bangladesh exports about $18 billion in apparel a year.

Mr. Posner, now a professor at the Stern School of Business at New York University, said the Obama administration was not doing enough to address safety problems in Bangladesh. “One of the big gaps here is that governments are standing on the sideline,” he said.

“They’re neither pushing a united strategy among big companies nor pushing hard enough on the Bangladesh government to do the right thing. It’s one thing to convene a meeting, it’s another thing to say to brands, ‘You have to work together to fix this.’ ”

Representative Sander Levin of Michigan, the top Democrat on the House Ways and Means Committee, and Representative George Miller of California, the top Democrat on the House Labor Committee, have also urged the administration to do more to push Western companies and the government of Bangladesh to fix factory safety problems.

“You can’t do this piecemeal,” Mr. Levin said. “You have to take the bear by the tail and get everyone to the table. The governments haven’t done that.”

One administration official said it was working on a plan that would provide several million dollars to the Bangladesh government to help strengthen its efforts to regulate factory buildings, especially on fire safety.

Mr. Posner said Disney’s move — apparel represents less than a fifth of the nearly $40 billion in annual sales of its licensed products — might encourage other Western brands to leave Bangladesh. “Now other companies feel they have a green light.”

David Schilling of the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility said he generally supported a “stay and improve” — not a cut and run — approach for Western companies in countries like Bangladesh.

“There have to be signals to government and suppliers, especially when you have loss of life, that positive steps have to be taken,” he said. “But you also have to have companies saying, ‘Enough is enough. We’re wanting to see significant change or we can’t source here.’ ”

First appeared in The New York Times, Published: May 2, 2013

Steven Greenhouse is the labor and workplace reporter for The New York Times, having held that beat since October 1995. As labor and workplace reporter, he has covered many topics, including poverty among the nation’s farm workers, Wal-Mart stores locking in their workers at night, labor’s role in politics, the shortcomings of New York State's workers compensation system and the battles to roll back collective bargaining rights for public employees. His book, "The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker," was published in April 2008 by Alfred A. Knopf. "The Big Squeeze" was published in paperback in February 2009 and won the 2009 Sidney Hillman Book Prize for nonfiction.