Survivors of Bangladesh garment factory collapse still suffering, 5 months later

Photo: Relatives and colleagues search for near and dear ones in the death list

JASON MOTLAGH

Rafiqul Islam can’t recall how many people he pulled from the rubble of Rana Plaza, the eight-story factory complex that collapsed in April, killing more than 1,100 people. But he knows how many he cut out with a hacksaw blade — eight. He did so in spaces so cramped that at one point he became trapped himself.

Those 18 days as a volunteer rescue worker left their scars. Islam has suffered memory lapses and had a series of violent outbursts, and wound up losing his job. Now he wanders alone most days, not sure where to go — until the voices bring him back to the place where he saved so many people and lost himself.

“I hear them still, calling for me,” he says, staring into a mound of broken concrete, torn fabric and twisted iron.

Nearly five months after the deadliest incident in garment manufacturing history, the suffering is far from over for the victims, their relatives and the rescue workers. Many families have received only part of their promised financial compensation. And activists and health-care professionals decry a lack of psychological and financial support for scores of survivors and rescue workers stricken with invisible handicaps.

“After the Rana Plaza tragedy, people are so concerned with the physical impact, but they are completely ignoring the psychological,” said Abdus Sabur, an adviser to the Sajida Foundation, a leading Bangladeshi social development organization. “Mental health is not taken seriously at all in this country.”

According to the Solidarity Center, a nonprofit group affiliated with the AFL-CIO, the Bangladeshi government has paid settlements to dependents of 777 of the 1,131 confirmed dead in the disaster, in amounts ranging from $1,250 to $5,000. An additional 36 garment workers who lost limbs or were paralyzed have received between $15,000 and $18,750 each.

Smaller amounts have come from a British chain, Primark, which used a supplier in Rana Plaza, and the Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association, which represents the $20 billion-a-year industry. A group of Western clothing brands are also discussing providing a lump-sum payment for the suffering experienced by the victims of Rana Plaza.

So far, none of the 4,000 families affected by the Rana Plaza disaster have received the full payments promised by the government or association, says the Bangladesh Institute of Labor Studies, a labor advocacy organization.

Survivors are struggling to cope with not just physical and financial burdens but also with deep emotional wounds.

Visible and invisible signs

Razibul Rahman Kari, 20, a sewing machine operator, was luckier than most when the factory complex collapsed April 24 on the outskirts of Dhaka. Pinned by a heavy slab, he eventually managed to dig himself out with the help of a local man.

But spending hours in the dark amid muffled screams took its toll: The young man has fresh scars on his wrists from cutting himself with a knife while locked in his bedroom. Sometimes when his mother has tried to bring him food, she said, he has beaten her. Without his $70-a-month salary to support them, the family relies on handouts.

The Center for the Rehabilitation of the Paralyzed, a large private facility in Savar, has worked beyond its capacity to care for Rana Plaza’s injured. But because of a dearth of trained mental health professionals, patients with symptoms of acute psychological trauma receive “a minimum” of counseling before they are discharged, said Hossain Mehedi, a doctor at the center.

Other victims may refrain from seeking help because of the social stigma attached to mental problems, Sabur said.

Majeda Begum, 23, another garment factory employee, grapples with severe headaches, disorientation and a paralyzing fear of closed indoor spaces. She lives within walking distance of the rehabilitation center, which provides her with free medication — but that’s only if she manages to show up, and these days she tends to gets lost.

‘Am I gonna be psycho?’

As the government struggled to organize a relief operation at Rana Plaza after the disaster, many local residents rushed to the factory ruins, playing a critical role in rescuing survivors.

One of them, a young mechanic named Omar Faruque Babu, was celebrated in media reports for pulling more than 30 people from the wreckage. When the rescue effort ended, he was checked into a hospital, where he hanged himself in a bathroom.

A part-time teacher, Faizul Muhid, 27, spent three days and nights mining the rubble for the living, and then moved on to a local high school where victims’ bodies were left for relatives to claim.

As the corpses rotted in the heat, he did what no one else would do: searched the rows of remains for items — cellphones, nose rings, scraps of paper — that might help with identification. Late one night, he and another volunteer had to fight off a pack of dogs that had gotten hold of an open body bag with a corpse inside.

These days, he self-medicates with a cocktail of antidepressants that he buys with assistance from friends. “Am I gonna be psycho?” he asked one recent afternoon.

Muhid initially resisted psychological help. Now he thinks he could use it, but it’s expensive and scarce: There are no more than a dozen certified counseling psychologists in this country of more than 160 million people, according to several doctors and activists.

Sheikh Yusuf Harun, deputy commissioner for the district of Dhaka, said, “It’s true — no one is taking responsibility” for the mentally damaged. “They are not reported to us,” he said.

Once compensation packages are finalized, Harun said, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina is planning to address the matter. He offered no details on what kind of long-term support might be made available.

To fill the void in psychological services, several grass-roots organizations are working in hospitals with victims of Rana Plaza, forming support groups that encourage patients to share their stories. Groups are also training counselors to canvass neighborhoods and offer help.

Though the outreach is generally well received, it remains “pretty ad hoc” and covers just a fraction of those affected, said Sadaf Saaz Siddiqi, who works at Naripokkho, a nonprofit group that helps garment workers.

No one has yet reached Islam, the rescue volunteer. A medal from a local workers’ rights organization sits on the nightstand of his tin shack, the only nod to his sacrifice.

After spending three weeks in a hospital facility, largely unattended to, he left to be with his wife before the birth of their fourth child, a son. He wants to support them, he said, but thoughts of the bodies he left behind still make him angry and restless.

When he’s not home, his wife usually knows where to find him.

First published in TheWashington Post, September 8, 2013

The story by Jason Motlagh was reported with a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.

Obama’s blunder with Bangladesh to suspend trade benefits

Angry clothing factory workers street protests for better pay and safe workplace

KEVIN RAFFERTY, special to the Japan Times

President Barack Obama recently announced that he was suspending Bangladesh’s trade benefits under the Generalized System of Preferences (GSP) because the country failed to give its workers proper rights.

Not for the first time, I have to wonder at the clumsiness and the lack of sensible, let alone sensitive, policies by the administration of President Barack Obama.

No doubt he was inspired by horror and outrage after the deaths of almost 1,500 workers in a series of criminal accidents in Bangladesh’s factories making garments for the biggest multinational companies in the world such as Wal-Mart, Primark, H&M, Marks and Spencer, Topshop.

Bangladesh factories suffered from several fires where workers could not get out because the exits were blocked. One fire last year killed 113 people. But the truly murderous culmination came in April when an eight-story factory, whose owners had ignored planning and construction regulations, suddenly collapsed like the proverbial pack of cards.

Police had warned about cracks, but the factory owners told worried workers that if they did not go to work they would lose their jobs: 1,129 of them lost their lives, and others survived only after crushed limbs were amputated. It was the world’s biggest factory disaster.

The punishment that Obama has imposed is like an old-fashioned sledgehammer to crack the proverbial nut — but the sledgehammer has missed its target. That’s a good thing because if Obama had succeeded in hurting Bangladesh, those he would have hurt most would have been the women who work sometimes in unsafe conditions of semi-slavery to produce garments for the world.

As Kimberley Elliott of the Center for Global Development noted, the U.S. action is in most ways a symbolic measure because GSP does not cover clothing, which accounts for 90 percent of Bangladesh’s exports to the United States.

The punishment affects about 1 percent of exports, or a trifling $35 million in goods, so it seems a clumsy way of making a point. It may be that Obama understood that what he was doing would have very little impact on the economy but nevertheless wanted to send a warning shot. But the way he did it smacks of bullying.

It also sends dangerous messages in different directions. It might encourage the European Union to follow suit, which would threaten more than $12 billion worth of Bangladesh goods. Washington’s action could also encourage big retailers to rethink and try to pull out of Bangladesh because Obama has withdrawn a significant seal of approval from the country.

Already one chief executive of an American company that designs and distributes high-end apparel from Bangladesh told the New York Times, “Right now, the name of Bangladesh just gives a bad rep (reputation) to a company.” A number of international companies are keen to explore other opportunities away from disgraced Bangladesh.

I have to declare an interest. I watched the creation of Bangladesh and its bloody Caesarian birth out of Pakistan with India as midwife. Even in the heady days of independence, the economic plight of Bangladesh seemed desperate, with few exports but heavy dependence on imports for all sort of basic goods, from food to energy and clothing.

Worse still, the life expectancy and literacy rates of the infant country were among the lowest in the world. The land was crisscrossed by rivers curling round each other like snakes in an orgy.

The main means of transport were country boats with home made patched up sails that had to be pulled if there was no wind, or slow buses or slower trains, all of which were usually so crowded that there was no room to stand, even on the roof.

What was the hope for this country, except for the heartwarming energy and enthusiasm of the people?

To cut a long story short, Bangladesh, after a painful start, has begun to make important steps forward, thanks largely to the women in the textile factories. They are the backbone of the $20 billion in clothing exports that have helped Bangladesh to climb up the world economic tables. Per capita income, thanks to annual growth of 6 to 7 percent, is $1,700, and Bangladesh now occupies 44th place in the global economic league tables.

It has gained a place in Goldman Sachs’ N-11 group of countries, meaning the Next Eleven, which have the potential after the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) to become the big movers and shakers of the world economy in this century. The list is an odd one, with some doubtful names on it, but it puts Bangladesh in the august company of Mexico, Indonesia, South Korea and Turkey, which have begun to make their global presence felt.

Who could have imagined such Bangladeshi progress even 10 years ago?

But the women textile workers have achieved much more for their country. They have helped to change the social fabric, so that in key indicators such as life expectancy, infant mortality, the schooling of girls and combatting undernourishment of children, Bangladesh is now superior to its big neighbor, India.

Does Obama wish to bring his sledgehammer policies to crush their future and that of Bangladesh?

It would have been — would be — far better for Obama to use carrots before resorting to a stick. The U.K. government has shown a more enlightened attitude by asking leading companies buying goods from Bangladesh how they can work together to improve the standards of the factories. European retailers have also shown the right attitude — to try to make the working conditions safer and better for the women. But their U.S. counterparts walked away from any such deal, not wishing to get involved in legal obligations.

There is surely room for big international retailers to squeeze their profits to ensure safer production. Industry sources calculate that Bangladesh women get the lowest monthly pay of all the Asian women working in garment factories, a mere $37 for a 48-hour working week, against $120 in Cambodia, $145 in Vietnam, $300 in factories near Jakarta and $500 in Guangdong.

At the international level, where is World Bank President Jim Kim?

He has been quick to make grand statements about defeating poverty globally, but in this key area of actually doing something to protect vulnerable workers who are trying to raise themselves out of poverty, I cannot find a single word from Kim or the bank or indeed from the Asian Development Bank or from big international aid givers, apart from the United Kingdom.

Are they waiting for the Bangladesh government to ask for help to defeat its own corrupt part in allowing infringement of building codes that led to the rise and fall of unsafe factories and for protection of the politically connected factory owners who profit from slave labor and exploiting the women? Shame.

First published in Japan Times, July 23, 2013

Kevin Rafferty is a professor at the Institute for Academic Initiatives at Osaka University

Bangladeshi garment factories are located in buildings not designed to withstand stress of heavy manufacturing

RAVI NESSMAN, Associated Press, Dhaka, Bangladesh

Bangladeshi garment factories are routinely built without consulting engineers. Many are located in commercial or residential buildings not designed to withstand the stress of heavy manufacturing. Some add illegal extra floors atop support columns too weak to hold them, according to a survey of scores of factories by an engineering university that was shown to The Associated Press.

A separate inspection, by the garment industry, of 200 risky factories found that 10 percent of them were so dangerous that they were ordered to shut. The textiles minister said a third inspection, conducted by the government, could show that as many as 300 factories were unsafe.

Taken together, the findings offer the first broad look at just how unsafe the working conditions are for the garment workers who produce clothing for major western brands. And it's more bad news for the $20 billion industry that has been struggling to regain the confidence of Western retailers and consumers following a November fire at the Tazreen Fashions Ltd. factory that killed 112 people and the April collapse of the Rana Plaza building that killed 1,129 people in the worst garment industry tragedy. But the proliferation of inspections could signal the industry is finally taking its workers' safety seriously.

Rana Plaza was "a wakeup call for everybody" to ensure their buildings were structurally sound, said Shahidullah Azim, vice president of the Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association.

"Earlier it was not in our minds. We never, ever thought of this," he said.

But Rana Plaza wasn't the first factory building to collapse in Bangladesh. In 2005, the Spectrum sweater factory crumbled on top of workers, killing 64. That building was also found to have illegal additions.

After the Rana collapse, the government and the garment manufacturers asked the Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology to begin evaluating the buildings. The university formed 15 teams of two engineers each — a structural expert and a foundation expert — to conduct initial inspections, examining a building's support columns, frame, foundation and the soil it was built on, said Mujibur Rahman, head of the university's department of civil engineering.

Rahman said further tests using sophisticated equipment will be completed in the coming months.

AP was shown initial results of some of the inspections of about 200 buildings — many of them garment factories — on condition the factories not be identified. The owners volunteered their buildings for inspection — even paying for the surveys — a decision that suggests they are among the more safety conscious in the industry. The remainder of the country's 4,000 garment factories could be worse, said Rahman.

While initial inspections showed that many of the factories appeared safe, some had problems so serious that engineers recommended they be immediately shut down. Others were told to seal off the illegal floors at the tops of their buildings and gingerly remove the heavy equipment stored there.

"There were buildings that we found that were really critical and we asked them to immediately vacate those buildings," Rahman said.

The engineers found that huge numbers of the factories were housed in commercial or residential buildings not designed to withstand the vibrations and heavy loads of industrial use, Rahman said. Machinery vibrations were blamed as one of the causes along with additional illegal floors as the cause of the Rana collapse.

Most of the examined buildings did not have structural tests dating back to their construction, and it was "very rare" that an engineer supervised construction, Rahman said.

They found a building approved for only six stories that had been expanded to 10. Support columns that were supposed to have five steel bars inside them had only two. Other columns were too small to support the structures. Some of the buildings had structural cracks that threatened their integrity.

In one report, the engineers found structural cracks on two columns and a heavy power generator located on the roof, where its vibrations could threaten the building's integrity. They recommended sealing all the floors above the ground floor pending a more thorough assessment. Rahman said he told the owners it would be safer just to demolish the building and start over.

A five-story factory had 30-centimeter by 30-centimeter (12-inch by-12 inch) structural columns that did not appear strong enough to handle the load. The engineers called for sealing the top floor until the building could be strengthened.

Another factory building had seven stories instead of the approved five and was meant for residential use. Its 25-centimeter by 25-centimeter (10-inch by 10-inch) columns were too small and the foundation was not wide enough to anchor the building in the red Dhaka clay. The engineers recommended closing the top two stories.

In other cases, the engineers called for the demolition of the illegal top floor of a seven-story building and the closure of several other buildings with structural cracks.

Rahman said some owners begged him to change the recommendations, saying they had three months of back orders to fill and then could address the problems. He refused.

Other owners appeared to think twice about the inspections.

The engineers were initially overwhelmed with requests to examine 400 buildings. But after their work began, some owners stopped answering their phones and engineers were unable to visit half of them, Rahman said.

It was not clear whether all the recommendations were being followed, but there were signs that some risky buildings were being forced into compliance.

Not far from the swampy pit where Rana Plaza once stood in the Dhaka suburb of Savar, a factory was dismantling — on government orders — two illegal floors it had been adding.

Industry and government officials said they were taking the results seriously and have announced a steady stream of factory closures in recent weeks.

"We are very much taking care of this thing, because we know that for one or two buildings, we cannot destroy all the industry," said Azim from the garment manufacturers' group.

The group set up its own engineering team and inspected 200 suspect factories in recent weeks, he said. They found violations so worrisome they shut 20 of them, he said.

Some will be moved to other buildings, others will be strengthened and some will be allowed to reopen after heavy equipment is removed from upper floors, he said. It was not clear if those 20 factories overlapped with those inspected by the university.

The garment association also established rules forcing factories to submit structural plans and soil test reports or risk losing their membership in the organization — and their export licenses, he said.

Textiles Minister Abdul Latif Siddique said the government was conducting its own inspections and expects to close factories as well.

"I think 200 to 300 factories will be vulnerable, and I think we will identify those buildings very quickly," he said.

In the wake of the Rana Plaza disaster, the country was under extreme pressure from Western brands to improve safety, he said. But he also appealed to those companies to pay higher rates to cover the upgrades.

"To provide security, better wages and compliance is not cheap," he said.

Swedish retailer H&M, PVH, the parent company of Calvin Klein, and Inditex, which owns Zara, are among companies that signed an agreement to help finance safety improvements in Bangladesh factories. Wal-Mart and the Gap have not.

Experts said the recent disasters were a product of the explosive growth of garment manufacturing here from a cottage industry into a behemoth that employs 4 million people. It began in the 1980s with small factories in residential buildings with no special fire exits, the workers sewing and cutting on the lower floors while the owner lived upstairs. When the business grew, the owner moved out and the factory expanded into the whole building.

Some factories later moved into commercial space. The most successful eventually constructed their own buildings, but even that was unregulated until Bangladesh established its first statutory building code in 2006.

Mubasshar Hussain, president of the Institute of Architects, Bangladesh, said 50 percent of the factories likely have problems, but all of them can be addressed within a year with a coordinated campaign to retrofit those buildings.

"We have the manpower, we have the technology, we have the material. All we need is the awareness of the owner," he said,

But Hussain worried that the burst of activity following the Rana Plaza collapse could dissipate. He pointed to a long-forgotten 2005 garment association report recommending close structural monitoring of factories in the wake of the collapse of the Spectrum sweater factory that killed 64 workers.

Siddique, the textiles minister, said the new disaster was too horrifying to be ignored.

"We are serious now, hopefully it will be better," he said.

First syndicated by Associated Press (AP) June 13, 2013

Associated Press reporter Julhas Alam contributed to this report.

How Bangladesh Garment Industry Traded Workplace Safety For Jobs

DAVE JAMIESON, EMRAN HOSSAIN and KIM BHASIN

Like millions of other young women in Bangladesh, Sumi Abedin forged her place in the modern economy at a sewing machine inside an urban garment factory.

The ready-made garment industry now accounts for a whopping 80 percent of Bangladesh's exports, making the country the third largest exporter of garments in the world. The explosive growth in business over the past two decades has helped create more than 3.5 million garment jobs in the country, particularly for women like Abedin, who, just a generation ago, may have had no formal position in Bangladesh's workforce.

Until recently, Abedin, 24, worked sewing pockets onto pants in the factory known as Tazreen Fashions, outside Dhaka. She earned meager wages by global standards -- roughly $55 a month, comparable to what other garment workers in her country make. This cash was critical for the survival of her family. Her father works as a rickshaw puller, and his earnings alone did not cover food and other basic necessities. Their combined income was just enough to support themselves and Abedin's mother.

But such opportunity comes with steep costs. Abedin knows people who paid for it with their lives.

Abedin no longer has a job. Last November, her factory burned to the ground, killing 112 people. She leaped from the third floor, breaking her right leg and left hand in the process. The young man who landed beside her died.

As proponents of expanded global trade are quick to highlight, Bangladesh's stratospheric rise in the apparel world has helped alleviate the country's grinding poverty. But in Abedin's case, the boom has taken more than it's given. After losing her job, she said, she was left with a payment of $150 from her employer, to cover back pay and severance, and another $1,200, from a fund supported by Li and Fung Ltd., a retail giant that contracted to have its clothes made inside the doomed factory. Medical bills have already swallowed about three-quarters of that money, and her doctor has told her she needs a year to recover before she can hope to work again.

Along with other hardships, she carries the knowledge that more factory disasters have happened since her own and that even more will almost certainly happen in the future.

"We want a safe workplace," Abedin recently told HuffPost, speaking Bengali. Even before the fire, "the working conditions were poor in my factory. We were verbally and physically abused."

Last month, Bangladesh suffered what has been called the world’s most deadly garment industry disaster -- the collapse of a factory complex inside the Rana Plaza building in a suburb of Dhaka. The tragedy, which took the lives of more than 1,100 workers, focused global attention on a reality that Abedin and other workers said they already knew too well: The garment trade in Bangladesh is a dangerous enterprise rife with factory fires and other deadly calamities. The industry has grown so rapidly that it has outpaced the government’s ability to monitor and enforce workplace safety standards. Indeed, the growth appears fueled in part by the government’s willingness to look the other way.

The substandard working conditions that Abedin and other garment workers have confronted are the byproduct of a globalization success story. Bangladesh has transformed itself into one of the world's leading exporters of clothing, generating millions of jobs that have financed housing, basic nutrition and education for some of the poorest people on earth. But this refashioning has been engineered through means that labor advocates portray as fundamentally exploitative, by courting foreign investors with some of the globe’s cheapest, most disenfranchised workers.

Bangladesh has proven irresistible to international clothing brands and retailers, who have found a refuge from the higher costs associated with stricter enforcement of health, safety and labor laws. Indeed, until the recent of string of industrial accidents big enough to capture headlines in the United States and Europe, Bangladesh factories had seen little regulation.

"Bangladesh made it possible mainly because of its cheap labor force," said Mohammad Giasuddin, whose father launched one of the first modern export of garments in Bangladesh. "And our laborers are industrious and good at it."

When Giasuddin's father, Mohammad Reazuddin, sent his first shipment to France in 1977, his effort was lampooned in a newspaper cartoon that suggested fashion-forward Paris would return the clothes to their sender. Leading Bangladesh businessmen mocked the very idea of the country producing garments primarily for Westerners. But Reazuddin and a small group of factory owners had the benefit of cheap labor -- the wage of a factory floor worker was about $2 a month then, Giasuddin recalled -- as well as the backing of the Bangladesh government.

Plenty of other countries in Asia and Latin America have abundant workers willing to work for little money. But hardly any countries have wage floors quite as low as Bangladesh's, and few have courted and fostered the garment industry with such strategic coherence.

In the 1980s, the government put a new emphasis on economic growth through exports and direct foreign investment, particularly with the establishment of export processing zones, like the ones that are now home to the country's thousands of garment factories. The government also allowed for the duty-free import of machinery and raw garment materials.

"The government and industry leaders made a judgment that they could compete globally in the garment industry," said Michael Posner, the former U.S. assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights and labor under President Barack Obama. "The infrastructure is weak. The government's enforcement of both labor laws and safety laws is weak -- or non-existent in many places. And the sourcing model for big companies has encouraged them to go to places where they can produce things as cheaply as possible."

The garment industry would bring needed jobs to the country, putting wages into the pockets of Bangladeshis struggling to survive through agriculture. Farms had been split into ever-smaller parcels, while farmers themselves felt increasingly squeezed by the rising costs of power and fertilizer. Garment jobs were seen as a crucial source of earnings for the poor.

The factory owners' greatest asset was a largely untapped pool of labor -- rural women. For decades, women in predominantly Muslim areas outside of cities had been relegated to informal, indoor agricultural work that added modestly to their husbands’ monthly incomes. The new garment factories presented the opportunity for formal work that was religiously permissible for these women -- a marginalized and underprivileged class that happened to carry a long tradition of stitching and weaving. (It's likely that muslin, long a coveted fabric in European countries, originated in Dhaka centuries ago.)

With no labor organizations to contend with, the men who owned the factories could pay their workers very little, with only small concern for strikes or protests over working conditions. Even today, most supervisory roles in the factories are held by men. Women now make up the overwhelming majority of line workers.

"It was a classic situation of having all this surplus labor in rural areas," said Martha Chen, an expert on Bangladesh at the Harvard Kennedy School. "You had this huge pool of women who'd never done paid work, so they were willing to work for nada. There was an extraordinary setup for it."

THE END OF QUOTAS

Even with such an abundance of low-wage labor, the furious growth of apparel-making in Bangladesh over the past decade would not have been possible without another element: The scrapping of a complex system of trade quotas that effectively limited how much clothing any one developing country could export to the wealthy world.

Exports of garments to the United States and other Western countries used to be governed by something known as the Multi Fibre Arrangement. Enforced by the World Trade Organization, the agreement specified the number of polo shirts, blue jeans, blazers and other garments that each developing country could send to the U.S. and Europe.

The agreement was meant to function as a kind of aid, extending profits from the worldwide clothing trade to poor countries like Bangladesh. But it also set production caps at a time when developed countries feared the lower production costs of countries like Singapore and South Korea, according to Mark Anner, director of the Center for Global Workers’ Rights at Penn State University.

The poorest countries, including Bangladesh, benefited from the arrangement. International companies manufacturing elsewhere in the region, pressured by quota restrictions in their own countries, gravitated toward nations like Bangladesh because of the availability of cheaper labor. Bangladesh was also able to export to the European Union duty-free and quota-free due to an exemption from the World Trade Organization.

But that arrangement came to an end in 2004. Many observers assumed that the change would hurt Bangladesh, considered less competitive than other developing players at the time. By such accounts, investment would exit nearly every country and rush into China, which presented its own low wages along with the largest workforce on the planet and formidable infrastructure for trade, from modern ports, to highways and rail. As the thinking went, poor countries like Bangladesh would lose millions of jobs and wind up even poorer.

“China was under very tight constraints up until the beginning of 2005,” said Pietra Rivoli, a professor of finance and international business at Georgetown University, and author of the book The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy. “Everyone was wondering if you take the constraints off of China, who's going to lose?“

But the end of the global quota system wound up proving a great boon for Bangladesh.

Once the quota system was phased out, "it allowed for tremendous concentration in the industry," said Anner. "It just allowed companies to pick winners and losers."

China’s apparel industry took off, with the production of many clothing categories multiplying as much as 1,000 percent above previous levels, according to Rivoli. Production dipped in South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, Hong Kong and other higher-wage countries formerly protected by the quotas.

But, over time, other winners emerged as well -- low-wage nations, such as India, Pakistan, Vietnam and Bangladesh.

Production in the apparel industry tends to flow toward lower-wage countries because labor is such a large part of the process, and each worker requires only a low level of skill. It also requires basic infrastructure from reliable power supplies to transport facilities. While the fundamental industrial structure in Bangladesh isn’t very efficient, it’s better than many of the other countries capable of providing comparably low wages, said Rivoli.

China's labor costs rose as Bangladesh's remained near rock-bottom, reinforcing its appeal for global apparel brands.

Back in 1994, Bangladeshi workers had gained a hard-won minimum wage of roughly $11 per month, but that level remained in place for more than a decade. In 2006, workers took to the streets to demand an increase. Police mounted a bloody crackdown, arresting, beating and even killing workers. The result was a doubling of the official minimum wage to $22 per month. Against a backdrop of double-digit inflation, that increase did not go far. Three years ago, Bangladesh again lifted the minimum wage, this time to about $37 a month. That’s where it remains today, constituting one of the lowest minimum wages in the world.

"Talk to people in China or India, and their perspective is that the pay rates in Bangladesh are abysmally low," said Alice Tepper Marlin, the head of Social Accountability International, a non-profit that helps monitor overseas factories in the garment industry.

"Desperately poor people are willing to work for wages that are way below the prevalent in neighboring countries.

"But without the apparel industry," Tepper Marlin added, "things would be worse."

Indeed, the rise of the garment industry has made many lives in Bangladesh less miserable than they were previously, and not just in the growing urban industrial hubs. Rural areas, too, have benefited from the growth in jobs, particularly through the remittance of wages from the factories back to the country, leading to what Chen described as "a revolution of a kind in the villages.”

CAPTURING THE LEVERS OF POWER

The export boom has given rise to a new uber-wealthy class of Bangladesh garment industry businessmen estimated at about 2,000, who collectively now wield enormous influence over the national economy, policymaking and the media.

A prime example is Sohel Rana, the owner of the building that crumbled. Before his arrest, he was a local ruling-party political figure who loomed like a local mafia don, as The New York Times reported. Despite the obvious structural cracks, Rana had claimed his building would stand "for a century."

Most businessmen-turned-politicians in the Bangladesh parliament hail from the garment industry, partly explaining the government's laissez-faire regulation of factories. Their coziness with the country's newspaper owners also means that worker discontent in garment plants goes largely unreported. The Rana Plaza collapse and its attendant protests were ultimately too large to ignore. Yet even as the death toll rose to unprecedented numbers, accounts were buried deeper and deeper inside domestic newspapers.

The industry's fast rise has led to widespread corruption, evident in scandals like the Hallmark loan scam. In that case, the owner of the garment-producing Hallmark Group siphoned more than $300 million from the state-owned Sonali Bank. By the time the scandal became public, Hallmark had already been formally honored by government officials for outstanding service to the country.

These industry captains' connections with government often shield them from consequences in deadly disasters. After 54 workers were burned alive at a factory overseen by garment company KTS in 2006, company managers were acquitted of charges of culpable homicide, even though they admitted in court that they'd locked the factory gates from the outside after the fire had started to prevent worker theft.

No one was held to account after the Spectrum Sweaters factory collapsed in 2005, killing more than 60 workers, even though the company was in violation of its building permit.

"There's a lot of collusion between the government and the factory owners and the building owners," said Chen. "There are lots of layers of really cynical exploitation of these women."

Chen generally ascribed to the Nicholas Kristof school of thought on sweatshops -- that they're mostly a good thing, offering what Kristof described in a controversial column as "an escalator out of poverty."

"They aren't really desirable, but it's better than what they had," Chen said. "I can say 'two cheers' for everything but the lack of safety. That's just egregious."

Many of the workers themselves, however, have a hard time recognizing the garment boom as a great fortune, especially when they risk their lives extracting poverty wages from it.

"The garment business is profitable only for the owners," said Abu Bakar, a laborer who works in the dye department of a factory in the industrial zone of Gazipur. "You cannot imagine how we maintain a life on these earnings. We get nothing in comparison to what the [Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association] or the buyers or the owners get. We toil over eight hours, six days a week, only to make ends meet."

PUSHED TOO FAR

The recent disasters, combined with paltry wages and substandard working conditions, have crystallized deep resentment among Bangladeshi laborers, threatening social stability. Angry workers have filled the streets, calling for the deaths of both negligent factory owners and their political allies.

American and European apparel labels are weighing their options, cognizant that their brands are increasingly vulnerable to public relations debacles when their goods turn up inside factories that prove to be deadly workplaces.

This represents a new development in the relationship between the global companies and the factories that produce their wares in Bangladesh, said Daniel Diermeier, a professor of managerial economics and decision sciences at Northwestern University, and author of Reputation Rules: Strategies for Building Your Company’s Most Valuable Asset. When retailers first established supplier relationships inside the country, he said, they were chiefly concerned with finding factories that could make what they needed on time and at the lowest prices.

“The whole issue of human labor practices and justice issues were not part of the decision process.” Diermeier said. “It wasn't on the radar.”

At first, retailers treated deadly events in Bangladesh as isolated incidents, Diermeier said. But that has changed in recent years, as their customers have gained awareness about the provenance of their products.

When public opinion turned on Nike in the 1990s after revelations of adolescents working in sweatshops, much of the industry instituted checks for child labor. New requirements for building standards never made it into those codes.

Now, in the aftermath of the Rana Plaza disaster, global apparel labels are devoting substantial energy to protecting their reputations. A group of major European brands has pledged to abide by a legally binding package of factory standards aimed at improving workplace safety in Bangladesh. Walmart, the world’s largest retailer, has declined to participate in that effort while announcing its own program to boost worker safety.

But labor rights groups have questioned the efficacy of these efforts. If American and European retailers come to view the “Made in Bangladesh” label as emblem of exploitation, that may prompt global brands to pursue a simpler course: They may leave the country altogether, shifting their orders to factories in other low-wage countries that -- at least for now -- lack the taint of headline-capturing industrial catastrophes.

“It’s easy to move,” explained Rivoli. “All you really need is sewing machines. It's not as if you're building an auto factory.”

If the industry does uproot, that would be a significant setback for Bangladesh, said Rivoli. In the traditional pattern of industrial development, the textile industry tends to be first, followed by the expansion into other industries. Once the industry booms and the nation advances to more complex endeavors, such as electronics and automobiles, the apparel industry shrinks, as it did in China. Bangladesh hasn’t reached that point yet.

Posner said he believes leaving the country is a mistake for retailers as well. If companies search the globe for comparably cheap labor, they'll end up in regions where human rights records or government safety enforcement are just as dubious, such as Burma. He said he'd prefer that large apparel players remain in Bangladesh while committing themselves to making the factories safe and the wages liveable.

"They're kind of running out of road," Posner said of the Western brands. "But I can guarantee you, someone is looking right now."

Many people in Bangladesh now fear the exit of Western brands, from factory owners down to line workers. Though the conditions may be oppressive, for many laborers the garment business provides their only hope of a nominal wage. They would rather see the industry stay and raise its standards.

Bakar, the dye worker, understands this trade-off all too well. After several years toiling in the garment industry without a raise, he quit his job in 2008 in quiet protest.

But after six hopeless months of looking for work, he was back inside a garment factory in order to survive. He may feel exploited by the system, but he prefers it to the alternative.

"Without the garment business,” Bakar said, “thousands and thousands of poor people would be jobless."

First appeared in The Huffington Post, May 23, 2013

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/23/bangladesh-garment-industry_n_3288266.html

Dave Jamieson, dave.jamieson@huffingtonpost.com

Emran Hossain, emran.hossain@huffingtonpost.com

Kim Bhasin, Kim.Bhasin@huffingtonpost.com