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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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.

Bangladesh Factory Collapse: Is There Blood on Your Shirt?

VICTOR LUCKERSON

The cheap clothes that Americans buy from retailers every day actually come at a very high price. That cost came into stark relief last week when Rana Plaza, a building housing several garment factories, collapsed in Savar, Bangladesh, killing at least 386 workers and injuring many more. With bodies still being pulled from the wreckage, the accident is already “one of the worst industrial accidents in world history,” according to Scott Nova, the executive director of the Worker Rights Consortium.

The workers who died were producing clothing for American and European consumers and earning only $38 a month, according to the Associated Press. Now the clothing brands and retailers that profited from the cheap labor at Rana Plaza are struggling to wash the blood from their hands, while other brands rethink their role in Bangladesh as a whole. Earlier this week, officials from Walmart, Gap, and about two dozen other retailers and apparel companies met in Germany to begin developing a plan to increase safety across Bangladesh’s garment factories, according to The New York Times. Today Disney, whose goods have been tied to accidents in Bangladesh in the past, announced that it will halt all production of branded merchandise in the country by March 31, 2014, according to the Times.

As the death toll mounts in Bangladesh factory accidents, western companies are feeling more pressure to change their practices. Here’s a list, drawn from both TIME reporting and other confirmed media reports, of companies that have past or present ties to devastating accidents at Bangladesh facilities:

The world’s largest retail giant was listed as a buyer on the website of Ether Tex, one of the garment factories destroyed in the accident. Walmart says they had no authorized production in the facility and will take “appropriate action” if they discover unauthorized production was happening in the factory. In a Reuters report, Ether Tex’s chairman initially said it had been doing sub-contracting work to supply Walmart at the time of the accident, but later said the work had been completed before the incident. In November, a fire at another Bangladesh factory that killed more than 100 was found to be producing products for Walmart stores, among other retailers.

Joe Fresh

The Canadian apparel brand, owned by Loblaw Companies Limited, was being manufactured at the Rana Plaza factory. Loblaw has vowed to provide compensation for families of victims who were making Joe Fresh apparel. The company also plans to send Loblaw representatives to the accident site to support the rescue and aid effort. Loblaw is now pushing for all Canadian retailers to adopt more stringent safety standards through the Retail Council of Canada.

Primark

Primark, a British retailer, has also directly accepted responsibility for receiving goods from the hazardous factory. The company is planning to provide monetary aid for victims’ families. “We are fully aware of our responsibility,” Primark said in a statement. “We urge these other retailers to come forward and offer assistance.”

JCPenney

A JCPenney official said that some of the Joe Fresh products being produced at Rana Plaza would have ended up in JCPenney stores, though the factories had never previously created private label JCPenney merchandise. The company says it has members of its social responsibility team currently on the ground in Bangladesh gathering information from local authorities.

Benetton

Though the Italian fashion brand emphasized that none of its products were recently made in the Rana Plaza factories, one Benetton supplier had subcontracted work to the facility in the past. The manufacturing facility was removed from Benetton’s supply chain before the accident.

Children’s Place

One manufacturer of clothing for the children’s retail chain was located at Rana Plaza, though none of the company’s products were being manufactured there when the building collapsed. A Children’s Place spokesman said the company is fully aware of its responsibilities and will provide “financial and other aid” to people affected by the accident.

Dress Barn

This women’s fashion retailer said that it had not purchased any clothing from the Rana Plaza facility since 2010, according to The Washington Post.

Cato Fashions

Cato Fashions, a women’s fashion brand said that New Wave Bottoms, one of the manufacturers at Rana Plaza, was one of its suppliers, according to the Associated Press. However, New Wave was not producing clothing for Cato at the time of the accident.

The Walt Disney Company

Disney was not producing goods at Rana Plaza, but labor groups in Bangladesh claim to have found Disney apparel in the ruins of the factory destroyed by a fire in the nation’s capital in November. Today Disney announced that it will no longer produce licensed merchandise in Bangladesh, Pakistan, Belarus, Ecuador and Venezuela, according to the New York Times.

First appeared in TIME.com, May 02, 2013

Victor Luckerson @VLuck is a reporter-producer for Time.com covering business and money

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

Cheap clothes have helped fuel social revolution in Bangladesh

Photo Saleem Samad: Women work at a garment factory in Bangladesh, earning about $37.50 per month.

STEPHANIE NOLEN in New Delhi

The news that Joe Fresh sourced clothes from a factory in a building that collapsed outside Dhaka this week – killing at least 300 workers and injuring as many as 1,000 more – brought the price of cheap fashion into sharp focus for Canadians.

The immediate reaction of many was to vow to boycott the store, an understandable response.

But I’m not sure it’s the best one.

Yes, Bangladesh’s garment industry is ridden with appalling labour practices. The fire at the Tazreen Fashion factory in November that left charred piles of young women’s bodies heaped at the fire exits – which were locked – reminded us of that. I’ve visited factories that were so dimly lit the workers stitched Gap-bound shorts hunched over, squinting at the seams. I’ve seen factories where the windows were sealed and the industrial fumes were strangulating. The workers, mostly women, sewing clothes for H&M and Nautica and all the other stores in the West make a few dollars a day, working 12-hour days. A despairing friend who says she struggles to pay the price of Canadian-made clothes, or shop only at the Maritime second-hand chain Frenchy’s, asked me this week if she had to “go naked” in order not to feel guilty.

But our cheap clothes have helped fuel a social and economic revolution in Bangladesh, and Bangladeshis do not want that to end.

Pressure from buyers works. Clients have pushed factories in Dhaka – and in Kampala and Maseru and other places where I’ve reported on the garment industry – to improve labour and safety standards. Not great – they wouldn’t meet Canadian standards. But they’re safer, and factory owners are constantly forced to reexamine.

Companies such as Nike and the Gap, high-profile bands that have been targets of movements like the Clean Clothes Campaign, have been forced to take an active interest in how their clothes are produced, and the factories that make them are correspondingly better than the ones that sew for brands that do not audit.

Two European brands that sourced from the building that collapsed this week were subject to close monitoring. The auditors had approved the working conditions – but it was not part of their brief to check the building. And the structure, we now know, was built without permits or inspections and on unstable ground. So this needs to be factored into expanded audit parameters.

The Bangladeshi state is weak – so is any state that has to rely such poorly paid jobs to build its economy – and the building owner is wealthy and politically connected. Of course, he didn’t have to have the factories inspected. The state will not enforce safety, but you as a consumer can demand it.

Is that better than boycotting the “Made in Bangladesh” label? In Dhaka not long ago, I spent the day in a slum called Korail, where I met many young women who work in the factories. Mini Akhtan makes $65 a month working 72 hours a week, sewing shorts and pyjamas bound for malls in Canada and the United States. She hates the fact that her mother is raising her five-year-old son, whom she sees only on Friday afternoons.

But Ms. Akhtan and her friends gave off a palpable sense that their life is different than it was five years ago – and a certainty that it will be quite different five years from now than it is today. Will they be rich? No. But maybe their kids will be at the private school. They will have saved enough from working at the garment factory to move back to the village and start a small shop. Or to buy a plane ticket to Bahrain to spend a few hard years doing construction work – and come back with savings to really shake things up. Ms. Akhtan is the first person in her family ever to have a formal job; her son, she said with total confidence, will be an engineer.

I asked her to show me the room she shares with her husband – it was small and wickedly hot. But it had electricity to power their one bulb and their fan. They share a piped water stand with six other families, and a latrine and a shower stand too.

And that’s another thing about the garment factories. They account for 75 per cent of Bangladesh’s exports. And Bangladesh is making massive inroads against poverty. It started from the nadir, so it still has low literacy, poor health indicators, high corruption. But maternal mortality has been cut in half in a decade. Ninety-five per cent of kids get their vaccinations.

On every development indicator, Bangladesh is trouncing India – even though India’s economy is growing twice as fast – and a big part of the reason is that women are driving Bangladesh’s growth. The garment factories have a mostly female work force (out of the sexist conviction that they are more biddable and better with fine handiwork like sewing.) Women with jobs and income get a bigger voice in their family decisions; their children go to school, get vaccinated. In India’s boom, almost no women have joined the work force – and you do not see as much social progress as you do across the border.

Bangladesh’s garment zone can seem like a hellhole, and no one who shops at Joe Fresh would want Mini Akhtan’s job for five minutes. But you can call Joe Fresh today and demand that they audit their producers for safety and for working conditions. You can demand to know what their producers’ relations are with Bangladesh’s struggling labour unions. You can tell Joe Fresh that if they are going after your business, they need to have a direct relationship with a supplier – not outsource to a third party so they get plausible deniability. Demand to see those safety audits, every quarter, posted on their website, right beside the sale on $6 shorts.

And get involved with Clean Clothes or a similar campaign working to shed light on that consumer chain. You don’t have to go naked. You can do more for Mini Akhtan and her family by buying “Made in Bangladesh,” and finding out how much the worker who made your shorts was paid.

First published in The Globe and Mail, Canada, April 27 2013