Promises made mostly not implemented

APPAREL WORKERS’ SAFETY

Rashid Ahmad 

The expectations for positive changes in the country’s garment sector created by the Rana Plaza Collapse remain mostly unfulfilled over the last five years.

The worst ever factory disaster in the history of the garment industry shook the world in 2013.

The authorities as well as the apparel owners seemed to have forgotten the commitments they had made five years ago in the aftermath of the disaster that killed at least 1,138 apparel workers and left more than 2,400 others maimed and crippled, mostly young women.

April 24, 2013, is marked as a black day in the history of the apparel industry worldwide.

On that black day, the eight-storied Rana Plaza, housing five garment factories and other business establishments, collapsed spelling doom to so many families.

The building was illegally built and rented out due to the negligence of the authorities who took no interest to enforce the law.

The disaster shook the conscience of the international community for which it raised the issues of factory safety, workers’ rights, proper compensations for the workers killed and injured and their rehabilitation.

A commitment required creation of workers database so that there would be no scope to say that the identities of those killed and injured could go unidentified again as it happened for many victims of the Rana Plaza disaster.

Providing the trade union rights to workers and payment of proper wages were two other important commitments made to the apparel workers of Bangladesh.

Initiatives were taken for partial implementation of some of the commitments by the government of Bangladesh, apparel factory owners as well as the overseas brands and the buyers.

But initiative was lacking for the implementation of important commitments like payment of compensations to the families of the workers who get killed in factory accidents and the rehabilitation of the injured survivors.

Therefore, much more remains to be done to address the issues, labour rights activists and experts told.

They said that the demand for penalizing those responsible for the Rana Plaza collapse and the disaster that struck the apparel factories housed in the illegally constructed building also remain unfulfilled since 2013. An important demand was to declare April 24 a national holiday to observe Workers Safety Day, they said.

The demands for the construction of a monument on the site of Rana Plaza site to commemorate those killed in the disaster and rehabilitation of the victims also remain unfulfilled, they said.

Bangladesh Garment Workers Solidarity president Taslima Akter said that after the deadly man- made disaster she and the other labour leaders pinned hopes that the government would be sincere about the workers safety and rights. She said that their hopes were dashed by the government’s obliviousness about what it should have done as matters of priority.

She said government and factory owners did nothing to protect the workers’ rights.

She said that despite pressure from the buyers and the brands there had been ‘very little progress’ over the workers’ safety issues as neither the government nor the factory owners showed the interest to implement them.

She said that after Rana Plaza disaster, the government took no interest to amend the compensation law for the payment of compensations according to the convention of the International Labour Organization.

She called the existing legal compensation amounts of Tk one lakh for a worker who dies in a factory or workplace accident and Tk 1.25 lakh for the severely injured workers as ‘totally inadequate.’

Dhaka University economics professor MM Akash called it regrettable that the government took no interest to implement the recommendations of a committee to fix the compensation calculating the loss of working years suffered by factory accident victim workers.

The committee was formed in the aftermath of the Rana Plaza disaster following orders from the High Court Division and MM Akash was the president of the sub-committee for determining the compensations.

Labour leaders said that the government’s denial of the workers’ right to association was fully reflected in December 2017 when hundreds of apparel workers were terminated and many leaders and workers were arrested by the police for holding demonstrations at Ashulia on the demand of wage hike.

They said that hundreds of workers and many labour leaders were implicated in false cases for holding the demonstrations on the wage hike issue.

Garment Workers Trade Union Centre organizing secretary KM Mintu said the government and the factory owners were obstructing trade union formation by the apparel workers.

Solidarity Centre, an NGO working for labour rights said that 50 per cent applications for the formation of trade unions at apparel factories were rejected by the government.

Following the Rana Plaza collapse a total of 3,780 garment factories were assessed under the three initiatives, European retailer platform Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh, North American buyers’ platform Alliance for Bangladesh Worker Safety and the government lead and ILO supported national initiative.

Accord and Alliance made progress in safety steps in 2,300 factories but about 31 per cent of readymade garment factories, inspected under the national initiative, have completely failed to fix safety faults, while 36 per cent of factories made less than 30 per cent progress in repairing structural, fire and electrical faults in the units.

Out of 3,780 garment factories, 1,549 were inspected under the national initiative, from which 531 were closed down, 69 relocated and 193 units shifted to the Accord and Alliance lists. Factories inspected under the two buyers-led initiatives made significant progress in terms of fixing safety faults.

According to the latest data, Accord completed 83 per cent of remediation in their supplier factories while Alliance completed 88 per cent of factory remediation. 

Labour leaders said that as the inspections were not completed, deadly factory accidents continue to occur in the country’s industrial sector.

After the Rana Plaza disaster, at least 80 people were killed and 450 others injured in 94 factory accidents, according to American Centre for the International Labor Solidarity.

BGMEA president Md Siddiqur Rahman denied the allegation and said that Bangladesh’s readymade garment sector became a global role model for safe working conditions due to vigorous safety initiatives taken by the entrepreneurs after the Rana Plaza building collapse in 2013.

The Rana Plaza site remains abandoned reminding visitors and the locals about the world’s deadliest disaster of factories. The area hummed with activities of the young apparel workers for whom many shops sprang up to sell cosmetics, bangles and what not the young female workers liked. But now it looks different.

• Courtesy: NewAge/Apr 24, 2018