Fashion Disasters
Rocked by a series of fatal disasters, change is coming to Dhaka’s garment industry.
Words Syed Tashfin Chowdhury and James Cartwright
Illustration Cajsa Holgersson
On November 24, 2012, a fire broke out at the Tazreen Fashions factory in Ashulia, Bangladesh, killing 124 of its workers. Those who survived the incident told the media that the only doors to the building had been locked from the outside, barring most workers from escaping as the fire took hold. There were no fire escapes or alternative exits. The incident received prolonged coverage by the local and international media, yet Delwar Hossain, the factory owner, was never arrested, allegedly due to his links with the country’s ruling party.
Less than six months later, on April 23, 2013, Rana Plaza collapsed. This was a nine-storey building in Savar, in the outskirts of Dhaka, that housed five different apparel factories; at least 3,500 people were working inside at the time of the incident, of which 1,129 were killed and another 2,500 wounded. It was the worst industrial disaster in Bangladesh’s history, with investigative reports by the media revealing that the building had been erected on a flood-prone marshland without proper permission from the authorities. It was later discovered that cracks on the building walls had been reported a day earlier, but workers who refused to enter for work the next day were threatened with sacking by their supervisors.
Once again, the building’s proprietor was known for his political ties, but this time global pressure forced the Bangladesh government to take action. Sohel Rana was arrested as he tried to flee to India, days after the disaster. He has been charged with murder and is currently awaiting trial; if found guilty, he almost certainly faces the death penalty.
“Cracks on the building walls had been reported a day earlier, but workers who refused to enter work the next day were threatened with the sack.”
Bangladesh was officially born after the liberation war of 1971, a brutal conflict between East and West Pakistan in which the latter’s military junta systematically murdered Bengali nationalists, students and academics, as well as engaging in a religious cleansing of the country’s Hindu population. Devastated by a nine-month conflict that eventually saw East Pakistan’s forces prevail with India’s aid, the liberation of Bangladesh took place in a time of drought, famine and recurrent military coups that left its economy floundering.
For the nascent country there was only one reliable source of income, and it became known as “the land of the golden fibre” for its production of jute — a fibrous natural material used in the manufacture of garments, twine and rope. But the arrival of man-made fibres to the international market quickly neutered the global jute industry, and Bangladesh’s own production was soon scuppered.
Then, as the West abandoned its manufacturing industries in the 1980s, a boom in demand for cheap apparel production occurred. Neighbouring India failed to meet this burgeoning demand and so Bangladesh stepped up, offering cheap labour and raw materials.
Ever since, Bangladesh’s garments industry has been the backbone of its economy, earning a substantial amount of foreign revenue through exports to the Middle East and Western nations. Its growth has been unprecedented. According to the Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association (BGMEA), during the fiscal year of 2014–2015 the apparel sector earned US $24.5 billion, 800 times more than the year exports began in 1983. There has also been an exponential rise in the number of garment factories across Bangladesh. In 1985, there were 384 registered with the BGMEA; now there are 4,222. An increase in factories means a growing workforce that has spiralled from just 120,000 people in 1984 to 4,000,000 today — nearly 80 per cent of whom are women.
Like most countries, Bangladesh’s government and private offices are located in the capital, Dhaka, along with the majority of its factories. Most Bangladeshis moving to Dhaka do so with the hope of finding work in the apparel and other industrial sectors. The result is a ballooning megacity of 17 million that, according to the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS), has almost tripled in size since 1990, providing residence and work to nearly 11 per cent of Bangladesh’s population.
Despite fierce initial growth, by the 1990s Bangladesh’s garments economy began to plateau and the forecast number of foreign orders failed to materialise, leaving factory owners with a glut of employees and insufficient income to pay them. Rather than letting staff go, they economised and cut costs by renting buildings with cheaper overheads, forcing workers into longer hours at lower wages and compromising on factory safety and compliance issues.
“During the 1990s, a worker at an apparel factory in the USA or UK earned more money in two hours than their Bangladeshi counterparts made in a month.”
At the time most of the top manufacturers in Dhaka were still recruiting semi-skilled workers, but the managements of most small and medium-sized apparel factories on the outskirts of the city opted to recruit unskilled workers with little or no education. According to Syed Sultan Uddin Ahmed, assistant executive director of the Bangladesh Institute of Labour Studies, most factories took advantage of the workers’ inexperience, and stopped providing written employment contracts. Workers who suffered accidents were left without proper compensation; they also went without casual leave, breaks in their daily schedule or other basic provisions that are the mainstay of workers in developed countries. They were simply unaware of their rights.
Although a number of different labour rights groups lobbied for trade unions in apparel factories, their demands were ignored by factory owners who feared that the establishment of such groups would lead to the empowerment of their workers and an impact on their profit margins. In a small concession to lobbyists, a minimum monthly wage for entry-level workers was fixed at Tk 930 (US $21) in 1994. This was revised to Tk 1,662 ($25) in 2006 and then to Tk 3,000 ($43) in 2010. During the 1990s, a worker at an apparel factory in the USA or UK earned more money in two hours than their Bangladeshi counterparts made in a month.
Conditions in the garments industry were further exacerbated in the early 2000s, when a large number of factories with a stable list of foreign buyers began to subcontract their orders illegally to smaller businesses — another canny method of increasing profits. These smaller factories were completely unregulated and housed in dilapidated buildings with no safety measures for staff. Many had serious structural flaws. By bribing the authorities or simply by exerting their political influence, most of these factories continued to operate unobstructed, and between December 2000 and June 2005 nearly 500 workers died in more than 150 factory fires. It wasn’t until several years later, says Uddin Ahmed, that factory owners were properly held to account for compliance and safety issues. “Most of the disasters were never properly investigated,” he explains, “so nobody was punished for negligence in these incidents till 2012.”
Rana Plaza was a game-changer for Bangladesh’s garments industry. The global media raised voices worldwide against the exploitation of workers and a number of international workers’ rights organisations, including the International Labour Organisation, campaigned to bring together international buyers, apparel factory owners, governments, unions and other stakeholders to address the issues at hand.
Saad Hammadi,a correspondent for The Christian Science Monitor in Bangladesh, suggests that a number of initiatives taken immediately after the Rana Plaza disaster have already led to drastic improvements in the sector.
One of these initiatives is the Alliance, short for Alliance for Bangladesh Worker Safety, that includes a group of 26 major global retailers formed to develop and launch the Bangladesh Worker Safety Initiative. Representing the 580 Bangladeshi factories producing apparel for the North American market, the initiative is a binding, five-year programme intent on improving safety standards at work.
“Between December 2000 and June 2005, nearly 500 workers died in more than 150 factory fires.”
Another is the The Accord, short for The Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh, that came into operation in May, 2013. The Accord is a similarly binding agreement between over 200 signatories, including international unions IndustriALL, UNI Global, Bangladesh trade unions and the international brands and retailers that account for over 1,600 garment factories, all of whom have committed to building safer workplaces for their labourers.
In November 2013, a new monthly minimum wage of Tk 5,200 ($68) was also fixed for workers, the culmination of two years of campaigning and protesting on the streets. “Working conditions and safety issues have drastically improved in large-scale, export-oriented factories now,” says Hammadi. “Due to the new minimum wage there has been no unrest in the sector over the past year.”
Mohammad Hatem, chairman of M.B. Knitfashion and a former Vice President of the Bangladesh Knitwear Manufacturers and Exporters Association (BKMEA), says that following Rana Plaza, the apparel exporters of Bangladesh have spent nearly $195 million in ensuring safe working conditions and safe workplaces in their factories. “The compliance issues which were prevalent are also improving,” he says.
His only concern now is that this investment may prove to be a loss for the sector, as “orders from international buyers are falling,” taken on by competitors in India and Vietnam. But perhaps that is the price of progress, of a workforce protected by its employers and treated with due care and respect. Company profits may be in decline, but the death toll is on the wane too.
This is article is from Weapons of Reason’s second issue: Megacities.
Weapons of Reason is a publishing project to understand and articulate the global challenges shaping our world by Human After All design agency.
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