“Building safety is important, but we need to talk about the human impact of this model. Most brands are still just trying to mitigate risks, but social innovation — focusing on the psychological and emotional impacts of overproduction — is not prioritised,” says Dr Hakan Karaosman, assistant professor at Cardiff University and co-founder of the EU-funded research centre Fashion’s Responsible Supply Chain Hub (FReSCH).
10 years on
To mark the anniversary, global unions UNI and IndustriALL, which orchestrated the Accord, are calling on brands to sign up. Already, 194 brands and retailers — representing around 2.4 million workers — are signed up in Bangladesh, and 46 brands and retailers — covering 750,000 workers — have committed to the efforts in Pakistan, which have yet to be implemented. According to the unions, the Accord has completed nearly 56,000 safety inspections to date across 2,400 garment factories in Bangladesh, correcting more than 140,000 safety issues, with a remediation rate of 91 per cent. Its impact on workers in registered factories is undeniable, but there are still many home-based garments workers further down the supply chain that the Accord doesn’t cover, and many brands don’t yet recognise, says Janhavi Dave, international coordinator at HomeNet International.
The Accord is hoping to expand further, says UNI’s deputy general secretary Alke Boessiger. While the next country has yet to be decided, she says India is a potential target. “India is a massive producer of textiles, but it’s also a massive country with different local legislations and restrictions on foreign organisations in each state. Based on our current capacity, I can’t say when we will roll out the Accord to India, but it’s of high interest to us.”
Labour Behind the Label is lobbying politicians in the UK to apply trade pressure on the Bangladeshi government to support the country’s Employment Injury Scheme, a groundbreaking social security initiative that provides income protection and medical care for work-related injuries without workers needing to fight for this on a case-by-case basis. “Ten years on from Rana Plaza, the scheme has only reached pilot phase,” explains Bryher. “There is a strong call to enshrine it in labour laws.”
Addressing inequalities by redistributing wealth and power
More than anything, the root of the issues that led to Rana Plaza collapsing was power imbalance, says Professor Rashedur Chowdhury of Essex Business School, who specialises in the dynamic relationship between multinational firms and marginalised groups and is an expert on the rhetoric and reality of the Rana Plaza factory collapse. Many of the Rana Plaza survivors he interviewed — mostly women, some as young as 13 — had come to Dhaka from villages throughout Bangladesh, living alone or with distant relatives and subject to extreme bullying, sexual harassment, and 16 to 18-hour days.
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