In The Long Shadow of the Rana Plaza

IN THE LONG SHADOW OF THE RANA PLAZA
19-03-2015

In 1881, when Bangladesh, India and Pakistan were ruled by the British Empire, the imperial government of Britain tried to enact a law called the Factories Act. The law mainly sought to regulate working conditions and especially tried to regulate the working of children below the age of nine. It was immediately met with opposition from the local industrialists and textile merchants. They said that curbing child labour was aimed at reducing their competitiveness and was in fact intended to protect the local manufacturing of Britain. Under severe pressure from their local social reformers and socialists, the UK had enacted the Factories Act regulating working children in the 1819 Cotton Mills Act. Now, these socialist groups combined with other interest groups (with varied motivations and included British industrialists) and got similar laws enacted in the Indian sub-continent as well.
More than a century later, the same arguments are repeated by businessmen, governments, and even certain academics in the Indian sub-continent when there were attempts to introduce worker-protection clauses into trade agreements. The example shows that the arguments against improving working conditions seldom change over time.

Manufacturing consent at the highest levels in favour of businesses has probably become easier over time - and respective governments (and even some unions) were convinced that the social clause has to be avoided at all costs. The attempts at including social clauses were discarded for the time being and if anyone lost from this – it was only the workers - for there is little doubt that the comparative advantage in question (that of low wage workers) would have diminished even with such clauses being present.

For all those who had been predicting a 'race to the bottom', if they had any doubts as to what the bottom looked like, the rubble of Rana Plaza is probably what it looks like. The Rana Plaza building that collapsed on 24^th April, 2013 in Savar, Bangladesh resulted in the deaths of 1129 garment-manufacturing workers with 316 still missing.

Impressively, global unions like the UNI and IndustriALL immediately swung into action and managed to get almost 200 clothing firms (mostly European) that had been outsourcing to Bangladesh to sign The Accord (on Building and Fire Safety) in order to offer safer working conditions⁷. The effort itself showed the monumental difficulty in getting such companies to agree to such guidelines. Certain firms including the US-based Walmart (which is notorious for its anti-union practices) still did not budge citing fears of legal liabilities if they agreed to any safety regulations¹.

Cheap Labour, Cheap Buildings and Cheap Lives

Around 80% of Bangladesh's and nearly 60% of Pakistan's export revenues come from garment manufacturing. The garment industry in Bangladesh employs around 4 million people of which nearly 80% are women. Bangladesh offers one of the cheapest work-forces in the world with the women employed there being paid an average of around 4000 takas per month (roughly EUR 40 or USD 50) where the GDP per capita is 5030 takas per month. To put these wages in perspective, this is around half the amount that is paid to garment workers in India as well as in Pakistan – and around one-fifth the wages of Chinese garment workers. As if this wasn’t enough, it is seen in hindsight that the rush by garment manufacturers was not only for the low wages but also for the poor regulations that were on offer.

While there may be nothing new in this behaviour of manufacturers, the scale of the current spate of tragedies has been unprecedented. In the last 8 months, five large-scale industrial accidents have taken place in export-oriented factories - where a total of 1,567 workers (mostly women) have died^{2,3 and 4}. All of the tragedies have occurred in this zone of similar labour laws ie Bangladesh-India-Pakistan. The scale of mis-management in this zone makes China's sweatshops appear like 'low-wage worker' utopias in comparison. The problems that affect the workers in this zone though, are similar. Like India, it is generally understood locally that it is not the absence of labour laws in the region but the lack of enforcement that is the culprit. Bangladesh for example, with a workforce of around 75 million, has a total of 95 health and safety inspectors⁵.

These newer garment factories in the sub-continent follow a prototype. First and foremost, to showcase to their clients, they are located in major cities pulling low-wage workers from the surrounding rural areas. Due to the high real-estate costs, the factory buildings are usually built very close to the walls of the compound to make use of the entire available area. The compound-walls, in turn, are usually high and topped with barbed wire or broken glass to increase security. To increase the land utilisation and worker density, the buildings are constructed up to many floors. While adequate ventilation and light is usually provided (for precise garment manufacturing), what is critical is that there are few entry and exit points. The windows while providing light are heavily barred and the few points of entry and exit have multiple barricades and checkpoints. At the same time, these exits are wide enough to allow only one person through at a time. This is in order to facilitate the rigorous security checks that are carried out on the workers every day. Either there are no other exits or all other exit points are locked up.

For those who are aware of the Triagle Shirtwaist tragedy in the United States (where 146 workers died in a garment factory fire), the above buidling design will be sickeningly familiar. This factory prototype provides high space utilisation and security (for employers) but is very low on safety for workers. If all the accidents had anything in common, it was that the workers were trapped inside the buildings due to the lack of exits - effectively turning the buildings into 'prisons' with few chances of escape even in life-threatening situations. If so many lives have been lost, it is due to the specific structural similarities in the building design and regulations. While over-worked workers, poor wages and low-quality workspaces are the norm in this side of the world, it would now appear that these are secondary issues.

Considering a Safety Floor

While the insertion of social clauses into trade agreements and the right to association are still the best solutions, the option of enforcing a bare minimum set of industry-specific Operational Safety and Health (OSH) should be considered more closely. It is revealing that most ILO member states have not ratified the Convention on OSH (C155) including Bangladesh, India and Pakistan. In countries, zones and industries where the right to association is not safeguarded, the alternative would be to include a set of corresponding OSH implementations as a minimum within trade agreements – simply because workers either do not have the knowledge resources or do not have any alternate means to associate and demand them as and when they are required.

The increased flexibility in the relocation of supply chains has meant that only a trans-national trilateral entity like the ILO has the required range of influence over different governments, trade bodies and transnational employers' organisations. For example, the only sign of alarm shown by the Bangladeshi employers association (BGMEA) after the building collapse was when the European Commission threatened to remove the Duty Free – Quota Free (DFQF) facility that had been extended to them by European markets⁶. The US government also followed with a threat to revoke the duty-free access to its market. What happened in Bangladesh could be another country next time around - the companies involved could be different and the industry in question could be an altogether different one.

There can be few arguments against the implementation of minimum safety standards in the supply chain of any responsible globalised operation. Not only that, minimum OSH standards are something that do not vary across the world, including in societies that claim to 'think differently' on such issues. To fulfil such a requirement would ensure that workers around the world are protected at the very basic level instead of repeating the tragedies that led to the most elementary lessons over the years.

REFERENCES
1) http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/23/business/legal-experts-debate-us-retailers-risks-of-signing-bangladesh-accord.html

2) http://www.irishtimes.com/news/death-toll-in-pakistani-fires-hits-314-1.736233
3) http://edition.cnn.com/2012/11/25/world/asia/bangladesh-factory-fire/?hpt=hp_t1

4) http://www.dhakatribune.com/bangladesh/2013/may/25/savar-death-toll-reaches-1129

5) http://www.ulandssekretariatet.dk/sites/default/files/uploads/public/Asien/Landeanalyser/labour_market_profile_2012_-_bangladesh_web.pdf
6) http://news.priyo.com/2013/05/24/bangladesh-must-consider-eu-warning-promptly-exper-76692.html
7) http://bangladeshaccord.org/