The Walmart in May accepted shipments of garment products from two Bangladesh factories, which were earlier ‘blacklisted’ by the US retailer, said a report of New York-based ProPublica.
Simco Dresses was ‘blacklisted in January but
continued shipping to Walmart Canada into March, it said.Walmart used to buy clothes from Simco, but after the Rana Plaza collapse that killed 1,131 people, mostly garment workers, in April, the retailer declared 245 Bangladeshi factories including Simco unauthorised.
In June 2011, Walmart said, it banned the Bangladeshi garment factory Mars Apparels from producing goods for the retail giant. But over the last year, Mars has repeatedly shipped tonne of sports bras to Walmart, according to US customs records and Mars owners.
The most recent shipment was in late May, almost two years after Walmart claims it stopped doing business with the Bangladeshi firm.
Simco Dresses has recently threatened to take legal action against Walmart for blacklisting the company.
Simco in a letter send to Andy Barron, an executive vice president of Walmart, on May 17 said putting the name of Simco on the list was unfortunate.
Walmart also did not accept a shipment of Simco as it was subcontracting part of its production to Tazreen Fashions where a fire killed 112 workers last year.
The shipment worth $3.90 lakh has been lying on the Los Angeles port now, Simco officials said last week.
The ProPublica report quoting Walmart spokesman Kevin Gardner said that the Mars shipments were allowed because of confusion over whether Walmart’s standards applied. Mars didn’t produce garments with a Walmart house brand but instead with a Fruit of the Loom label. So, Gardner said, it wasn’t clear if Mars needed to meet Walmart’s standards or Fruit of the Loom’s.
Fruit of the Loom could not immediately be reached for comment.
As for Simco, orders that Walmart had already placed were accepted to lessen the impact on workers, Gardner said.
The report said interviews with Bangladeshi factory owners spotlight another potential problem — Walmart’s approach of publishing a blacklist with no further details might unfairly tar family businesses with minor violations.
International labour groups have been pressing retailers to sign an accord to pay for fire and building safety upgrades to Bangladesh factories. So far, several large retailers including H&M, Inditex and PVH Corp., which includes Tommy Hilfiger and Calvin Klein, have signed onto the agreement.
But many of the biggest retailers in the United States, including Walmart and Gap, have not. Instead, they are working on an alternative plan that they say will improve safety faster — but that is not legally binding.
‘We think the safety plan that we’ve put in place already meets or exceeds the [other] proposal and is going to get results more quickly,’ Gardner said. ‘The point of the list is to get more accountability and transparency into our supply chain.’
Soon, he said, Walmart would also publish safety audits of its current suppliers in Bangladesh.
Mars Apparels is a manufacturer of lingerie and sportswear in the port city of Chittagong. In the last year, the garment maker sent at least 22 shipments, totalling 80 tonnes, of sports bras through the Port of Newark, according to customs records compiled by Import Genius, a data consultant for the import-export industry.
In each case, the customer was listed as ‘Walmart Stores’ and the product mark as ‘Ariela-Alpha International,’ whose brands include L.e.i. and Fruit of the Loom.
Reached on a cell phone in Bangladesh, Shaker Ahmed, deputy managing director of Mars Apparels and the son of its founder, confirmed the customs data and said that the latest shipment went out last month.
But Ahmed said that until contacted by ProPublica, he had never had any problems with Walmart or heard about its list of banned factories. He described Mars as a medium-sized garment manufacturer with less than 1,000 workers.
Ahmed said Mars has supplied Walmart for more than a decade, though since 2008 it has been making clothes for private labels such as Fruit of the Loom that are owned or licensed by an importer, which then supplies the clothing to Walmart.
When Mars was manufacturing clothing for Walmart brands, its factory was regularly audited by the company, Ahmed said. Walmart rates its suppliers green, yellow, orange and red, with green being the best and red the worst, he said. ‘We never received a rating below yellow.’
The other banned garment maker in the recent customs records, Simco Dresses, was blacklisted in January. The Import Genius records show three shipments of girls’ dresses in February and March to the Isfel Co. destined for Walmart Canada. Isfel didn’t return a call.
Customs records provided by another trade research firm PIERS show four more March shipments of knitted dresses and rompers, also destined for Walmart Canada.
The Bangladeshi press reported in January that Walmart had refused a shipment of women’s shorts from Simco after discovering unauthorised subcontracting to Tazreen Fashion. Simco said at the time that Walmart’s ban could drive it into bankruptcy.
Simco’s managing director Muzaffar Siddique said his firm had subcontracted an order to an authorised Walmart supplier, which then sent the work to Tazreen without its knowledge, reports ProPublica.
Asked about the February and March shipments from Simco, Walmart spokesman Gardner said, ‘If it isn’t an egregious matter, we will accept goods produced under existing orders as part of our efforts to mitigate impact on the workers.’
Siddique contended that Walmart’s listing of his company is unfair and is damaging his family’s business. After the list was published, he said JC Penney cancelled a $300,000 order for 500,000 pairs of pyjamas, said the report.
‘We are very upset about it,’ Siddique said. ‘When I do business with you, it is like a doctor-patient relationship; there should be confidentiality. Walmart has no business going about publishing people’s names that it thinks are bad because that jeopardises other business we are doing with our customers.’
Sources in Simco, however, said that the Walmart was yet to take shipments worth $3.9 lakh from the LA port.
-With New Age input
