Western clothing retailers were inevitably going to face questions over the link between cheap fashion and worker safety in the aftermath of the Rana Plaza disaster,
which killed 1,129 people in Bangladesh, according to a Guardian report.
In a stark reminder of the human cost behind the plentiful supply of affordable goods on Britain’s high streets, shoddy construction turned a building in Dhaka into a death trap when a garment manufacturing complex collapsed in April. It also threatened to damage the reputation of Primark, which got some of its cheap chic from the building.
As the retailer’s head of ethical trading, Katherine Kirk has spent four years overhauling how Primark finds its clothes and denies a causal link between discount goods, tight profit margins and perilous working conditions in the developing world.
‘Rana Plaza had retailers in there who were selling hoodies for €40 (£34),’ she says. ‘About 98 per cent of our factories are shared. They can be making T-shirts from £65 down to £4. This isn’t an issue of cheap clothing, this is an issue of the challenges in Bangladesh.
‘We were doing as much if not more than other brands. We looked at all the risks we were aware of and were trying to mitigate and make sure people were working in safe places. We were not doing structural surveys and no other brand was doing structural surveys.’
Following the disaster, which involved manufacturers working for up to 40 companies, including British retailers Matalan and Bonmarché as well as Primark, more than 50 brands have signed up to a legally binding building safety agreement backed by international trade union IndustriALL and the Bangladeshi government.
Under the terms of the deal, brands including H&M and Marks & Spencer, as well as Primark, have each agreed to contribute up to $500,000 (£325,000) a year towards rigorous independent factory inspections and the installation of fire safety measures.
The industry has been galvanised into action by
a tragedy that has finally forced closer co-operation between international brands, unions, the Bangladeshi government and local suppliers. ‘I think the eyes of the world are on this. The momentum, focus and opportunity cannot be lost,’ says Kirk.
Until now, no international brand had been checking the structural integrity of the buildings where their clothes were being made. Rana Plaza is not the first factory to collapse in Bangladesh. In 2005, 64 workers died in the collapse of the Spectrum sweater factory, used by Inditex, the owner of Zara.
Even now, US retailers Walmart and Gap have chosen not to join the international safety deal, preferring to develop their own regimes. Arcadia, the owner of Topshop, is also yet to sign up.
Sam Maher from Labour Behind the Label, a workers’ rights pressure group, says: ‘Anybody sourcing in Bangladesh should be aware this could be happening in their supply chain.’
In Primark’s case, the disaster has brought immediate policy change. It is urgently assessing the structural integrity of the factories it uses in Bangladesh and will look at the same issue elsewhere. Tesco and M&S are also reassessing their suppliers’ buildings in Bangladesh.
Investigators working for retailers and the Bangladeshi government have already identified a number of unsafe factories, with some estimates suggesting that up to 60 per cent of the country’s 3,000 clothing factories have structural issues. In the first evidence of action, Tesco, Primark and Debenhams have terminated their orders from Liberty Fashions, a factory in the Savar district where Rana Plaza stood, after a survey found ‘serious problems’ with safety of the building. The owner has disputed the findings.
Liberty Fashions was given a ‘red flag’ by Walmart and struck off as a supplier nearly three years ago over poor treatment of workers. Yet the company has admitted that clothing was still being made at Liberty Fashions for its licensed jeans brand Jordache until the factory was closed this month.
But Kirk insists there is no inherent risk in using production facilities in Bangladesh and says that Primark has many well-run and ethically compliant factories in the country. ‘I don’t think you can tarnish the whole of Bangladesh,’ she says. Every country producing goods for UK brands has ‘challenges’, according to Kirk, and Primark has a team of eight staff on the ground in Bangladesh to ensure factories are safe.
Primark has stepped up action to monitor its factories since appointing Kirk, a former Gap executive, in 2009. The retailer now has 40 staff in eight countries, including Vietnam and Turkey, to monitor and help improve standards. That network helped it to respond swiftly after the Rana Plaza disaster. It sent food parcels to more than 1,000 households and signed up 4,000 victims to bank accounts so they could receive short-term financial aid. The company has also given support to all workers in the Rana Plaza building, not just those producing Primark fashions.
Maher says Primark stands ‘head and shoulders’ above other brands linked to Rana Plaza, which have yet to pay compensation, or, in some cases, admit they sourced clothing from the building.
US giant Walmart, for example, is not involved in helping victims despite documentary evidence that its products were made in the building just a year ago. The retailer says that the work was unauthorised and no production was being carried out at Rana Plaza at the time of the accident.
Store Twenty One, an Indian-owned Solihull-based fashion chain with 200 shops, whose labels were also found in the collapsed building, according to Labour Behind the Label, has refused to comment. Its website carries a two-sentence statement on the tragedy, expressing sadness and condolences and saying: ‘We are investigating the situation with our supply base and overseas offices.’
While Primark has sprung into action since the disaster, Peter McAllister of the Ethical Trading Initiative says the retailer still has questions to answer. ‘Why were they not following the best in class practice?’ he asks.
M&S, for instance, has said it would not have bought clothing made in a building like Rana Plaza because it houses multiple factories. Six months before the disaster, Primark itself recognised that it was difficult to check the overall safety of these buildings. It was in the process of pulling out of such ‘shared buildings’, yet only began working in Rana Plaza two years ago.
On a broader level, there have long been concerns about safety standards and working conditions in Bangladesh, where weak government oversight and widespread corruption mean that building and labour regulations are often ignored. Primark has pulled out of 10 Bangladeshi factories this year alone, for a variety of reasons.
Most damningly, Labour organisations have been warning for some years that multi-storey buildings in the Savar district of Dhaka are dangerous.
Both Kirk and McAllister admit that the industry was slow to check out the structural security of factories after the Spectrum collapse. It was regarded as a one-off rather than a chronic problem. Instead, the industry’s safety efforts had focused on fire safety, after a string of factory blazes, most notably at Tazreen Fashion in November, when 112 died.
IndustriALL says it was ‘shocked by the complacency of the brands’ after the Spectrum disaster and there was no urgency about efforts to improve conditions. ‘International anger was not big enough to get the brands to change their ways until Rana Plaza,’ says the union’s general secretary, Jyrki Raina.
Kirk says the chains alone are not to blame and improvements in safety have been hampered by a lack of support from the Bangladeshi government and manufacturing groups. She says it is vital the government backs the building safety deal by ensuring that the right infrastructure is in place. Getting things right will be important to Bangladesh, which is very reliant on clothing exports in a highly competitive global market place.
‘We will need to see engagement. By signing up to the accord we are all committing to at least maintaining the level of business we have in Bangladesh for five years,’ Kirk says. ‘After that, we will have to re-evaluate our position. We don’t want to be in unsafe factories.’
-With New Age input
