United States Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Senator Robert Menendez has said Bangladesh’s factories will be truly safer when the workers can organise, speak and act together without fear of retribution from factory owners or managers. “Our Committee held a hearing on labor issues in Bangladesh this past June, and we consistently heard that if the workers of Rana Plaza had been in unions, their managers could not have forced them back into the building when collapse appeared imminent. Similarly, if the workers of Tazreen Fashions had been organised, managers could not have made them work through a fire alarm or kept exits padlocked,” he said in a letter, sent to former US Representative Ellen O’Kane Tauscher (D-CA), Chair of the Board of Directors of the Alliance for Bangladesh Worker Safety, on Wednesday.
“While I applaud the many initiatives in the Alliance’s action plan to ensure fire and building safety in its members’ factories, it does not adequately empower the workers in those factories to ensure their own safety,” he added.
The Senator said: “Due to Bangladesh’s troubled history of labor relations, factory owners and managers have serious misperceptions regarding the role of unions and the potential of constructive labor relations.”
-With The Independent input
