The government on Thursday set fresh deadlines for implementing the remaining conditions of the action plans provided by the US government and the EU Sustainability Compact to revive generalised system of preferences in the US market and to retain the duty-free access to the EU countries. At a meeting with foreign diplomats, senior officials of the Bangladesh government promised to complete the recruitment of additional 200 factory inspectors by mid October and the formulation of rules under the labour act by this month.
Earlier, the government missed at least three deadlines for completing the recruitment of factory inspectors and formulation of rules under the labour act.
The government also promised to complete the second phase of factory inspection by October and to complete the government and ILO sponsored inspection in all 1,500 subcontracting factories by December this year, a meeting source said.
At the meeting, senior government officials assured foreign diplomats that the Bangladesh EPZ Labour Bill, recently approved by the cabinet, will be approved in parliament by October.
Canadian high commissioner Heather Cruden, Dutch ambassador Gerben Sjoerd de Jong, representatives of US ambassador and EU ambassador, commerce secretary Hedayetullah Al Mamoon, labour secretary Mikail Shipar and foreign secretary Shahidul Haque and representatives of Alliance, JICA and ILO, were present in the meeting.
Meeting sources said that the government wanted to complete some of the remaining conditions including recruitment of additional factory inspectors by mid October as review meeting of the Sustainability Compact was likely to be held on October 15 or 17 at Brussels.
The review meeting on the progress in line with the Sustainability Compact conditions is scheduled to be held on October 20 in Brussels, they said.
Hedayetullah informed the foreign diplomats that the recruitment of factory inspectors had been delayed due to some technical and procedural complexities.
The process will be completed under the rules of Public Service Commission and the government cannot interfere into the job of the PSC as the commission is an autonomous body, he said.
Hedayetullah assured that all the complexities had been solved and the PSC made commitment to complete the recruitment by mid October.
After the Rana Plza collapse on April 14 last year that killed at least 1,137 garment workers, the EU and Bangladesh government signed the Compact on July 8 last year and later the US joined the initiative.
The Compact had set December 30, last year as the deadline for recruiting additional 200 inspectors.
A total of 88 inspectors have so far been appointed through the PSC, the labour ministry officials said.
At the meeting government presented the present scenario of the workplace safety in the readymade garment sector and said that a total of 1,920 factories had been inspected so far under the initiative of the North American and European brands and government in association with the International Labour Organisation.
The labour secretary informed the diplomats that the formulation of rules under the labour act was almost complete and now they were waiting for some inputs from the ILO, according to the meeting sources.
In the meeting ILO country director Srinivas B Reddy requested JICA to provide remediation fund through IFC to the factories where the BUET experts are conducting safety inspection under the supervision of the government and the ILO.
He said that Accord and Alliance made commitment to arrange remediation fund for their listed factories but there was a shortage of funding for remediation work in the subcontracting factories, meeting sources said.
After the meeting, labour secretary Mikail Shipar told New Age that they had made a presentation on the progress of implementation of the action plans of US and EU Sustainability Compact and the diplomats expressed their satisfactions over the progress.
-With New Age input
