Factories still unsafe 5 years after collapse
DHAMRAI, Bangladesh — A few hundred workers, activists and relatives of victims of a 2013 garment factory collapse in Bangladesh that killed 1,134 people and left thousands injured held a rally Tuesday as the country marked the fifth anniversary of the disaster.
Protesters placed flowers at a makeshift monument near the abandoned factory site, just outside the capital Dhaka, and urged that the owner of the collapsed building, imprisoned on murder charges, be given the death penalty.
The Rana Plaza factory building was expanded illegally, with extra floors stacked one on top of another. An engineer had declared it unsafe, and the thousands of people who worked inside, stitching garments for clothing brands from around the world, knew it was trouble.
“That factory was very risky,” said Khadiza Begum, who was working there the day the complex collapsed. “It had weak pillars. It had narrow stairwells. It had no fire exits.”
The tragedy killed 1,134 people, many of them young women supporting extended families, and injured more than 2,500. It focused international attention on Bangladesh’s role as the world’s second-largest garment producer, and led the government and manufacturing associations to promise big improvements.
Many of the world’s top clothing brands said they would stop contracting with factories if they failed to improve safety for their workers. European and U.S. brands set up programs meant to improve safety.
Five years later, the situation is complicated, according to a recent study conducted by the Center for Business and Human Rights at New York University’s Stern School of Business.
“We have found tremendous improvement in the larger factories” involved in the safety programs, Paul Barrett, deputy director of the center, said in an email. “But two other categories — factories overseen by the government and subcontracting facilities not overseen by anyone — remain at risk.”
The center’s survey of conditions at Bangladesh’s textile factories found that workers at about 3,000 of the country’s 7,000 factories are still exposed to life-threatening risks, ranging from a lack of fire safety equipment to serious structural flaws. The dangerous factories, often small, sometimes subcontract work from larger factories that deal with foreign brands.
Such factories rarely allow access for journalists, though the best-equipped ones are eager to show off their workplaces.
Textile exports are a huge business for Bangladesh, bringing in $28 billion annually, mostly from Europe and the United States.