Deadly fire exposes the ugly truth
WHEN BLAZE KILLED 112 WORKERs earning $45 a month to clothe the West, the least ethical link in the supply chain was exposed
ASHULIA, BANGLADESH — The fire alarm shattered the monotony of the Tazreen Fashions factory. Hundreds of seamstresses looked up from their machines, startled. On the third floor, Shima Akhter Pakhi had been stitching hoods onto fleece jackets. Now she ran to a staircase.
But two managers were blocking the way. Ignore the alarm, they ordered. It was just a test. Back to work. A few women laughed nervously. Pakhi and other workers returned to their sewing tables. She could stitch a hood to a jacket in about 90 seconds. She arranged the fabric under her machine. Ninety seconds. Again. Ninety more seconds. She sewed six pieces, maybe seven. Then she looked up. Smoke was filtering up through the three staircases. Screams rose from below. The two managers had vanished. Power suddenly went out throughout the eight-storey building. There was nowhere to escape. The staircases led down into the fire. Iron grilles blocked the windows. A man cowering in a fifthfloor bathroom called his mother to tell her he was about to die.
“We all panicked,” Pakhi said. “It spread so quickly. And there was no electricity. It was totally dark.”
Tazreen Fashions Ltd. operated at the beginning of the global supply chain that delivers clothes made in Bangladesh to stores in Europe and North America. By any measure, the factory was not a safe place to work.
Yet Tazreen was making clothing destined for some of the world’s top retailers. On the third floor, where firefighters recovered 69 bodies, Pakhi was stitching sweater jackets for C&A, a European chain. On the fifth floor, workers were making Faded Glory shorts for Walmart. Ten bodies were recovered there. On the sixth floor, a man named Hashinur Rahman put down his work making True Desire nighties for Sears and eventually helped save scores of others. Inside one factory office, labour activists found order forms and drawings for a licensee of the U.S. Marine Corps that made commercial apparel with the marine logo.
In all, 112 workers were killed in a blaze last month that has exposed a glaring disconnect among global clothing brands, the monitoring system used to protect workers and the factories actually filling the orders. After the fire, Walmart, Sears and other retailers made the same startling admission: They say they did not know that Tazreen Fashions was making their clothing.
But who, then, is ultimately responsible when things go so wrong?
The global apparel industry aspires to operate with accountability that extends from distant factories to retail stores. Big brands demand that factories be inspected by accredited auditing firms so that the brands can control quality and understand how, where and by whom their goods are made. If a factory does not pass muster, it is not supposed to get orders from western customers.
Tazreen Fashions was one of many clothing factories that existed on the margins of this system.
Yet Tazreen Fashions received orders anyway, slipping through the gaps in the system by delivering the low costs and quick turnarounds that buyers — and consumers — demand. C&A, the European retailer, has confirmed ordering 220,000 sweaters from the factory. But much of the factory’s business came through opaque networks of subcontracts with suppliers or local buying houses.
Walmart and Sears have since said they fired the suppliers that subcontracted work to Tazreen Fashions. Yet some critics have questioned how a company like Walmart, one of the two biggest buyers in Bangladesh and renowned for its sophisticated global supply system, could have been unaware of the connection.
The factory’s owner, Delowar Hossain, said his managers arranged work through local middlemen.
Bangladesh is now a garment manufacturing giant, the world’s second-leading apparel exporter, behind China. Bangladesh has the lowest garment wages in the world, and many of the Tazreen factory’s victims were young rural women with little education, who earned as little as $45 a month in an industry that now accounts for $19 billion in exports.
In Bangladesh, public outrage about the fire has boiled over. An estimated 100,000 people attended the burial ceremony of 53 workers whose bodies could not be identified. Industry leaders have promised financial support for survivors and the families of the dead. The Bangladeshi government has started inspecting the country’s 4,500 garment factories; it has already found fire code violations in almost a third of the hundreds it has examined.
“Now we have to do much more,” said Mohammad Shafiul Islam Mohiuddin, president of the Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association, conceding past failures. “We have learned. We start from here.”
In reconstructing the deadly blaze, The New York Times interviewed more than two dozen survivors, relatives of the victims, Bangladeshi fire officials, garment factory owners and managers, auditors and others. In the end, analysts said, the conflagration was a tragic byproduct of an industry in which global brands and retailers, encouraged by hundreds of millions of consumers around the world, are still primarily motivated by the bottom line.
“We as consumers like to be able to buy ever greater quantities of ever cheaper goods, every year,” said Richard Locke, deputy dean of the MIT Sloan School of Management. “Somebody is bearing the cost of it, and we don’t want to know about it. The people bearing the cost were in this fire.”
Several months ago, Shima Akhter Pakhi was summoned to the sixth floor of Tazreen Fashions. Pakhi, 24, had worked at the factory for three years, and every month she sent money back to her family in rural Bangladesh. Now she earned a monthly base salary of $51, maybe $20 more with overtime. Up on the sixth floor, managers were tapping her for fire safety duty.
When Pakhi started at Tazreen, the factory had only three floors, but the owner was adding five upper floors in expectation that business would grow. The empty, unfinished sixth floor was nearly the size of a football field. Pakhi and a few other employees were handed fire extinguishers and taught to remove the pin, squeeze the handle and spray. They were also told that in the case of a fire on upper floors, employees should evacuate down the staircases in descending order from top to bottom.
“They did not tell us what we would do if the fire started on the ground floor,” Pakhi recalled.
Fire investigators say the blaze erupted on the cavernous ground floor after stacks of yarn and fabric caught fire. Had the fabric been stored in an enclosed, fireproof room, as required by law, the fire could have been contained and the workers could have escaped.
Instead, the blaze spread quickly, pushing up the staircases, along with toxic fumes from burning acrylic. Investigators discovered that few fire extinguishers had been used. And, finally, managers made a catastrophic mistake by initially dismissing the fire alarm.
“They killed time,” said Abu Nayeem Mohammad Shahidullah, director general of Bangladesh’s national fire service. “Time was so precious, so important. But they said it was a false alarm.”
Hossain, the factory owner, told Bangladeshi news media that he did not know why managers on the floor would have tried to stop employees from leaving the factory.
Managers had been preparing the factory for inspections from buyers and staged a drill a few days before the fire, several employees said. Pakhi said managers had even displayed photographs of the fire training session on bulletin boards.
“I think they took the pictures and hung them on the board to show the buyers,” she said. “They would see the pictures and think they have trained people to fight fires. But personally, I don’t think I could fight fires with this training.”
On the sixth floor, Hashinur Rahman heard the screams and rushed to a staircase. He and others had been making satiny lingerie, but they pushed past a manager and began descending into thicker and thicker smoke. Ignoring the manager would save their lives.
Fire officials later concluded that the two staircases on the eastern side of the building were quickly overwhelmed with fire and toxic smoke. But officials say the lone western staircase remained passable for many minutes and provided an escape route for many survivors.
Rahman, 32, had barely made it out of the building, along with many of his colleagues, when his cellphone rang. It was a friend who worked on the third floor. Hundreds of people were trapped.
“Save us!” the friend shouted. “Help us!”
Rahman said he ran to the narrow alley that separated the factory’s western wall from a building under construction.
Rahman scaled bamboo scaffolding to a third-floor window covered with an iron grille. He leaped onto a concrete slab of the new building and found a brick. He began smashing the grille, trying to break it open. He looked inside and saw his co-workers’ desperate faces.
One seamstress, who goes by a single name, Rahima, had tried to escape the third floor by a stairwell but began choking on smoke. As the smoke thickened, Rahima said, she fell to the floor. Then people trampled her.
“When I fell down, and the people were stepping on me, I did not think I would survive,” she recalled. “But then I thought of my daughter.”
Rahima had been married to a husband who beat her. When their daughter was born five years ago, the husband fled. Rahima left her village to find work in the garment industry, which has provided an escape from grinding rural poverty for millions of women like her in Bangladesh and around the world. She moved into a rented room with her two sisters and got a job at Tazreen. In the village, Rahima’s parents cared for her daughter while she sent back money. Two days before the fire, the little girl arrived for a rare visit.
“I got my strength, and I stood up,” Rahima said. “I ran to the sample room.” Finally, the iron grille gave way. A few men jumped to the concrete slab of the adjacent building. Leaning against the scaffolding, they reached across the gap to help co-workers make the leap. Women went first. Rahima made it across. So did Pakhi. On other floors, people smashed open windows or tore out exhaust fans and leaped into the darkness. Some landed on the metal roofs of nearby shanties. Some landed on the ground.
And some never made it out at all.