Revisiting the price of cheap
Workers’ rights in spotlight as death toll continues to rise
Until they died, no one outside Bangladesh knew they were alive.
They toiled at their work tables jammed side by side in the searing heat, waiting for the few breaks they were allowed, to run to the toilet or splash water on their sweating faces. They worked more than 12 hours a day for less than $2. And sometimes even that pathetic pay came late.
But the workers at Bangladesh’s Rana Plaza factory knew better than to complain about intolerable conditions or the cracks in the walls — that would mean no wages at all. They knew the rules: no complaining, no organizing, no questions. When more than 500 garment workers — 547 was the everrising official toll on Saturday — were crushed under tonnes of rubble in the illegally slapped-up factory building in Dhaka last week, however, that façade cracked. And, along with it, confidence in the international brands that claim concern for worker safety and the feel-good factor of global shoppers who scoop up armfuls of cheap chic from their favourite stores. So what is to be done? As alarm bells ring in the corporate community there is talk of company flight. Some conscience-stricken consumers called for boycotts.
Both would deprive millions of mainly female workers of what little income they had and starve their extended families. As the social media sizzle cooled, more reasoned voices, like that of Canada’s Galen Weston, executive chairman of Loblaw Cos. Ltd., called instead for closer monitoring of factories in Bangladesh, where the company’s Joe Fresh clothing line is made.
“Properly inspected, well-built, well-run factories play an important role in the development of countries like Bangladesh,” said Joe Fresh creative director Joe Mimran. “We must do a much better job of ensuring the safety of workers.” A team of company officials is to meet this week with Bangladeshi officials and unions.
But for those who have spent years investigating working conditions in poverty-stricken developing countries, the expression “déjà vu” is top of mind.
Although American workers won improved labour laws and enforcement from disasters like New York’s 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, the 21st century’s rapid globalization and outsourcing of jobs have made the plight of offshore workers, and responsibility for their safety, more remote.
And the competition for expanding profits — and shrinking costs — has launched a race to the bottom for worker’s safety, working conditions and wages.
That, watchdog groups say, has put standards and their enforcement in peril, along with workers’ lives: even in coun- tries with existing laws, government laxity and a faulty system of inspection makes them unenforceable. And the situation is unlikely to change without a rootand-branch change in attitude in the big brands that are profiting from producing cheap goods.
Long-time workers’ advocate Charles Kernaghan, knows the checkered history of monitoring well.
“We were the first group ever to do monitoring in El Salvador, back in the 1980s, when Gap was producing in a horrible factory there,” says Kernaghan, now director of the Institute for Global Labour and Human Rights, an advocacy group.
“We challenged them to let independent Jesuit religious leaders, who had real integrity, monitor the factory. It was the first time independent monitoring happened. But then other labels went ballistic. They didn’t want independent and principled monitoring by people like priests.”
Shortly afterward, Kernaghan said, Clinton administration Labor Secretary Robert Reich called him.
“He said ‘congratulations, you started a growth industry,’ ”
By that Reich meant a worldwide explosion of monitoring touched off by a series of sweatshop scandals that activists like Kernaghan had brou
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ught to light. spect of bad publicity xpensive upgrades in s and working condiions made their own vernments, eager to usiness and improve ding, did little to de- ernments to protect e global economy has left a yawning gap of regulation and helped spawn an $80-billion industry in corporate social responsibility (CSR) and social auditing,” said Sharan Burrow, who heads the International Trade Union Confederation, in a damning report published last month by the AFL-CIO federation of labour organizations.
“Many of the best-established CSR brands, such as the Fair Labor Association and Social Accountability Interna- tional, are funded by big corporations and sometimes even by government subsidy.”
Both are registered non-profit organizations. The FLA website says it has “helped to improve the lives of millions of workers around the world” and create “lasting solutions to abusive labour practices.” SAI’s says it “partners to advance the human rights of workers and to eliminate sweatshops” by improving rights and conditions for workers.
Neither has yet responded publicly to the report.
Corporations were quick to embrace the model of “multi-stakeholder initiatives” to check on compliance in their supply chains. It was meant to bring together civil society groups and corporations to thrash out ways of improving workers’ conditions. They would oversee a system of “social audit” and quality control firms that could reassure consumers that basic rights and standards were upheld.
But it didn’t work out that way for hundreds of workers who were maimed, sickened or killed by their workplaces.
In one of the worst cases, nearly 300 workers died in a garment factory fire in Pakistan in 2012, when locked exits and barred windows stopped them from escaping, just three weeks after the factory was certified as complying with SAI’s standards.
How it happened highlights the basic faults in the system.
“The SAI system approved the Italian company RINA to certify factories,” said the report. But the company subcontracted the inspection and did not go to Pakistan to check the workplace conditions. The local subcontractor visited the factory and gave it a clean bill of health in spite of complaints of violations from a previous inspector.
The problem isn’t unique, the report says. “Globally, there are more than 3,000 workplaces that hold the certification overseen by SAI.” And it is not the only organization to follow similar practices.
Will the Bangladesh catastrophe be a turning point for corporations to revisit and repair the flawed system? Weston, and a handful of others, say they are moving in that direction. Critics say that as long as workers are powerless to organize and press for their rights, nothing fundamental will change.
“The workers want to raise standards, but in many cases they aren’t allowed to unionize or raise their voices,” says Fayazuddin Ahmad of the anti-poverty group ActionAid in Bangladesh.
Bangladesh has no laws against unionization, but a reputation for hostility to them.
Governments of struggling states, as well as corporations who outsource their manufacturing to them, fear the price tag of improved working conditions, says York University political science professor Ananya Mukherjee.
“The logic is that if we make it a bit more expensive, the company will become uncompetitive,” she says. “But the way prices break down, wages are a very small percentage.”
Some in wealthy countries argue shoppers should be happy to buy more expensive goods produced by companies that treat workers well. But, says Kernaghan, that option is also shrinking as the West’s middle class lose jobs and purchasing power and the poor grow poorer. But something must give. “The price of cheap,” says economist Armine Yalnizyan of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, “is Bangladesh.”