Corporate Culture: Bangladesh Textile Factory Horror

Hundreds of garment workers were killed and injured when an 8 story building housing five textile factories collapsed on 24 April.

Large structural cracks appeared in the Rana Plaza the day before and an evacuation order was given. The building and factory owners ignored the warning and insisted work continue hours before the building collapsed.

This, the worst ever, industrial accident in Bangladesh comes only months after more than one hundred garment workers died in two factory fires.

Working for a minimum wage of US$38 per month, less than one percent of garment workers in Bangladesh are represented by a union.

The Labour Law leaves workers unable to join a union and fight for safe workplaces, improved working conditions and better wages.

IndustriALL Global Union and IndustriALL Bangladesh Council is calling on the government to take urgent action to guarantee freedom of association and improve building and fire safety and the minimum wage for the more than 3 million garment workers in Bangladesh.

Send your message supporting these demands to the Bangladesh Prime Minister and Minister for Labour and Employment today - click here.

Corporate Culture:

Giant companies controlling the industry insulate themselves from responsibility for the conditions they create.  And their most important accomplice is the corporate social responsibility industry. 

According to a report just released by the AFL-CIO, Responsibility Outsourced, just before a fire at the Ali Enterprises factory in Pakistan killed 262 workers in 2012, clothing manufacturers hired an auditing firm, Social Accountability International, to certify it was safe. SAI then subcontracted inspection to an Italian firm, RINA, which subcontracted it yet again to a local firm RI&CA.  Ali Enterprises was certified that August. "Nearly 300 workers died in a fire two weeks after," the report charges.

Certifying factories that kill workers has become an $80 billion industry that "helped keep wages low and working conditions poor, [while] it provided public relations cover for producers,"  Responsibility Outsourced says. "Manufacturing work has left countries in which there were laws, collective bargaining and other systems in place to reduce workplace dangers," it says, while "jobs instead have gone to countries with inadequate laws, weak enforcement and precarious employment relationships."

This transfer was enabled by corporate-friendly trade agreements guaranteeing the products of these factories unfettered access to U.S. and European markets.  They simultaneously put pressure on developing countries to guarantee the rights of foreign corporate investors and an environment of low wages, lax enforcement of worker protections, and attacks on unions.