Coles, Target, Cotton On and Forever New were named as retailers using low-cost labour in Bangladesh, where a factory collapse in April claimed more than 1100 lives, by ABC TV’s Four Corners program on Monday night.
The Australian retailers are the latest to be drawn into controversy over the use of Bangladeshi suppliers. On Monday, Fairfax Media reported that Kmart, Big W and Rivers were among Western companies manufacturing in the poverty-stricken South Asian country.
Four Corners reported the Gous Fashions factory, in Bangladesh’s second largest city, Chittagong, started supplying Coles in May 2011.
Managing director Anwarul Azim told the program Gous Fashion had ceased previous abusive practices against employees, including demanding excessive overtime and locking female workers in the factory.
Mr Azim said Gous Fashion would not take any more orders from Coles because it was ‘‘impossible to be a compliant factory with the Coles offer prices’’.
‘‘Actually if they want to do the business, they’ll have to go to the non-compliant factories, like you know you have seen the Savar tragedy,’’ he said. ‘‘So many people died.’’
The April 24 collapse of the Rana Plaza building in Savar, on the outskirts of capital Dhaka, was the deadliest structural collapse of the modern era, excluding the September 11, 2001, terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in New York.
Workers who had abandoned the eight-storey building because of safety fears were forced back into it on the morning of the collapse.
The building’s politically connected owner, Soheil Rana, insisted that people were ‘‘exaggerating’’ the risk from ‘‘a hair line crack’’.
He has since been arrested and a Bangladesh government report in May recommended he and the owners of five factories inside the building be sentenced to life in jail.
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