Bangladesh – Garment Factory Blast Raises Continued Concerns on Workers’ Safety-Women & Tragic Memories of Rana Plaza Fire
Author: WUNRN
Date: July 31, 2017
Relatives of victims killed in the collapse of Rana Plaza and activists shout slogans on the first year anniversary of the accident, as they gathered in Savar April 24, 2014. REUTERS/Andrew Biraj
“The recent accident shows that safety regulations process started after Rana Plaza is far from over and reforms need to be expedited”
By Anuradha Nagaraj
CHENNAI, India, July 4, 2017 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – The death of 10 workers in a boiler explosion at a Bangladesh garment factory is one in a series of deadly mishaps that illustrate the neglect of workplace safety, union leaders said Tuesday.
Demanding more effective implementation of regulations put in place after the 2013 Rana Plaza disaster that killed more than 1,100 people, workers’ unions have called for zero tolerance to such lapses in safety.
“There can be no negotiations on worker safety and no tolerance for such accidents,” said Amirul Haque Amin, president of the National Garment Workers Federation, seven of whose members were among the over 50 injured in the factory blast.
“After Rana Plaza, the coming together of various stakeholders has brought in better regulation in the industry but casualties in such accidents are still on the higher side.”
The boiler explosion on Monday night occurred at a plant of Multifabs Limited, a Bangladeshi company on the outskirts of the capital, Dhaka.
The firm supplies knitted apparel to clients in Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Russia, Spain, Netherlands and Britain, including to Littlewoods, one of Britain’s oldest retail brands.
The company said the plant was functioning well and the boiler, procured from Germany, had just been serviced. The factory had been shut for 10 days for the Eid period at the end of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan and was being readied to resume operations from Tuesday.
The company had undergone mandatory independent safety inspections as it supplies to brands that are signatories to the Bangladesh Accord on fire and building safety, an independent, legally binding framework set up after the Rana Plaza collapse.
Bangladesh’s garment-making industry, the biggest in the world after China’s, came under scrutiny after the collapse of the eight-storey Rana Plaza factory complex and a fire at a garment factory in 2012 that killed 112 workers.
“Implementation of various programmes since Rana Plaza have been uneven and this accident is a reminder that there has to be greater capacity building on ground,” said Raisul Islam Khan of UNI Global Union, a federation of trade unions.
Bangladesh’s labour department needs to be strengthened, labour inspectors better qualified and more local initiatives are needed to plug the gaps, he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
Campaigners say the progress in fixing problems in the supply chain has been slow in the industry that employs 4 million people and generates 80 percent of Bangladesh’s export earnings.
They have criticised many retailers for failing to improve working conditions – with long hours, low pay, poor safety standards and not being allowed to form trade unions common complaints from garment workers.
“The accident shows that process started after Rana Plaza is far from over and reforms need to be expedited,” said Amin.
BANGLADESH – GARMENT FACTORY FIRE – DEATHS & INJURIES – WOMEN
“The garment industry employs more than three million workers in Bangladesh, most of them women.” – NYT
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Stunned – ( Hasan Raza / Associated Press / November 25, 2012 )
Bystanders look at the burned factory. A fire official said there were no emergency exits leading outside the building.
Aglow with flames ( Hasan Raza / Associated Press / November 24, 2012 ) A Bangladeshi firefighter battles a fire at a garment factory outside of Dhaka. The blaze broke out at the seven-story factory operated by Tazreen Fashions late Saturday.
BANGLADESH – FATAL FIRE HIGHLIGHTS DANGERS FACING GARMENT WORKERS
By VIKAS BAJAJ
November 25, 2012 – More than 100 people died Saturday and Sunday in a fire at a garment factory outside Dhaka, Bangladesh, in one of the worst industrial tragedies in that country.
It took firefighters all night to put out the blaze at the factory, Tazreen Fashions, after it started about 7 p.m. on Saturday, a retired fire official said by telephone from Dhaka, the capital. At least 111 people were killed, and scores of workers were taken to hospitals for treatment of burns and smoke inhalation.
“The main difficulty was to put out the fire; the sufficient approach road was not there,” said the retired official, Salim Nawaj Bhuiyan, who now runs a fire safety company in Dhaka. “The fire service had to take great trouble to approach the factory.”
Bangladesh’s garment industry, the second-largest exporter of clothing after China, has a notoriously poor fire safety record. Since 2006, more than 500 Bangladeshi workers have died in factory fires, according to Clean Clothes Campaign, an anti-sweatshop advocacy group in Amsterdam. Experts say many of the fires could have easily been avoided if the factories had taken the right precautions. Many factories are in cramped neighborhoods and have too few fire escapes, and they widely flout safety measures. The industry employs more than three million workers in Bangladesh, most of them women.
Activists say that global clothing brands like Tommy Hilfiger and the Gap and those sold by Walmart need to take responsibility for the working conditions in Bangladeshi factories that produce their clothes.
“These brands have known for years that many of the factories they choose to work with are death traps,” Ineke Zeldenrust, the international coordinator for the Clean Clothes Campaign, said in a statement. “Their failure to take action amounts to criminal negligence.”
In a statement from the United States, Wal-Mart said, “While we are trying to determine if the factory has a current relationship with Walmart or one of our suppliers, fire safety is a critically important area of Walmart’s factory audit program and we have been working across the apparel industry to improve fire safety education and training in Bangladesh.”
The fire at the Tazreen factory in Savar, northwest of Dhaka, started in a warehouse on the ground floor that was used to store yarn, and quickly spread to the upper floors. The building was nine stories high, with the top three floors under construction, according to a garment industry official at the scene who asked not to be named because he was not authorized to speak to the news media. Though most workers had left for the day when the fire started, the industry official said, as many as 600 workers were still inside working overtime.
The factory, which opened in May 2010, employed about 1,500 workers and had sales of $35 million a year, according to a document on the company’s Web site. It made T-shirts, polo shirts and fleece jackets.
Most of the workers who died were on the first and second floors, fire officials said, and were killed because there were not enough exits. “So the workers could not come out when the fire engulfed the building,” said Maj. Mohammad Mahbub, the operations director for the Fire Department, according to The Associated Press.
In a telephone interview later on Sunday, Major Mahbub said the fire could have been caused by an electrical fault or by a spark from a cigarette.
In a brief phone call, Delowar Hossain, the managing director of the Tuba Group, the parent company of Tazreen Fashions, said he was too busy to comment. “Pray for me,” he said and then hung up.
Television news reports showed badly burned bodies lined up on the floor in what appeared to be a government building. The injured were being treated in hallways of local hospitals, according to the reports.
The industry official said that many of the bodies were burned beyond recognition and that it would take some time to identify them.
One survivor, Mohammad Raju, 22, who worked on the fifth floor, said he escaped by climbing out of a third-floor window onto the bamboo scaffolding that was being used by construction workers. He said he lost his mother, who also worked on the fifth floor, when they were making their way down.
“It was crowded on the stairs as all the workers were trying to come out from the factory,” Mr. Raju said. “There was no power supply; it was dark, and I lost my mother in dark. I tried to search for her for 10 to 15 minutes but did not find her.”
A document posted on Tazreen Fashions’ Web site indicated that an “ethical sourcing” official for Walmart had flagged “violations and/or conditions which were deemed to be high risk” at the factory in May 2011, though it did not specify the nature of the infractions. The notice said that the factory had been given an “orange” grade and that any factories given three such assessments in two years from their last audit would not receive any Walmart orders for a year.
A spokesman for Walmart, Kevin Gardner, said the company was “so far unable to confirm that Tazreen is a supplier to Walmart nor if the document referenced in the article is in fact from Walmart.”
But the International Labor Rights Forum, which tracks fires in the Bangladesh garment industry, said documents and logos found in the debris indicated that the factory produced clothes for Walmart’s Faded Glory line as well as for other American and foreign companies.
Bangladesh exports about $18 billion worth of garments a year. Employees in the country’s factories are among the world’s lowest-paid, with entry-level workers making the government-mandated minimum wage of about $37 a month or slightly above.
Tensions have been running high between workers, who have been demanding an increase in minimum wages, and the factory owners and government. A union organizer, Aminul Islam, who campaigned for better working conditions and higher wages, was found tortured and killed outside Dhaka this year.
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