When clothes kill
T-shirt: $5. Long-sleeved shirt: $10. Jeans: $15. Shoes: $18. And all that new, cheap, and stamped with the original brand...
Except this dream for quality, and more importantly, cheap clothes, has its price. And sometimes it is not just measured in dollars and cents, but in human lives, as became evident from the recent disastrous incident at a textiles factory in Bangladesh, which claimed 1100 lives. Behind the attractive prices on the labels, often a cruel reality lurks. And the responsibility for that is shared by both the textiles producers and the governments of the respective countries, and the big traders and distributors. And of course ultimately, the customers themselves.
Savar is a town, some 30 km away from Dhaka. During the last decade it has been transformed from a mid-size, mostly agrarian town, into a crowded youth hub, and a major centre of the Bangladeshi industry. The city has claimed lots of its adjacent territories for construction, and the land prices have risen gradually with the raising of ever taller buildings. One of them, the infamous Rana Plaza.
It has now transpired that four of its storeys had been built without a permit. But the famously ineffective local administration which has been incapable of coping with the construction boom, and the fact that the owner of the building was a representative of the youth wing of the ruling party, have contributed to Rana Plaza being used illegally for years. It hosted a bank, many shops, several apartments and, although the architectural plans never meant it to be an industrial site, also five textiles workshops. According to the people who worked there, during the frequent power shortages when the reserve electric generators were switched on, the entire building would shake as if there was an earthquake. But no checks from the authorities ever happened, and the owner never had to pay any fines.
Still, when on April 23 some cracks started appearing on the building, an inspection from the municipality concluded that the building had to be shut down due to structural instability. The banks and the shops were instantly emptied. But the textile workshops were not. Because they had deadlines to meet, and lots of orders to complete. So the factory owners informed their employees that there were no problems with the building, and even threatened them that if they didn't come to work on the next day, they wouldn't get their pay.
So, on the morning of April 24, while nearly 3000 workers were taking their places in the workshops, the building started to shake, and within mere seconds it collapsed, turning itself into a horrifying sandwich of concrete, human body parts, textiles and machines. In the next days the rescue operation started looking more like a massive body exhumation rather than a search for survivors. The number of casualties reached 1127, most of them women, and also children of the workers who were there at the daycare room while their parents were working. The heavily injured were hundreds, and the shocking footage circulated all the media around the world. This has been the most tragic incident in the history of the textile industry. But the most stunning thing is how easily it could have been avoided.
From a first sight, the incident was caused by internal problems of the South Asian country - from the lax building oversight, to the inefficient institutions, to the political umbrella that was spread over the owner of the building. Except, apart from the dead bodies and injured people that the rescue teams were dragging out of the rubble, there were also tons of clothes, stamped with the trademark brands of most major producers around the world. Shorts carrying the Primark brand (a UK firm), and trousers of Loblaw (a Canadian firm), and t-shirts and jackets of Benetton, and C&A, and Zara, etc, etc...
Of course, the owners of some of these companies were eager to distance themselves from what had happened thousands of miles away from their headquarters, and many of them kept denying having any direct relations to any of the producers who had opened shop in Rana Plaza. In the meantime, the official press statements of a number of retailers did admit that some of their local subcontractors had used some facilities in that building. And some have even tried to save face and rushed to compensate the families of the victims. But the damage had already been done.
The thing is, nowadays the delivery and distribution channels are really a very flexible term. A corporation orders the production of an item, and a subcontractor then delegates part of their job to a third party, which in turn goes to a fourth party, and so on. All this puts significant obstacles to tracking down any item all the way back from its actual physical producer to the original contractor. If we recall the horse meat scandal in the EU, the situation is not very different in the garment industry - only it is much more complicated. So it is indeed possible that the original company has remained blissfully unaware about the implications of its market choices, and really has no information about where a certain t-shirt or a pair of trousers has come from. A situation that is very convenient in the fashion industry, because it allows the big companies of international repute to easily wash their hands by saying that they simply cannot have all the information, and they cannot have direct control on the conditions in which their goods are being produced. But at the end of the day, they are the ones choosing the subcontractors who would do their job for them, and claiming that they didn't know anything about what goes on in those factories, is simply not serious.
It is a fact that the collapse of Rana Plaza is not the first case of this sort in the garment industry of Bangladesh. Less than a year ago, 117 people died because the building they were working in had no emergency exits in case of fire. According to International Labor Rights Forum data, more than 800 textile workers have died in fires since 2005.
What all these cases have in common is that they were all easily avoidable, and that these workshops had been commissioned by international companies. It is telling that at the background of these sombre stats, neither the government in Dhaka nor the international companies have moved a finger to take adequate measures that could have possibly averted tragedies such as Rana Plaza - until now.
The explanation that most proponents of the existing system are giving is that the globalised economy expects of countries like Bangladesh to deliver cheap goods, and cheap goods are most easily produced when there are no strict rules, or when no one is applying the existing ones.
The problem is that Bangladesh is heavily dependent on textiles production - this industry provides about 80% of its entire export income, and is thus the driving engine behind its economy. And there are more than 3.2 million people employed in the sector, the overwhelming majority of them women who practically have no other alternative. Meanwhile, one of the characteristics of the textile industry is that it has undergone very little change in the last few decades. Compared to the other modern industries, it remains poorly automatised and very dependent on the labour force. And we are talking of labour force with low qualification, which is readily available everywhere around the country. All this means that the level of competition in this industry can be killing.
Many are stating the fact that Bangladesh is the world's second largest textiles producer after China. But the main reasons for that are the low salaries and the duty-free trade agreements between the EU and USA. The minimum monthly wage for the Bangladeshi garment worker is only $38. This is per month! And this is exactly what makes Bangladesh so competitive in the sector, and makes so many of the major players in the field flock there to tap on its labour force.
In the meantime, the low income is probably the only argument that Bangladesh could offer in this severe competition on the market. We should keep in mind that, given such factors like speed of completing the orders and meeting the production deadlines, Bangladesh actually lags way behind other countries like China and Mexico, mostly due to the lack of proper infrastructure, which often causes unforeseen delays. There is also the ineffective resource management which is a legacy from the past, and also the geographic factor - it is no coincidence that one of the first things one would think of when mentioning Bangladesh is "floods". This way, the nearly 5000 Bangladeshi workshops are actually in a very weak position during negotiations with potential foreign clients, who constantly pressure them to increase the speed of production and decrease the costs. In result, sooner or later a compromise is made with the rules and safety standards, and horrible incidents happen.
This does not mean that the foreign companies necessarily bear direct responsibility for the Rana Plaza tragedy, or the situation in Bangladesh as a whole. But, being so absorbed in the fierce competition between themselves, and their desire to supply the consumers in the developed markets with cheap clothes, they have certainly contributed little to nothing for creating conditions for avoiding such tragedies.
Today, every fashion company basically has three options. One: keep the status quo, and just wait for the stain that the Rana Plaza tragedy has put on the industry to fade away by itself - until the next tragedy. Two: abandon the country altogether, as Walt Disney has already announced it intends to do, and redirect to other, more secure destinations, which do not hold such risks for their reputation. But the problem with these two options is that they both mean a certain loss of trust with part of the customer base.
The third option, which numerous activists and NGOs have been advocating for quite a while, is that these companies should take steps to improve the labour conditions in Bangladesh. Of course this would make production a bit costlier (unless they would like to relinquish some of their profit rates), but given the fact that the salaries in the country are 4-5 times lower than those in China (and are definitely by far the lowest in the region), which has even prompted some Chinese companies to re-outsource to Bangladesh, obviously there is quite a lot of room for manoeuvring. This is exactly the direction that some of the big textiles importers have chosen, among them H&M, Inditex and C&A, when they signed the long awaited Bangladesh safety accord for creating a system of independent auditing of the labour conditions among their outsourced subcontractors. Because all other alternatives would essentially mean that they would lose a lot of "cool" points among their customers. And that is the last thing a company in their position would want.
And then of course there is the question if this system would work at all. Although it is very "fashionable" to be talking about corporate social responsibility these days (the "corporations as good citizens" meme), in fact the fashion companies have really done very little for improving the labour conditions in Bangladesh or any other developing country for the last three decades. In this case, the key factor is not their willingness or desire, but rather the public (customer) pressure, and the political will to change the system in a meaningful way. And, until all of this comes in place, clothes will continue to kill. But ultimately, as it turns out, the ones who have the tools to stop that, are we, the consumers.
Except this dream for quality, and more importantly, cheap clothes, has its price. And sometimes it is not just measured in dollars and cents, but in human lives, as became evident from the recent disastrous incident at a textiles factory in Bangladesh, which claimed 1100 lives. Behind the attractive prices on the labels, often a cruel reality lurks. And the responsibility for that is shared by both the textiles producers and the governments of the respective countries, and the big traders and distributors. And of course ultimately, the customers themselves.
Savar is a town, some 30 km away from Dhaka. During the last decade it has been transformed from a mid-size, mostly agrarian town, into a crowded youth hub, and a major centre of the Bangladeshi industry. The city has claimed lots of its adjacent territories for construction, and the land prices have risen gradually with the raising of ever taller buildings. One of them, the infamous Rana Plaza.
It has now transpired that four of its storeys had been built without a permit. But the famously ineffective local administration which has been incapable of coping with the construction boom, and the fact that the owner of the building was a representative of the youth wing of the ruling party, have contributed to Rana Plaza being used illegally for years. It hosted a bank, many shops, several apartments and, although the architectural plans never meant it to be an industrial site, also five textiles workshops. According to the people who worked there, during the frequent power shortages when the reserve electric generators were switched on, the entire building would shake as if there was an earthquake. But no checks from the authorities ever happened, and the owner never had to pay any fines.
Still, when on April 23 some cracks started appearing on the building, an inspection from the municipality concluded that the building had to be shut down due to structural instability. The banks and the shops were instantly emptied. But the textile workshops were not. Because they had deadlines to meet, and lots of orders to complete. So the factory owners informed their employees that there were no problems with the building, and even threatened them that if they didn't come to work on the next day, they wouldn't get their pay.
So, on the morning of April 24, while nearly 3000 workers were taking their places in the workshops, the building started to shake, and within mere seconds it collapsed, turning itself into a horrifying sandwich of concrete, human body parts, textiles and machines. In the next days the rescue operation started looking more like a massive body exhumation rather than a search for survivors. The number of casualties reached 1127, most of them women, and also children of the workers who were there at the daycare room while their parents were working. The heavily injured were hundreds, and the shocking footage circulated all the media around the world. This has been the most tragic incident in the history of the textile industry. But the most stunning thing is how easily it could have been avoided.
From a first sight, the incident was caused by internal problems of the South Asian country - from the lax building oversight, to the inefficient institutions, to the political umbrella that was spread over the owner of the building. Except, apart from the dead bodies and injured people that the rescue teams were dragging out of the rubble, there were also tons of clothes, stamped with the trademark brands of most major producers around the world. Shorts carrying the Primark brand (a UK firm), and trousers of Loblaw (a Canadian firm), and t-shirts and jackets of Benetton, and C&A, and Zara, etc, etc...
Of course, the owners of some of these companies were eager to distance themselves from what had happened thousands of miles away from their headquarters, and many of them kept denying having any direct relations to any of the producers who had opened shop in Rana Plaza. In the meantime, the official press statements of a number of retailers did admit that some of their local subcontractors had used some facilities in that building. And some have even tried to save face and rushed to compensate the families of the victims. But the damage had already been done.
The thing is, nowadays the delivery and distribution channels are really a very flexible term. A corporation orders the production of an item, and a subcontractor then delegates part of their job to a third party, which in turn goes to a fourth party, and so on. All this puts significant obstacles to tracking down any item all the way back from its actual physical producer to the original contractor. If we recall the horse meat scandal in the EU, the situation is not very different in the garment industry - only it is much more complicated. So it is indeed possible that the original company has remained blissfully unaware about the implications of its market choices, and really has no information about where a certain t-shirt or a pair of trousers has come from. A situation that is very convenient in the fashion industry, because it allows the big companies of international repute to easily wash their hands by saying that they simply cannot have all the information, and they cannot have direct control on the conditions in which their goods are being produced. But at the end of the day, they are the ones choosing the subcontractors who would do their job for them, and claiming that they didn't know anything about what goes on in those factories, is simply not serious.
It is a fact that the collapse of Rana Plaza is not the first case of this sort in the garment industry of Bangladesh. Less than a year ago, 117 people died because the building they were working in had no emergency exits in case of fire. According to International Labor Rights Forum data, more than 800 textile workers have died in fires since 2005.
What all these cases have in common is that they were all easily avoidable, and that these workshops had been commissioned by international companies. It is telling that at the background of these sombre stats, neither the government in Dhaka nor the international companies have moved a finger to take adequate measures that could have possibly averted tragedies such as Rana Plaza - until now.
The explanation that most proponents of the existing system are giving is that the globalised economy expects of countries like Bangladesh to deliver cheap goods, and cheap goods are most easily produced when there are no strict rules, or when no one is applying the existing ones.
The problem is that Bangladesh is heavily dependent on textiles production - this industry provides about 80% of its entire export income, and is thus the driving engine behind its economy. And there are more than 3.2 million people employed in the sector, the overwhelming majority of them women who practically have no other alternative. Meanwhile, one of the characteristics of the textile industry is that it has undergone very little change in the last few decades. Compared to the other modern industries, it remains poorly automatised and very dependent on the labour force. And we are talking of labour force with low qualification, which is readily available everywhere around the country. All this means that the level of competition in this industry can be killing.
Many are stating the fact that Bangladesh is the world's second largest textiles producer after China. But the main reasons for that are the low salaries and the duty-free trade agreements between the EU and USA. The minimum monthly wage for the Bangladeshi garment worker is only $38. This is per month! And this is exactly what makes Bangladesh so competitive in the sector, and makes so many of the major players in the field flock there to tap on its labour force.
In the meantime, the low income is probably the only argument that Bangladesh could offer in this severe competition on the market. We should keep in mind that, given such factors like speed of completing the orders and meeting the production deadlines, Bangladesh actually lags way behind other countries like China and Mexico, mostly due to the lack of proper infrastructure, which often causes unforeseen delays. There is also the ineffective resource management which is a legacy from the past, and also the geographic factor - it is no coincidence that one of the first things one would think of when mentioning Bangladesh is "floods". This way, the nearly 5000 Bangladeshi workshops are actually in a very weak position during negotiations with potential foreign clients, who constantly pressure them to increase the speed of production and decrease the costs. In result, sooner or later a compromise is made with the rules and safety standards, and horrible incidents happen.
This does not mean that the foreign companies necessarily bear direct responsibility for the Rana Plaza tragedy, or the situation in Bangladesh as a whole. But, being so absorbed in the fierce competition between themselves, and their desire to supply the consumers in the developed markets with cheap clothes, they have certainly contributed little to nothing for creating conditions for avoiding such tragedies.
Today, every fashion company basically has three options. One: keep the status quo, and just wait for the stain that the Rana Plaza tragedy has put on the industry to fade away by itself - until the next tragedy. Two: abandon the country altogether, as Walt Disney has already announced it intends to do, and redirect to other, more secure destinations, which do not hold such risks for their reputation. But the problem with these two options is that they both mean a certain loss of trust with part of the customer base.
The third option, which numerous activists and NGOs have been advocating for quite a while, is that these companies should take steps to improve the labour conditions in Bangladesh. Of course this would make production a bit costlier (unless they would like to relinquish some of their profit rates), but given the fact that the salaries in the country are 4-5 times lower than those in China (and are definitely by far the lowest in the region), which has even prompted some Chinese companies to re-outsource to Bangladesh, obviously there is quite a lot of room for manoeuvring. This is exactly the direction that some of the big textiles importers have chosen, among them H&M, Inditex and C&A, when they signed the long awaited Bangladesh safety accord for creating a system of independent auditing of the labour conditions among their outsourced subcontractors. Because all other alternatives would essentially mean that they would lose a lot of "cool" points among their customers. And that is the last thing a company in their position would want.
And then of course there is the question if this system would work at all. Although it is very "fashionable" to be talking about corporate social responsibility these days (the "corporations as good citizens" meme), in fact the fashion companies have really done very little for improving the labour conditions in Bangladesh or any other developing country for the last three decades. In this case, the key factor is not their willingness or desire, but rather the public (customer) pressure, and the political will to change the system in a meaningful way. And, until all of this comes in place, clothes will continue to kill. But ultimately, as it turns out, the ones who have the tools to stop that, are we, the consumers.