Death houses

In a statement by Human Rights Watch, it has been noted that ‘many clothing brands, mostly from the US, have not joined the Accord on Health and Safety in Bangladesh and Pakistan’ even now – a decade after the collapse of the Rana Plaza building in Bangladesh. The eight-story commercial building housed several shops, a bank and five garment factories on the upper floors. Large cracks were discovered in the building’s structure a day before the collapse but the owners of the garment factory paid no heed and made their workers come in to work in the unstable building the next day, even though the shops and bank had closed and a government inspector had ordered the evacuation of the building upon the discovery of the cracks. The ensuing collapse led to the death of 1134 workers, including rescue workers, and injuring up to 2600, leaving many permanently disabled. In Pakistan, we are no strangers to unsafe buildings and a brazen disregard for workers’ safety. Take the 2012 Baldia Town factory fire which killed over 300 people. Although arson has been alleged to be the cause of the latter incident, subsequent investigations concluded that the poor safety standards at the factory exacerbated the damage done by the blaze. The factory owners have also been accused of locking their workers in, basically treating them like prison labour, and were not even registered with the Labour Department. In both the Baldia Town and Rana Plaza incidents the factory owners were exporting to clients abroad and employed poor workers with few employment opportunities and many potential replacements. This is where the crux of the deadly accidents truly lies. The workers, often with nowhere else to make a living, have little bargaining power when it comes to safety conditions.

On the other side of the equation are big, lucrative, mostly Western, brands that form the client base of many of our industrialists. They bring in the big bucks, something which countries like Pakistan and Bangladesh desperately need, and unlike the workers, they are not easily replaceable. Hence, once a contract is secured, there is tremendous pressure on the factory owners to deliver goods on time, meet their quotas and keep costs low, come what may. This pressure extends to local governments, who need to keep the exports flowing out and forex flowing in, leading to a lax approach towards workers’ rights and safety from national regulators when it comes to exporting industries.

In this context, the most sensible course of action would be for major brands in the advanced nations that rely on labour in the Global South to raise the standards that the factories they work with are required to meet, in order for there to be an improvement in the workers’ rights and safety situation. This would also have the added impact of improving safety standards at the national level in developing countries by removing the conflict between better standards and rights for workers and economic gains. Unfortunately, since many of these brands have not joined the Accord on Health and Safety in Bangladesh and Pakistan that was formed in response to the Rana Plaza disaster, it is to be assumed that the competitive advantage of poorer countries like ours lies in cheap labour and lax standards, something companies in rich countries do not want to change. It would appear that national regulators will have to take the lead and conduct stricter safety tests along with expanding the rights of workers to organize and unionize. This means taking an economic hit, at least temporarily, but no amount of money ought to trump the rights and lives of our people.