Two years after Rana Plaza, have conditions improved in Bangladesh’s factories?

On 24 April 2013, an eight-story garment factory collapsed in Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh. The building’s fall killed 1,134 people and injured hundreds of others.

The Rana Plaza tragedy was not caused by an earthquake or a terrorist attack, but rather by poor construction and a lack of oversight – and, in some ways, by a growing global desire for more cheap fashion.

It’s been two years since the Rana Plaza tragedy, and although much remains to be done to ensure the rights and safety of workers in Bangladesh’s still-booming garment industry, progress has been made. Global brands including H&M, Mango, Primark, the Gap and Walmart, among a dozen others, have contributed $21.5m to the Rana Plaza Donors Trust Fund, which was set up to award compensation to victims and their families.

According to Srinivas Reddy, Bangladesh director for the International Labour Organization (ILO), which is administering the fund, there is a shortfall of $8.5m. “The fund is voluntary so we cannot make any brand donate,” Reddy said via Skype from Dhaka. “All we can do is encourage them to do so, or encourage those that have donated to donate more.”

Vocal protests have focused on late-to-donate brands like Benetton and The Child’s Place, while first movers Primark and H&M have received high praise for their commitment to making things right.

But the real change will come in the form of improvements to worker safety and worker’s rights. According to Reddy, Dhaka’s permitting offices have simply not kept pace with its booming garment industry, leading to a situation in which factories were being given permits without so much as a site visit, much less monitoring.

That has begun to change since the Rana Plaza collapse. According to Reddy, out of 3,508 factories identified as exporting clothing from Bangladesh, almost 75% have gone through building fire and safety assessments. As a result, 35 factories have been closed for failing to comply with structural integrity standards.

“That is not good news, necessarily, but what’s important is to recognize that we might have actually averted some building problems and accidents by closing down these factories,” Reddy said, “and putting the remaining factories through the remediation process” that requires building owners to fix various building safety issues.

Still, both brands and national leaders had promised that this entire process – the review and updating of all of Bangladesh’s factories – would be completed by the two-year anniversary. So far, the review process is not quite finished and building improvements have just begun.

“A lot of work has happened, but the initial expectations seemed to be unrealistic in terms of completing this massive amount of work,” Reddy said. “A lot more work still needs to happen. A lot of commitments that were made by brands, retailers and national stakeholders still have to be met.”

Several brands and retailers are playing an active role in addressing worker safety issues in Bangladesh, according to Reddy, in terms of both paying for factories to be upgraded and working with government agencies and nongovernmental organizations to draft guidelines and strategies for improving the lot of garment workers.

However, those commitments are set to end in 2018. “So we need to focus on how to continue this work, train monitoring staff, and ensure that capacity is built into the local authorities,” Reddy said.

One problem that has yet to be addressed, according to Reddy, is the capacity issue in Dhaka’s Capital Development Authority. The Authority approves building permits and is supposed to monitor construction to ensure that buildings are built according to the approved design. “Currently they do not really monitor,” Reddy said. “They grant permits and then don’t monitor, because they just don’t have enough monitoring staff. That was one of the problems with Rana Plaza – they were approved for six floors and built eight. That’s still a weak link and we’re asking the government to step up.”

Safety, but not security

Although the ILO and other NGOs are pleased with the progress that has been made on worker safety, worker rights issues have lagged behind. At the end of 2012, there were 122 unions in Bangladesh’s garment industry and they represented less than 3% of workers. The Rana Plaza collapse spurred an increase in both the number of unions and the number of workers joining them, resulting in a more than 20% increase in factory-level unions in the country’s garment district.

Today there are 437 unions, representing nearly 5% of workers in the industry. Part of the remediation plans that came out of talks immediately following the Rana Plaza collapse was the need to establish worker safety committees at the city’s factories, so that employees would have a place to voice concerns about workplace safety. So far, those committees have not been formed because the government has been slow to draft policies for their creation.

“We believe this trend [of increased union membership and more workers calling for safety committees] is mainly due to the aspirations of the workers and the fact that they’ve seen what happened in Rana Plaza,” Reddy said. “Each worker might have had serious doubts about going into the building – and in fact some of the workers I spoke with said they did have doubts about its safety – but they had no power as individuals and no ability to say anything about it, and so they kept going. And then it did go wrong.”

Reddy added that the Bangladeshi government has also made the process of starting and registering a union easier and more transparent, which has helped spur their adoption, although he said there remains a lack of trust between companies and unions.

Attention or pressure

“The Rana Plaza collapse was certainly not the first such occurrence but it struck a chord; it really seemed to resonate with people,” said Stephanie Hepburn, author of the book Hidden in Plain Sight, about human trafficking in the fashion industry. Added Hepburn, founder of the ethical fashion site Good Cloth: “It caused policy shifts but it also caused a really noticeable shift in consumer awareness.”

That attention has been good and bad for Bangladesh’s garment industry, according to Reddy. On the one hand, it has spurred international brands to take a keen interest in the country, supplying funding, time and ideas to improving the garment industry there. On the other, it has created pressure for the industry to improve rapidly.

“All these issues evolved over the course of the past 30 years, but people wanted to see them fixed in months,” Reddy said. “Some people felt like, ‘Why is everyone focused on Bangladesh when there are a lot of other exporting countries that don’t meet these international standards?’”

The Rana Plaza reforms have not touched 40% of the country’s factories, and these tend to be the facilities that are exporting to various countries through small brands and retailers.

The hope now is that the world will continue to pay attention to these issues, and that smaller companies and brands, not just the big players with reputations to protect, will support reform as well.