By the time garments reach stores thousands of miles away from where they were made, they would have traversed a complex and fragmented global supply network where unsafe conditions and abuse can flourish, says this University of Michigan professor.
Several factories inside the complex produced apparel for Western brands, including Benetton, Primark and Walmart, shining a spotlight on the unsafe conditions in which a sizable portion of Americans’ cheap clothing is produced. The humanitarian tragedy hit home as wealthy nations’ shoppers wrestled with their own complicity and called for reforms - but a decade later, progress is still patchy.
Bangladeshi volunteers and rescue workers are pictured at the scene after the Rana Plaza garment building collapsed in Savar, on the outskirts of Dhaka, on Apr 24, 2013. A campaign for full and fair compensation for families of victims was launched immediately, facilitated by the International Labor Organization, a United Nations agency. Within a few months, two initiatives were designed to bring garment factories in Bangladesh up to international standards: The European-led Accord for Fire and Building Safety, and the American-led Alliance for Bangladesh Worker Safety.
Both were five-year agreements: The Alliance was ceased in 2018, whereas the Accord operated for a few more years before handing operations over to the locally created Readymade Sustainability Council in June 2020.The onus and expense of making these improvements, however, were largely to be borne by the suppliers - a substantial financial burden for many factories, especially considering the low cost and slim profit margins of the clothes they were producing.
In terms of infrastructure improvements, however, while there has been decent progress, much still needs to be done; for example, the initiatives covered just about one-third of all the garment factories in Bangladesh. Importantly, neither addressed company sourcing practices.
The growth of this sector has reduced poverty significantly and also empowered women. To meet the rapid growth of the apparel industry, however, many buildings were converted to factories as quickly as possible, often without requisite permits.Commentary: We know sweatshop clothing is bad – and buy it anyway. Here’s how your brain makes excusesA common way that foreign companies source products from low-cost countries like Bangladesh is through intermediaries or agents.
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