How tragedy led fashion brands to protect workers' rights

In April, in a factory in Bangladesh, where Inditex and Primark were made, 1,000 people died. Wonderzine watched what happened next and now tells how this tragedy affected the plans of mass-market companies.

For six months, the fashion industry has experienced a real shock - we are not about Alexander Wang's debut collection for Balenciaga. In April in Bangladesh, a catastrophe occurred in a garment factory, where almost 10 brands of the democratic segment are sewn. 1,100 people died - consider the students of two schools or the whole course of the institute. In detail, the incident described the agency Reuters. According to the publication, in one of the buildings of the factory ceilings cracked, but the damage was considered harmless. The next day, the workers returned to the machines - what happened next, you can already guess. Earlier in the same factory there was a fire, which killed 100 people. A very important point - it was the Rana Plaza factory, notorious among professionals. She was led by Spaniard David Mayor, who arrived in Bangladesh 10 years ago to start production, which can be set as an example. Rana Plaza was an island of humanity among such institutions: here people were paid a good salary, they had a normalized work schedule and good working conditions. Mayor did not achieve this in a year: he made almost fantastic contracts in terms of budgets and terms, and he managed to attract major players - Inditex, the owner of Bershka, Massimo Dutti and Zara, as well as Mango and Primark. Perhaps they liked his principle of "clothing made with the soul."

Why did this disaster happen? David Mayor went back to Spain to conduct another business, and in a month or two Rana Plaza became an ordinary factory, where workers worked until night and received pennies. You shouldn’t have any illusions: cheap clothes cost, how much they cost, largely due to low-wage workers who sew them (sometimes the majority of the cost of a thing is the participation of some Gisele Bundchen in her advertising). Rana Plaza was a pleasant exception: there were 3,000 people working there, and in total four million Bangladeshis were employed in the clothing industry. Imagine how many people are employed in the production of clothing in Vietnam, India, China, Mexico, Taiwan and other active exporters. Is at least half of them provided decent conditions? Enough information that the average salary of an employee of a garment factory in the world is about 50 cents per hour. After the incident in Bangladesh, it becomes obvious to us that the topic of almost slave labor can no longer be hushed up. It is indecent for clothing manufacturers not to speak out on a vital topic: society simply will not understand them. Plus, they need factories in India, China and Mexico not only because of cheap labor, but also because of their location: the delivery time for clothes is quite tight, and remember the typical problems with customs, therefore, you need to approach an order for each country individually.

Now large brands are working in two directions. First, they join the Bangladesh Safety Pact, which was created after the disaster in Bangladesh. This is a five-year plan, the first step of which is to inspect all the country's clothing factories in a year and identify obvious violations, and then eliminate them. The brands Abercrombie & Fitch, H & M, Calvin Klein have already joined BSP (they contribute $ 5 million each), but Fast Retailing, which owns the Uniqlo brand, refuses. Secondly, companies are beginning to look for new countries to produce inexpensive clothing. These include African states: Ethiopia is considered promising. In African countries, clothes are not made for the first year, but earlier they were rather charitable initiatives aimed at supporting third world countries. Thus, small ethical workshops in Africa opened Asos, Diesel and the brand Bono and his wife Edun. One should not expect that the mass-market approach to production will change with access to African countries and the only thing a buyer can do in this situation is to ignore the stores of these brands. But it is to be hoped that those responsible for their factory workers — as the “social responsible factory” of the Industrial Revolution II in Haiti — will appear more and more.

PHOTO: EAST NEWS (1), RexFeatures / Fotodom (2), photo 1, 2 via Shutterstock