Global fashion giants yet to establish fair supply chain 5 years after Rana Plaza accident

Five years after the collapse of Rana Plaza, the building that housed several garment factories and shops in Savar, fashion giants have yet to establish a fair supply chain, reports The Telegraph.

The Rana Plaza disaster caused the death of 1,138 garment factory workers and left thousands with life-changing injuries.

The disaster, one of the deadliest industrial accidents in history, raised loud questions regarding the fashion industry and became a loud symbol of the way fashion brands lost control of their supply chains as they pursued outsourcing to lower costs.

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Two months after the accident many brands came together sign the Bangladesh Accord on Fire and Building Safety, which has helped transform parts of the industry.

The agreement was a legally binding deal to enforce common building standards certified by an independent inspection programme, and barring factories that ignored the rules from working with any of the brands involved. It also forced manufacturers to create elected health and safety committees.

A separate group set of 17 North American retailers, the Alliance for Bangladesh Worker Safety, has taken a similar approach.

“Employers in Bangladesh who have undergone oversight by the accord and alliance can now claim to be among the safest, if not the safest, in the world,” Warwick Business School Prof Jimmy Donaghey, who has visited Bangladesh eight times since the disaster, told The Telegraph.

Some brands like Primark have gone even further, embarking on their own programmes of building inspections and hiring an in-house structural engineer as part of its ethical trade team.

However, the measures taken for building safety do not suggest the global fashion supply chain to be as clean as expected.

“Mainly we are cheap labour – that is why we are scared; we need money, we need to survive,” Nazma Akter, who began work as a seamstress in a Bangladeshi factory aged just 11 and now runs the Sommilito Garments Sramik Federation trade union, told The Telegraph.

She said women workers often confront harassment and abuse, especially if they try to organise unions. “Women are still treated like they should not talk,” she added. 

Although most companies prohibit the practice of sub-contracting, manufacturers often pass the order to another factory which has never been inspected; a practice hard to control by companies without having physical presence in each factory.

One of the big issues has been a lack of transparency. It is hard for unions and campaigners to keep track and hold companies accountable as they are unaware of company policies and also the list of manufacturers a company works with.

Carry Somers, founder of the Fair Trade Panama hat brand Pachacuti, launched not-for-profit group Fashion Revolution in the months after the disaster in the hopes of putting pressure on brands into revealing more details about their supply chains.

“Campaigners had to search through the rubble for clothing labels to prove which brands were actually producing there,” she told The Telegraph. “That’s when I realised that the workers were invisible and the lack of transparency and responsibility in the fashion supply chain was costing lives.”

Somers points to the annual Fashion Transparency Index, which ranks over 150 of the world’s largest brands and retailers, as proof that genuine efforts have been made by fashion companies. “Last year, not one brand was scoring over 50 percent, but this year our research found six brands and retailers scoring higher,” she explains, marking a positive shift. The results, officially published today, show that brands like Adidas, Reebok, H&M and ASOS are among the highest-scorers.

The top-performing UK companies were Marks & Spencer and Asos. Primark was among the best of the brands implicated in Rana Plaza, with a score of 36 out of a possible 100.

Matalan, on the other hand, was among the worst on the list, with a score of just five while Bonmarche was not included in the research.

However, companies are seen publishing lists of their direct suppliers – those who stitch the clothes together but skipping enough information about rest of the supply chain– cloth cutters, leather tanners, button makers and the like.

Somers, who visited tanneries in Savar, just miles from where Rana Plaza was, last year observed workers toiling amid the harsh chemicals with no protective equipment.

But Somers also warned against customers seeing high prices as a sign clothes were made ethically. “Several of the mass-produced luxury brands are made in Bangladesh on the exact same production lines as cheaper fast-fashion brands,” she says, and the likes of Chanel, Dior and Dolce & Gabbana are among the worst performers in the transparency index.

The tragic incident of Rana Plaza ignited a real change in the industry improving factory condition to a certain point but with many supply chains still remaining obscure and pushing for lower prices, the issue is likely to remain controversial for some time.