This website uses cookies to improve your experience. And it is increasingly evident that gender-based harassment and violence is the weapon of choice to target worker rights activists in Bangladesh.

(Alliance member companies have committed to inspect 100 percent of all member-approved factories by July 2014.) And for many workers, fire safety is still a danger in many factories. We use these partnerships to highlight the benefits to the factories themselves that can result from having a skilled and empowered workforce, as well as improve working conditions and options for women employees. Many, like Shefali, also suffer from severe health problems after working between 10 and 14 hours per day.

How will American attitudes toward rich people affect the 2020 presidential election. Ensure those responsible are charged and given the appropriate legal sanction - to end the culture of impunity. Worker’s voices should be heard during audits in order to ensure accuracy of reports. Collaboration amongst all those who share responsibility for garment factory safety is the way forward. The work won’t be done overnight – solutions will take time to adopt and sustain, and we all must be dedicated to achieving results that will set a new standard for Bangladesh garment industry workers. Any cookies that may not be particularly necessary for the website to function and is used specifically to collect user personal data via analytics, ads, other embedded contents are termed as non-necessary cookies.

The situation in Bangladesh is complex and challenging. We empower women and girls to fulfil their potential – because when one woman is helped out of poverty, she brings her family and community with her. Dhaka is sited on two fault lines and is vulnerable to earthquakes – it has experienced several small earthquakes over the last three years. Rapid industry growth and urbanization have led to factories sprouting up in apartments and other places that are ill-suited to large-scale garment production and make unauthorized sub-contracting even more dangerous than usual. We'll presume you're OK with this, but you can opt-out if you wish. Rescue efforts at the Rana Plaza site were hampered by the presence of thousands of bystanders, with little control taken on the site of the disaster.

And thus it is incumbent upon retailers and brands, the U.S. government, the Bangladesh government, the international development community, factory owners and workers, and labor to work together to create a long-term culture of safety in these factories. The contents of this site are ©2020 Capitol Hill Publishing Corp., a subsidiary of News Communications, Inc. In addition, the families of those killed in the incident should be given adequate payments to support them over a longer-term, particularly as they have often lost their only source of income. For its part, the Alliance emphasizes building local capacity to empower workers. Workers recently interviewed by the Solidarity Center say their employers set harsh production demands with short timelines. There is a mutual responsibility of all stakeholders in the garment industry to ensure that no woman or man dies whilst trying to make a living. They also learn how to identify risks in building safety, abrasions in wiring and machine equipment and how to report those risks to management to help prevent their factories from becoming another Rana Plaza. Our ultimate goal is to help ensure that safe workplaces in Bangladesh become the rule, not the exception, for all women and men employed in the Bangladesh ready-made garment industry.

Bangladesh is urbanising rapidly, around 35,000 people move to urban areas every week and almost no buildings conform to building codes, (which were weak to begin with).

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You also have the option to opt-out of these cookies. An anonymous, 24-hour helpline will help workers raise safety issues before they become emergencies, enabling two-way communication and providing a platform for education.