1100 People Died For Your Cheap Clothes For $37 A Month

Walmart And Gap Refuse To Sign Broad Safety Agreement In Bangladesh

By Bryce Covert on May 15, 2013

 

 

After six major European retailers announced on Monday and Tuesday that they would sign onto a broad safety upgrade agreement in Bangladesh, American companies Walmart and Gap announced that they would not sign on. Gap has been the most outspoken about its opposition, reports the New York Times:

By far, Gap has been the most vocal company opposed to the plan, expressing concerns that overzealous American lawyers could seize on the agreement to sue American companies on behalf of aggrieved factory workers in Bangladesh — perhaps in the event of a factory fire. Gap said it supported much of the plan, but it proposed changes that would greatly limit any legal liability for a company that violated the plan.

Walmart cited “requirements, including governance and dispute resolution mechanisms” in the agreement as its reason not to sign on, saying they are “appropriately left to retailers, suppliers and government, and are unnecessary to achieve fire and safety goals.”

The company plans to instead use its own safety plan. It began its own factory inspections of 279 Bangladesh facilities this year after the fire in November that killed 110 and it will release the names and inspection information as well as provide fire safety training for every worker in the factories that produce its goods. The inspection results will be posted on June 1.

Labor groups criticized Walmart’s plan, which is voluntary. The broader plan signed by the other companies is legally binding. Labor groups characterized Walmart’s proposal as merely aspirational.
Meanwhile, documents provided to the New York Times show that Walmart sourced clothing from the collapsed factory that killed 1,127:

The Bangladesh Center for Worker Solidarity has provided The New York Times with photos of several documents not disputed by Wal-Mart that were recovered in the building’s rubble, showing that a Wal-Mart contractor from Canada had produced jeans last year at the Ether Tex factory, which had been situated on the fifth floor of the collapsed Rana Plaza building.

The only American company to sign onto the agreement thus far is PVH, owner of Calvin Klein, Tommy Hilfiger, and Izod. A handful of smaller European companies also signed on Tuesday: Benetton, Marks & Spencer, and El Corte Inglés.

http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2013/05/15/2013441/walmart-gap-bangladesh/

H&M Responds Slowly to Bangladesh Factory Collapse Killing 1,100

Additional perspective on workplace safety --

H&M Responds Slowly to Bangladesh Factory Collapse Killing 1,100 by Puck Lo, CorpWatch Blog May 19th, 2013

Protest advertisement designed by Avaaz H&M (Hennes & Mauritz), a major Swedish “fast fashion” retailer, led 30 international companies this week to commit to a new $3 billion fund to improve the safety of garment factories in Bangladesh. Watchdog organizations say the companies acted only because of external pressure by activists and workers. The announcement came weeks after Rana Plaza, a building that housed five garment factories, collapsed in Bangladesh last month leaving over 1,100 dead. While H&M was not among the many international buyers that were found to have contracts with the factories, the disaster sparked an activist campaign that put an enormous amount of pressure on the company which is the second biggest garment retailer in the world and the biggest buyer of clothes from Bangladesh. Changes in labor and safety practices generally occur "not for philanthropic reasons but because protests were starting to disturb the supply chain" Nayla Ajaltouni, coordinator of the French branch of Clean Clothes Campaign told Agence France Press after riots in Bangladesh in 2010 led to an increase in the minimum wage there. Two years later the story is still the same. Responding to Disaster In the days following the Rana Plaza collapse, even as emergency workers dug bodies out of the rubble and families of missing workers fought police in heated street demonstrations, the Walt Disney company, which sources production of toys and clothes from low wage countries around the world, announced it was planning to leave Bangladesh by March 2014. But H&M said it had no plans to move. Hanging in the balance are the jobs of over four million workers in Bangladesh who depend on the $20 billion garment industry for their living. The company had the tacit support of many labor organizers who want companies that source from Bangladesh to become more responsible. “We want buyers to stay and use their power to ensure factories treat workers decently,” says Kalpona Akter, an organizer with the Bangladesh Center for Worker Solidarity. H&M’s decision to stay is not entirely altruistic: after all Bangladesh has the world’s lowest minimum wage - $38 a month. Safety is a major concern: Clean Clothes Campaign estimates that more than 500 garment workers died on the job between 2006 and 2012. One reason, say union organizers, is that corrupt government officials tended to look the other way during safety inspections, especially since many senior politicians own garment factories themselves. To address these issues, Bangladeshi and international unions came up with a proposal titled the “Accord on Fire and Building Safety” that they brought to global retailers, suppliers, NGOs, unionists and government officials at a meeting in Dhaka during April 2011. Intended to be a legally enforceable agreement between retailers, unions and suppliers, it promised a total of $3 billion to fund an independent monitoring body that would oversee all of Bangladesh’s 5,000 factories. If a factory did not meet certain standards, it could be shut down. Two years ago, the plan was wildly unpopular. When the unions pushed it, Walmart’s representative shot it down. “It is not financially feasible for the brands to make such investments,” Walmart’s spokesperson said, according to the meeting minutes. H&M, the Gap and other retailers also attended the meeting. All of the big brands and factories all walked away without signing the agreement, said Amirul Haque Amin, president of the National Garment Workers Federation in Bangladesh. A Change of Heart After the Rana Plaza collapse, the unions’ stalemated safety plan suddenly gained traction as public outcry over the deaths mounted. Avaaz, a progressive global campaign group, collected almost one million signatures to pressure H&M and the Gap to sign the agreement. Initially H&M did not respond. Avaaz then racheted up the pressure – it launched an ad campaign featuring a photo of Karl-Johan Persson, CEO of H&M, alongside a young Bangladeshi woman in tears. The ad asked the CEOs of H&M and the Gap to take personal responsibility for the deaths of the Bangladeshi workers. “These factories aren’t sweatshops, they’re deathshops. Hundreds of women have been crushed to death making our clothes,” Avaaz said in a May 9 press release. “Two major clothing companies have signed the robust safety agreement, including PVH -- the owner of Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger -- but GAP and H&M have yet to state their positions.” Both Dagens Industri, a Swedish newspaper, and Women’s Wear Daily magazine, a major industry publication, refused to run the ad, says Avaaz. But as a signature campaign started to get hundreds of thousands of signatures on Facebook, H&M caved and announced it would adopt the Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh. “Our strong presence in Bangladesh gives us the opportunity to contribute to the improvement of the lives of hundreds of thousands of people and contribute to the community’s development,” Helena Helmersson, an H&M spokesperson, claimed in a press release. “By being on site, put demands on manufacturers and work for continuous improvements, we can slowly but surely contribute to lasting changes.” The company immediately received accolades in the press for “setting an example” and for making a “game-changing” move. (It should be noted that while H&M has committed to pay a maximum of €500,000 ($640,000) a year into the new building fund, the figure represents a little less than 0.02 percent of the $2.7 billion in profits the company made last year) Cambodia Victory This is not the first time that H&M has agreed to change its ways as a result of unwelcome activist attention. For example, Cambodia is often promoted as an alternative to Bangladesh for apparel production. There the minimum wage for garment workers is $66 a month, the second-lowest in the world. Although safety standards are better than in Bangladesh, low pay, long hours, and employers breaking laws are common there, unions say. In February 2012, Asia Floor Wage Alliance, a Cambodian labor group, held a two-day “People’s Tribunal on for Minimum Living Wages and Decent Working Conditions for Garment Workers as a Fundamental Right.” Garment workers testified on their experiences of poverty, short-term contracts, substandard housing conditions and an epidemic of workplace fainting. H&M was invited to attend but did not. "The tribunal reveals a chasm between the CSR [corporate social responsibility] speak of international garment companies and the real situation faced by Asian garment workers," said Anannya Bhattacharjee, coordinator of the International Asia Floor Wage Alliance. Bhattacharjee said that the core issue was that garment workers need to be paid more. "The wage issue is a cross border problem and needs to be addressed as such. International players must work together and use the Asia Floor Wage figure to combat poverty pay in the garment sector," she said. A year later, some 200 Cambodian workers, who sewed underwear for Kingsland Garment Company, a sub-contractor to H&M and Walmart, camped outside their factory in Phnom Penh and held a two-day hunger strike when the company suddenly shut down and seized payment of their legally mandated unemployment wages. “We decided to start sleeping outside of the factory to prevent management from taking the machinery out,” Yorn Sok Leng, 30, told Labor Notes, an activist media organization. Within days, the companies paid them $235,000 in wages owed, handing the organizers a rare victory. Next Step: Minimum Industry Wage New protests across Bangladesh are forcing yet more changes. Strikes effectively shut down most of the garment factories for much of last week – as workers rallied to demand better wages and working conditions. Days ago Bangladesh officials finally gave in and announced that the minimum wage would be raised for the first time since 2010. Persson, the H&M CEO, also agreed to support an increase in the Bangladesh minimum wage. These incremental changes are not enough, says Muhammad Yunus, founder of the micro-credit Grameen Bank in Bangladesh and Nobel Peace Prize winner, who argues that a global approach is needed. “I propose that foreign buyers jointly fix a minimum international wage for the industry,” he wrote in the Guardian recently. “This might be about 50 cents an hour, twice the level typically found in Bangladesh. This minimum wage would be an integral part of reforming the industry, which would help to prevent future tragedies. We have to make international companies understand that while the workers are physically in Bangladesh, they are contributing their labour to the businesses: they are stakeholders. Physical separation should not be grounds to ignore the wellbeing of this labour.” Yunus also suggested raising the final retail price of an item by 50 cents. “Would a consumer in a shopping mall feel upset if they were asked to pay $35.50 instead of $35? My answer is no, they won't even notice,” he said. (Incidentally most U.S. retail chains have not signed on to the Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh. Instead, following the Rana Plaza collapse, Walmart and other companies announced their own voluntary monitoring systems and safety programs, which some activists say was little more than a public relations campaign. "It's not surprising, and the timing is fishy," said Brian Finnegan, global worker rights coordinator at the AFL-CIO. "The whole point of what we're doing is to make it binding and enforceable.")   http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=15840

14 Retailers Refuse to Improve Safety, Including WalMart, Gap, Macy's, Sears, JCPenney, Target, Kohl's, Nordstrom

1100 People risked their lives and died for $37 A MONTH.

You don't even see these profitable Retailers offering a proposal of their own because they don't want to be bound by reasonable and ethical standards.
 
Globalization offered these greedy retailers the right to exploit the poor.

Bangladesh Factory Safety Accord: The 14 North American Retailers Who Refuse to Sign

Omar Rivero18 May, 2013

 

Ignoring the memory of the over 1,100 factory workers that passed away at the Rana Plaza Factory collapse in Savar, Bangladesh last month, at least 14 major North American retailers have declined to sign the Accord on Fire and Building Safety, an agreement that would have entailed a five year commitment from all participating retailers to conduct independent safety inspections of factories and pay up to $500,000 per year towards safety improvements.

The retailers worried that the agreement would give labor groups and others the ability to sue them in U.S. courts, but anybody that has paid attention to the last 30 years of global unfettered corporate greed knows the truth: these corporations care more about their bottom line than they do about the lives and safety of third-world workers, and their actions reflect it. They are so obsessed with reducing production costs that they couldn’t care less about a few cheap lawsuits from cash-starved labor groups.

While the agreement has garnered overwhelming support outside of the United States, the American public is barely aware of its existence and significance, standing idly by and silently condoning these major multinational corporations as they neglect any semblance of Corporate Social Responsibility for the dangerous workplace conditions they establish for workers in third-world countries.

Several major European retailers like Marks & Spencer, Carrefour, Bennetton, and H&M deserve credit for having rightfully taken responsibility for their previous inaction and joined the agreement.

PVH, parent company to Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger, also signed the agreement, along with Abercrombie & Fitch. However, that leaves 14 North American retailers that are shirking responsibility for any future workplace deaths by refusing to sign the accord.

If the American public doesn’t awaken from its slumber and start to apply public pressure on these irresponsible North American corporations, they will have no incentive to put an end to their reckless evasion of Corporate Social Responsibility.

 

Here are their names, spread their shame:

 

Walmart
Gap
Macy’s
Sears/Kmart
JCPenney
VF Corp.
Target
Kohl’s
Cato Fashions
Carter’s
Nordstrom
American Eagle Outfitters
The Children’s Place
Foot Locker

Watch a report about these irresponsible retailers’ refusal to sign the accord by MSNBC’s Chris Haye’s:

Distracting from what's important

When the media was overtaken by Big Corporations, trivia and nonsense prevailed.
Long gone are the consequential issues and important coverage of major topics.

The article below highlights the what is being censored ----

5 Major Scandals The Media Isn’t Obsessing About

By Igor Volsky on May 17, 2013

 

This week, the national media has focused on the three different scandals surrounding the White House, devoting hours of coverage to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) improperly targeting conservative groups applying for tax exempt status, the talking points Susan Rice used in the aftermath of the attacks in Benghazi, and the Justice Department’s subpoena of phone records from the Associated Press as part of an investigation into a national security leak. The around-the-clock coverage comes even as a new Gallup poll finds that interest in the ongoing controversies is “lower comparable to major news stores in the past.”

   

And while these stories raise serious concerns about money in politics, embassy security, and freedom of the press, they aren’t the only problems impacting the American people. Here are five big stories the media isn’t obsessing about:

1. Carbon pollution reaches historic highs, threatening human existence. The concentration of climate warming carbon dioxide in the atmosphere “has passed the milestone level of 400 parts per million (ppm),” scientists estimate. “At the beginning of industrialisation the concentration of CO2 was just 280ppm,” said Prof Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. “We must hope that the world crossing this milestone will bring about awareness of the scientific reality of climate change and how human society should deal with the challenge.” The last time the Earth saw carbon dioxide levels that high, humans did not exist. The West Antarctic ice sheet also did not exist, and sea levels were as much as 82 feet higher than they are today. During an earlier period when CO2 levels were this high, temperatures were 5° to 10°F warmer globally.

2. The devastating impact of sequestration on kids, cancer patients and first responders. On Tuesday, the Congressional Budget Office reported that the budget deficit will shrink to its smallest level since before the Great Recession in 2013, and it will continue to decrease through 2015. But despite the smaller deficits, Republicans remain focused on spending reductions — even as the most recent round of cuts has kicked children out of preschool, left cancer patients without needed screenings, undermined public health and fire safety, and gutted programs that help low-income Americans in a variety of ways. Those cuts have also threatened to derail the economic recovery, which has sputtered along despite the headwinds created by a consistent focus on deficit reduction.

3. Massive cuts to food stamps for the most vulnerable Americans. The House Agriculture Committee approved a farm bill late Wednesday night that would cut federal food stamps by $20.5 billion — more steeply than any legislation since the welfare reforms of the 1990s. Earlier this week, the Senate Agriculture Committee also agreed to a $4.1 billion reduction. The program keeps hundreds of thousands of vulnerable Americans out of the deepest pits of poverty, and even as the Great Recession swelled SNAP rolls, the program continued to push its erroneous payments rates to record lows.

4. 1100 workers die in garment factory collapse in Bangladesh and most American retailers plan business as usual. Since a factory collapsed in Bangladesh, killing 1,100 clothing industry workers, American retailers have been hesitant to adopt safety plans that could prevent similar tragedies. Abercrombie & Fitch announced it would sign a safety upgrade plan that has been approved by six major European retailers and one other American company, but many other manufacturers — including Walmart and Gap — are holding out. Although some retailers fear the costs of upgrades, they could pass them on entirely to consumers and only raise prices by 10 cents per garment.

5. 4,000 gun deaths due to gun violence since Newtown. A crowdsourced effort to count every person killed by a gun in the United States since the Newtown tragedy is currently being hosted by Slate. As of this writing, the count is 4,150. The Senate rejected gun safety legislation in April and has not yet set a date for reconsidering the measure.

http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2013/05/17/2026851/5-major-scandals-the-media-isnt-obsessing-about/

GAP & WALMART Refuse to Protect Workers

I Acknowledge Class Warfare Exists

Gap and Walmart refuse to sign broad safety agreement for Bangladesh factories. http://bit.ly/10pNZ7R

Published on Wednesday, May 15, 2013 by Common Dreams

Improve Working Conditions in Bangladesh? Walmart Says 'No'

Following worst factory tragedy in world history, Walmart snubs workers' rights

- Jacob Chamberlain, staff writer

In the wake of the worst garment factory tragedy in world history, which left over 1,200 dead in Bangladesh last month, a number of Western brands have signed an agreement to improve working conditions in their subcontracted factories there. Walmart was missing from the list of signatories.

(AFP)

The legally binding agreement, signed by retailers including H&M, Primark, C&A, Tommy Hilfiger, Calvin Klein, Zara, Tesco and others, "aims to compel retailers to pay for rigorous and independent public inspections and blacklist any factories unwilling to comply," the Guardian reports.

The agreement covers "independent safety inspections with public reports, mandatory repairs and renovations and a vital role for workers and their unions," The Ethical Trading Initiative, which crafted the Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh along with trade unions IndustriALL and UNI Global, writes.

"At the heart of the agreement is the commitment to Bangladesh’s Tripartite Plan of Action on Fire Safety, and for companies to share in the responsibilities for providing a safe environment for workers."

Instead, however, Walmart refused to sign, saying that it has created its own agreement (of which it is the only party). The agreement claims that Walmart will conduct its own inspections of the 279 factories it uses in Bangladesh within six months.

As the Guardian reports, "the Walmart deal is not legally binding, does not require the company to offer financial support for fire and safety regulations or blacklist factories unwilling to comply."
Sam Maher from Labor Behind the Label, said: "Walmart's so-called new program is simply more of the same ineffective auditing that failed to prevent the Rana Plaza disaster, or the deaths of 112 workers at Tazreen, who were producing Walmart goods."

In contrast, "The changes demanded by the IndustriALL accord include ensuring that factories are provided with the incentives and investment needed to actually make factories safe and are essential for any real change to occur," Maher added. "What Walmart [is] demanding is business as usual: a business that has cost lives of over 1,300 workers in the last six months alone."

This, of course, is not the first time Walmart has refused to improve the well being of workers in factories.

In 2011, several major western retailers, lead by Walmart, rejected a proposal made by a group of Bangladeshi and international unions that proposed a way to make Bangladesh's garment factories safer through establishing an independent inspectorate to oversee all factories in Bangladesh "with powers to shut down unsafe facilities as part of a legally binding contract signed by suppliers, customers and unions."

At the time, Walmart's representative said it was "not financially feasible ... to make such investments."

The inspections would have been funded by contributions from the companies of merely $500,000 per year, compared to the $20 billion western brands such as Walmart, the Gap and H&M make from the garment industry in Bangladesh per year and the annual $1 trillion such retailers make per year in the global garment industry.

Several other retailers have declined to sign this week's agreement, including River Island, Matalan and Peacocks.

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2013/05/15-6

It only took 1100 deaths.....

With the death toll and rising public opinion about the high cost of cheap clothes that risk workers' lives for $37 a month, improvements may be in the future, at least for Bangladesh. There are more countries, greater risks and irresponsible manufacturers that need to step up.

Empty rhetoric and hollow promises were made in the past.

H&M Agrees To Factory Safety Upgrade Plan In Bangladesh

By Bryce Covert on May 13, 2013

 

After the death toll from the factory collapse in Bangladesh soared past 1,100, H&M announced today that it has signed a fire and building safety agreement in the country, Reuters reports. The agreement was initiated by IndustryALL and UNI Global Union. The company said in a statement that it hopes for “a broad coalition of signatures in order for the agreement to work effectively on the ground.” The company didn’t use any of the suppliers that were operating out of the collapsed factory.

In the wake of the tragedy, the country has also announced that it plans to raise the minimum wage for garment workers, the Associated Press reports:

A new minimum wage board will issue recommendations for pay raises within three months, Textiles Minister Abdul Latif Siddiky said Sunday. The Cabinet will then decide whether to accept those proposals.
The wage board will include representatives of factory owners, workers and the government, he said.

The garment industry’s minimum wage was last raised in 2010 by 80 percent following protests from workers, rising to 3,000 takas, or $38, a month.

Working conditions in the country have long been dismal thanks to the corruption of government officials, a failure to commit to higher standards from companies in the industry, and a glut of workers desperate to work. After a fire that killed 112 workers in November, major retailers refused to implement a union-proposed safety plan, citing costs. That may now change following the leadership of H&M.

American demand for cheap clothing has also fueled the garment industry boom in Bangladesh without ensuring better working conditions. As the Wall Street Journal reports, “Americans last year devoted just 3% of their annual spending to clothing and footwear, compared with around 7% in 1970 and about 13% in 1945, according to Commerce Department data.” Spending has decreased in part because clothing prices have fallen over the last two decades after rising from the 1950s to the 1970s. Prices for clothing have risen just 10 percent since 1889, while food prices, in contrast, have gone up more than 80 percent.

But the cost of safety may not even be noticeable to many consumers. The price tag for safety upgrades in the country’s factories, if passed on entirely to the consumer, could cost as little as 10 cents per garment. Companies may also be able to absorb a minimum wage increase as they did when cotton prices rose in 2011.

Update

The New York Times reports that H&M is the largest purchaser of garments in Bangladesh, putting even more heft behind its decision. The agreement it has signed “calls for independent, rigorous factory safety inspections with public reports; for mandatory repairs and renovations – with Western retailers underwriting those repairs; and for retailers to stop doing business with any factory that refuses to make necessary safety improvements.”

Update

Inditex, the Spanish apparel brand that owns Zara, has signed onto the agreement. The country also announced today that it would allow its garment workers to form unions without first getting permission from factory owners.

http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2013/05/13/2000401/hm-agrees-to-factory-safety-upgrade-plan-in-bangladesh/

 

For $37/Month, 700 DEAD

Bangladesh Building Collapse Death Toll Tops 700 As Protests Rage On

AP | By By JULHAS ALAM

Onlookers and family members of missing garment factory workers gather near the site as workers and army personnel, not pictured, use heavy machinery as they work to clear the site and recover bodies of victims from the rubble of a garment factory building collapse, Monday, May 6, 2013 (AP Photo/Ismail Ferdous)

DHAKA, Bangladesh (AP) — Hundreds of survivors of last month's collapse of a building housing garment factories in Bangladesh protested for compensation Tuesday, as the death toll from the country's worst-ever industrial disaster passed 700.

The police control room overseeing the recovery operation said the death toll stood at 705 on Tuesday afternoon as workers pulled more bodies out of the wreckage of the eight-story building that was packed with workers at five garment factories when it collapsed on April 24. The factories were making clothing bound for major retailers around the world.

The disaster is the worst ever in the garment sector, surpassing the 1911 garment disaster in New
York's Triangle Shirtwaist factory, which killed 146 workers, and more recent tragedies such as a 2012 fire that killed about 260 people in Pakistan and one in Bangladesh that killed 112, also in 2012. It is also one of the deadliest industrial accidents ever.

No one knows what the final toll will be, as the exact number of people inside Rana Plaza at the time of the collapse was unknown. More than 2,500 people were rescued alive.

Hundreds of garment workers who survived the disaster blocked a major highway near the accident site in a Dhaka suburb on Tuesday to demand the payment of wages and other benefits. No violence was reported, although traffic was disrupted for hours.

Local government administrator Yousuf Harun said they are working with the Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association to ensure the workers get paid.

The workers, many who made little more than the national minimum wage of about $38 per month, are demanding at least four months in salary. The workers had set Tuesday as the deadline for the payment of wages and other benefits.

Harun said no salary remained unpaid except for the month of April and there was an agreement for the workers to receive an additional three months of pay. After a team from the BGMEA arrived at the protest and pledged to make the payment later Tuesday, the workers left the highway, Harun said.
The BGMEA had said Monday that it was preparing a "complete list" of the workers employed in the factories and they would need a few more days to finish it and to clear the salary.

Bangladesh earns nearly $20 billion a year from exports of the garment products, mainly to the United States and Europe.

Authorities have not set any specific timeframe to complete the recovery operation at the building site, saying they will continue until all bodies and debris are removed.

Officials say the building's owner illegally added three floors to Rana Plaza and allowed the garment factories to install heavy machines and generators.

Photos on link: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/07/bangladesh-building-collapse-death-toll-700_n_3227277.html

 

Benetton, Wal-Mart, Children's Place, Cato Corp., Gap Tied to Factory Deaths

Too many Anonymous Corporations distanced themselves from Worker Safety Standards and caused deaths and injuries for CHEAP LABOR, while they raked in profits.

Culpability? Where are our morals? Is this what the Tea Baggers want America to become? 

Benetton, Others Tied to Bangladesh Factory Disaster: 400 Killed
Pratap Chatterjee
May 1st, 2013

Multinationals like Benetton have tried to distance themselves from Rana Plaza, a Bangladeshi building housing five clothing factories, that collapsed last week killing over 400. Activists argue that change will only come when workers get more political support to challenge them.

See http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=15836

Benetton, Others Tied to Bangladesh Factory Disaster: 400 Killed by Pratap Chatterjee, CorpWatch Blog May 1st, 2013

Collage of designer labels dug out of Rana Plaza (left) after the collapse. Photos: Institute for Global Labour and Human Rights Over 400 people were killed when a Bangladeshi building housing five clothing factories collapsed last week. The tragedy at Rana Plaza in the town of Savar is the latest in a series of industrial disasters to call attention to unsafe working conditions in the global apparel trade. In the last few days, paperwork and unfinished materials pulled from the rubble indicate that the list of companies that bought clothing from the factories included: Benetton of Italy, Children’s Place and Cato Corporation from the U.S., Kik from Germany, Loblaw from Canada, Mango and El Corte Inglés from Spain as well as Bon Marche and Primark of the U.K. Several companies, including Benetton, initially attempted to distance themselves from the five Bangladeshi suppliers in the building - Ether Tex, New Wave Bottoms, New Wave Style, Phantom Apparels and Phantom Tac. “None of the companies involved are suppliers to Benetton Group or any of its brands,” Benetton tweeted. “(We) did not have any ongoing production at the time of the incident,” said Cato in a Facebook statement, “at the time of this terrible tragedy.” Children’s Place did the same: “(N)one of our apparel was in production.” Spanish manufacturer Mango claimed that they “would not have been able to ascertain that the owners of said had building had built three storeys more than is permitted." The powerful Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association (BGMEA) has also tried to distance itself. “We asked the garment owners to keep it (the building) closed,” claimed Mohammad Atiqul Islam, president of BGMEA. Activists are furious. “(T)hese retailers cannot just wash their hand and say, "We didn't do production there," Kalpona Akter, executive director of the Bangladesh Center for Worker Solidarity, told Democracy Now, a U.S. TV program. “They have responsibility. They cannot just go away from this responsibility and say that "We didn't sew, or we didn't produce, make clothes in this factory." “It is high time for (companies like) Benetton to stop this senseless game of always trying to pretend they’re not there,” said Ineke Zeldenrust, international coordinator of the Clean Clothes Campaign, an anti-sweatshop group based in Amsterdam. “Since Tazreen, where 112 people died, brands have come up with insufficient proposals such as safety videos (H&M) or a safety academy (WalMart). How much safety does a video provide, when floors collapse or emergency exits do not exist? The lack of action demonstrated by brands amounts to criminal negligence.” European Union (EU) governments have promised to take action by targeting the Bangladeshi government. “The EU is presently considering appropriate action, including through the Generalised System of Preferences – through which Bangladesh currently receives duty-free and quota-free access to the EU market under the ‘Everything But Arms’ scheme – in order to incentivise responsible management of supply chains involving developing countries,” said Catherine Ashton, the EU foreign policy chief, and Karel De Gucht, the EU trade commissioner, said. But experts are skeptical noting that the 27 countries that make up the EU will probably back down under pressure from the multinational retailers who source $20 billion of clothing a year from the south Asian country. Nor is the Bangladeshi government likely to pay much heed, given that many senior politicians own garment factories. Some believe that the big retailers can provide a solution. “(I)n a world where consumers demand ever lower prices, the cost of a bargain can be too high,” editorialized the Financial Times. “Retailers will argue that it is not their job to enforce regulation. That is true … (T)hey should also use their economic muscle to press the government to do its job.” At least one reader poured scorn on the editorial. “Common arguments to benefit developing world garment workers hinge on charging higher prices to the consumer,” wrote William Hamilton to the newspaper. “Yet, wouldn’t it be easier and more beneficial for everybody if, instead of clothing companies selling shirts at a 400 per cent mark up, even on sale, they dropped their margins by paying manufacturers more?” The apparel industry is starting to wake up to the negative publicity generated by garment factory deaths. Some 25 companies including Carrefour from France, H&M from Sweden, the Gap and Walmart from the U.S., agreed to meet with labor activists in the town of Eschborn, near Frankfurt, on Monday, to discuss ideas to improve factory safety in Bangladesh, at the invitation of the German Agency for International Cooperation. Others say that change will only happen when ordinary Bangladeshis are empowered. “The reaction in the global north to the latest "accident" in Bangladesh has been to talk about boycotts – to break the global commodity chain at the point of consumption. But that is not enough,” adds Vijay Prashad in the Guardian. “What is needed is robust support for the workers as they try to build their own organisations at the point of production. The Bangladeshis are capable of doing their own labour organising; what they need is political backing to do so.”   http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=15836

The Worth of Life

As Big Corporations trample rights and protections in their greed for more profits, What's our value?

It's not only Bangladesh, some far off place, but it's coming to America in such places as the Texas Fertilizer Factory Explosion and the Framingham Compounding Pharmacy Deaths.

Human life is less important than Corporate Profits.

It doesn't matter until you're affected.

As Bangladesh Toll Hits 400, Calls Grow to Grant Workers the Same Protections as Labels They Make





Today’s global May Day actions include a march of thousands of workers in Bangladesh demanding workplace safety following last week’s factory collapse that left more than 400 dead and 150 missing. The collapse is now being described as the deadliest accident in the history of the garment industry and marked Bangladesh’s third industrial accident in five months. The building’s owner has been arrested, and a Bangladeshi court has frozen the assets of the owners of the five garment factories that were inside. Most of the workers reportedly earned an average annual salary of $38 a month — roughly 21 cents an hour — to make apparel for a number of Western companies. We’re joined by leading labor rights activist Charlie Kernaghan, director of the Institute for Global Labour and Human Rights. "The companies, the corporations, they’re hiding behind these phony codes of conduct that are meaningless. They’re just paper. What the workers want are legal rights," Kernaghan says. "We need to stand up and just say, 'You can bring anything you want into the United States, but you're not bringing it in if it was made by children or the workers are denied their right to organize.’ The lift that would give to the Bangladeshi labor movement would be enormous."

http://www.democracynow.org/2013/5/1/as_bangladesh_toll_hits_400_calls

Exposé Reveals Wal-Mart Blocked Improvements Despite Vows to Improve Safety After Deadly Factory Fire

Bangladeshi Labor Activist Finds Burned Clothes with Wal-Mart Labels at Site of Deadly Factory Fire

Massive Fire Kills At Least 118 Factory Workers in Bangladesh at Wal-Mart Supplier

Survivor of Bangladesh’s Tazreen Factory Fire Urges U.S. Retailers to Stop Blocking Worker Safety

The Fraud of 'Globalization' and Economic Development

There are interesting parallels with the Koch-Funded Tea Baggers' March toward deregulation, corrupting officials and gutting government so it no longer protects its citizens, driving down wages.



People wait in long lines for food in Bangladesh. (photo: Jewel Samad/Getty Images)

Free Trade's Murderous Role in Bangladesh

By William Black, Reader Supported News

30 April 13

wrote yesterday about the "control frauds" (in which the person controlling a seemingly legitimate entity uses it as a "weapon" to defraud) that target purchasers of bad quality goods ("lemons") and employees. The example I used to explain these concepts was the collapse of the building housing garment factories in Bangladesh.

As I write, there are terrible reports indicating that the death toll is far greater than currently reported.

 

Again, the initial reports from a disaster often prove inaccurate in important ways so I urge caution and the need to confirm whether the newer reports are accurate.

 

The higher death toll is not what prompts this article. I write to discuss the intersection of control fraud, austerity, globalization, labor "reform," and economic development.

 

The Road to Bangladesh

 

The most interesting event I have participated in is the Kilkenomics Festival in Kilkenny, Ireland held in early November. It is an economics festival in which people with expertise in finance (dressed in jeans) partner with professional comics (dressed in suits) to discuss serious economic issues. The organizers sell roughly 3,000 seats to non-wonks from Ireland and Europe. The comedians keep us honest and minimize the jargon.

 

I appeared in six or seven events last November, including interviews with the BBC and Ireland's Pat Kenny on RTE. One of the subjects we discussed repeatedly was the intersection of austerity, "free trade" and labor "reforms." I made the point that the EU had a single game plan for the Eurozone's southern periphery. They inflicted austerity, forcing the Eurozone into a gratuitous second recession and the southern periphery into an über-Depression with unemployment rates significantly worse than the largest European economies generally suffered during the Great Depression. (Cynically, and the EU is a past master in cynicism, the EU refers to the result as a "mild recession." It also avoids the word "austerity" like the plague and calls it "pro-growth.")

 

What is far less well known in the United States is that Berlin has also demanded (successfully) that the "troika" (European Commission, the European Central Bank (ECB), and the IMF) insist that the nations of the periphery engage in labor "reforms." "Reform" is a word chosen for its positive connotations and its generality. There is certainly some variant of a labor "reform" that would be desirable in any nation. Unfortunately, what the troika means by labor "reform" is sharply lower working class wages.

 

The excuse for forcing lower working class wages is that doing so is essential to increase exports. The troika's recipe for the periphery's recovery is for every nation of the periphery to become a significant net exporter.

 

A nation with a sovereign currency can use three strategies to speed its recovery from a recession or a depression. The three strategies are not mutually exclusive. The nation can adopt fiscal stimulus, an aggressive expansion of the money supply, and it can devalue its currency (which makes it far easier to become a net exporter). A nation that adopts the euro, however, must give up its sovereign currency and its ability to employ any of these recovery strategies. It cannot employ a significant stimulus program because doing so would violate the (oxymoronic) "Stability and Growth" pact. It cannot expand the money supply because the ECB is controlled by German principles, which are based on the assumption that hyper-inflation lurks behind every corner. It cannot devalue its currency because it no longer has a sovereign currency.

 

The only strategy left in the tool chest for a nation that adopts the euro and is mired in recession or depression, therefore, is to become a substantial net exporter. There are two obvious problems with this sole remaining strategy. One, not all nations can be net exporters. One nation's export is the other nation's import. The more Germany is a net exporter the harder it is for other euro nations to be net exporters.

 

Two, the way for a nation to gain a competitive advantage in exports and increase its chances of becoming a net exporter is either to have a far more skilled workforce producing high value exports or to slash working class wages. Northern Italy can export luxury goods created by skilled craftsmen and designers. Spain, Ireland, Portugal, Southern Italy, and Greece have to out-compete poorer nations with far lower working class wages. The troika is actively encouraging each of these nations to lower working class wages. The problem I pointed out when I was in Kilkenny is that Ireland is trying to cut working class wages enough to out-compete Italy, but Italy is trying to cut working class wages to out-compete Spain, which is trying to out-compete Portugal, which is trying to out-compete Greece, which is trying to cut wages to out-compete Turkey. I argued that slashing working class incomes makes recessions worse, that it was impossible for everyone to be a net-exporter, and that this "race to the bottom" of working class wages would produce grotesque inequality and poverty in what used to be the developed world. I called the race to the bottom strategy the "Road to Bangladesh."

 

But, wearing my criminology "hat," I added that encouraging the "Road to Bangladesh" is criminogenic. As firms are forced by "free trade" to force lower wages on their workers if they wish to stay competitive with their competitors who manufacture goods in nations like Bangladesh, and as firms in Bangladesh engage in the same competition to constrain wages, the result can be murderous.

 

The least ethical firms that are most willing to steal from their employees (e.g., by failing to pay overtime) and place their lives and safety at risk in the workplace gain market share can produce a "Gresham's dynamic" in which bad ethics drives good ethics out of the workplace. As I explained in yesterday's article, they will also degrade the professions, regulators, and elected officials by suborning them to overlook the unsafe plants and the thefts from workers.

 

But here's the sting in the tail of my story about Kilkenomics. When I criticized the "Road to Bangladesh" strategy the conservative economists, I was appearing with rushed to praise Bangladesh as the model for successful economic growth through exceptionally low wages. They responded that if Portugal was in fact on the Road to Bangladesh it was actually on the road to success. Neo-classical economic dogma is intensely criminogenic.

http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/274-41/17198-focus-free-trades-murderous-role-in-bangladesh

$37 a month

$37 a month to risk your life to provide CHEAP CLOTHES for upscale retailers and downscale retailers like Wal-Mart making gargantuation profits.....conveniently distancing themselves from culpability......How do we look the other way?  

Bangladesh: Death Toll Nears 400 In Building Collapse
By Sarath Kumara

http://www.countercurrents.org/kumara290413.htm

The number of deaths in the Bangladesh building collapse had risen to 381 by Sunday evening, with many more bodies, and possibly survivors, still trapped in the debris. According to the police, as many as 900 people remain missing. While the final death toll may never be known, it is one of the world’s worst industrial disasters......


Forced To Die: The Garment Workers At Rana Plaza
By Farida Akhter

http://www.countercurrents.org/akhter290413.htm

It was not an accident, it was simply an organised killing. It can be termed a “Rana- made” killing of the readymade garment workers. As the factory is located in Savar, the suburb of Dhaka, the incident is called Savar Tragedy.....

Last words.......

It is difficult to end the story of Savar tragedy. The garment workers are now scared of the buildings. Earlier, they were scared of the gates being locked as they could not get out in time of fire accidents. But they have to work. They have to earn their living by working and look after their families. Can’t the workplaces be made safe for them? How much does it cost? How much do the owners have to reduce their margin of profit to ensure safety of the workplaces? On the other hand, the international buyers talk about compliances but do not want to pay for ensuring the safety standards. It is not enough to campaign as “blood stained” Bangladeshi garments. We have to hold corporations responsible both at national and international level to ensure safety. Consumers in the western world can come forward to demand that safety standards be met, but please do not campaign to “stop buying” Bangladeshi clothes. The garment workers need the industry to earn their livelihood. This is the fundamental premise that should not be weakened or shattered. Such campaigns actually encourage the multinational corporations to move from Bangladesh to other countries to repeat the same exploitation of the workers. Earlier campaigns of activists to promote products from least developed countries such as Bangladesh were not wrong, and we should continue the campaign despite this situation. However, we must now move away from the role of creating ‘consumers’ in the west to more politically engaged campaigns such as forcing the corporate world to be responsible for what happened in Bangladesh. The hands of everyone are stained with the blood of the workers. So every stakeholder must take responsibility.

The information used in this article is from daily NewAGE, The Financial Express and few Bengali dailies. The interpretations are of the author.

Farida Akhter is a founder and Director of the NGO UBINIG (Policy Research for Development Alternatives) in Dhaka, Bangladesh, and a longtime spokeswoman for global justice and solidarity.

 

From CNN with a collage of photos:

Bangladesh factory collapse: Who really pays for our cheap clothes?

By Anna McMullen, special for CNN

updated 11:24 AM EDT, Fri April 26, 2013

 

 

 

 

 

From the Guardian:

The Bangladesh factory tragedy and the moralists of sweatshop economics

Choosing higher-paid jobs, Dhaka workers accept risks, we're told. That argument confuses cost of living with the cost of a life

 

 

• 
• • Maha Rafi Atal
  • guardian.co.uk, Monday 29 April 2013