The eight key steps to killing 400 garment workers

Few  may believe this.  But it’s astonishingly difficult to kill 400 people in a garment factory, Sohel Rana’s success in achieving something that needed so many things to happen in the right order shows how many different people contributed to the tragedy at Rana Plaza on April 24. If just one thing had happened differently, those 400 people would still be alive today.

I’m going to suggest a couple of ways all involved can stop this happening right now.  Let’s start with the essential seven first steps in killing 400 people:

First: build an unsafe factory. According to detailed accounts appearing a few hours after Rana Plaza collapsed, Sohel Rana first opened a four-storey factory without foundations on swampland in 2006. Some claim it was built without formal permission as well – though others interpret the law differently. Few deny, though, that extensions added in 2008 and again in 2012 were in breach of the law

Second: attract customers. You can’t kill 400 people unless at least 400 people are working in an illegal building – and to get them working, you need business to come to that building’s factories. Who the customers giving the factories that business might be is murky: websites have loved including Walmart as one of the businesses commissioning garment making there, but the only evidence for that is the website of one of the factories – in our experience a source of almost zero value. Walmart deny it, and in January issued a warning that any supplier using a factory without legal building approval after March 1 would be terminated.

Among the factories in the building was the ironically titled Phanton TAC (the TAC stands for Total Audit Company), a joint venture claiming to “have developed a comprehensive auditing system that allows us to monitor and audit daily the conditions in our factory” Bangladesh police are trying unsuccessfully to find and arrest the Spanish part-owner, who was clearly too preoccupied with investing in “the continuous improvement of working conditions in our factory” to worry about its safety.

Alleged customers of other factories in the building  include Benetton (of Italy), Mango (of Spain), Matalan (of the UK), Primark (of the UK and Ireland) and Loblaw’s (of Canada, but ultimately majority owned by the same UK-based charitable trust as Primark). Reactions varied from denial to apology, but two reactions are likely to be depressingly typical:

-          Primark admitted having suppliers using factories in the building. Which must mean its factory approval process did not include checking whether a factory met building codes

-          Matalan say the last time New Wave (one of the factories in the collapsed building) supplied Matalan was in February. And on April 25, British designer Jeff Banks said on UK television that Matalan had emailed its field staff requiring future factory approvals to be restricted to building complying with local codes. Implying it hadn’t required that before.

Remember: collapsing buildings aren’t new in Bangladesh. Garment workers have been killed in Bangladesh factory collapses in 2005 and 2006, and there were deaths from a collapsing building in 2010. All the Western suppliers with work going through the Rana Plaza factories must have had inadequate approval processes, simply ignored their certification, or exercised no control over third party suppliers.

Third, you’ve got to ignore the warnings. Though Rana Plaza collapsed on April 24, serious cracks had become visible the previous day. So serious the police ordered the factory to be kept closed – and so serious the story featured on Bangladesh TV. It’s hard to see why a factory owner would take a risk like the one Sohel Rana was taking: personally I think it’s less a question of greed than of a naïve, undercapitalised, businessman terrified of the debit notes he’d incur if production – endlessly disrupted this year by a succession of politically motivated strikes – was any further delayed. I’m not for a second excusing him: but pointing out that the self-indulgent antics of Bangladesh’s politicians probably bear a fair slug of responsibility for why Rana behaved so spectacularly stupidly

Fourth, your customers have to ignore the warnings.  I’ll take Primark as an example. It says its “ethical trade team is at this moment working to collect information, assess which communities the workers come from, and to provide support where possible." But what did its Bangladesh team do on April 23 when the TV reports appeared? How is it possible for them not to have called the factory and insisted work be suspended, and staff kept out of the building, till a proper independent check was carried out?

Fifth, local labour activists have to ignore the warnings. It’s clear from the speed with which stories of illegal building appeared after the factory collapsed that there’s no secret in Bangladesh about what factories have been built illegally. It’s just as clear from the speed with which garment workers started rioting that there are a lot of self-appointed labour rights activists around Dhaka. And it’s clear from the speed labels appeared showing whose garments were being made at Rana Plaza that those activists had little difficulty getting to the area.

So where were they on the morning of April 24? They’re forever telling us how Bangladesh factory owners can’t be trusted. Why is it so easy for activists to whip up protests – but none of them could be bothered going to check on whether one of those owners was behaving responsibly?  

Sixth: workers have to ignore the warnings. The threats allegedly made to workers if they didn’t go into the factories on April 24 sound blood-curdling – but they sit oddly  with claims made by local factory owners that capacity is seriously underused because factories’ biggest problem is a perpetual labour shortage. Labour activists might achieve a great deal more for workers by publicising the shortage of workers than by constantly telling workers how badly they’re exploited

Seventh: get a politician on your side. Allegedly, the senior government official in the area (the local TNO, or "Thana Nirbahi Officer": now an official appointed by the central government) had been heard by survivors to claim to waiting workers “There's nothing dangerous and factories can be kept open"  

How can all this be stopped?

If just one of the seven steps above hadn’t happened, those 400 people would still be alive. There probably isn’t much point in bewailing the ineptness, duplicity and corruption of the Bangladesh government, or pointing out that when an industry is as short of  workers as Bangladesh, management threats are just hot air: a desperately poor and frightened workforce can't always risk calling bullies' bluffs. But both buyers and activists might reasonably be expected to behave with something approaching common sense.

I’ve often argued on this Blog that the bureaucracy of codes of practice often blinds businesses to common sense, and it’s hard to understand how not a single buyer representative picked up the phone of the evening of April 23 and insisted production be stopped.  True: there’s no provision for such sensible management in any compliance code I’ve ever seen – but there’s more to management than just following rules (or in Phantom TAC’s case, churning out meaningless compliance-speak) and it beggars belief not one single buyer showed any sense that evening.

Similarly, it’s hard to understand why so many activists turned out on April 24 to ransack the ruins, organise riots and tell the press how many buildings were illegal, when none had come to picket the building at the start of the day.

Sounds to me like the buyers were too busy filling in their compliance forms, and activists too interested in how horrible Walmart is for either to worry properly about workers’ safety.

So why can’t they get together? Why don’t the activists publish a web site with all the Bangladesh factories they claim are illegal or unsafe – and get workers to populate the site with current client lists? Why don’t retailers stop telling us about their compliance activities and take a leaf out of Walmart’s new book, making it clear that any supplier using a factory without proper, honestly achieved, building certification will get fired?

The usual stuff about the use of unapproved suppliers isn’t always a cynical exercise in passing the buck: suppliers do use unsafe factories when things get tough. But they wouldn’t if workers were mobilised in the fight against dangerous premises.

The real obstacles might well be the toxic web of corruption that unites the Bangladesh government and the factory owners – and the obsession too many alleged worker organisers have with destroying capitalism, rather than gaining safer, better-paying, jobs for Bangladeshis.

If workers and retailers collaborated, they might well achieve a great deal more, far more quickly, than either group imagines

Postscript: April 30

I got it wrong. The original posted version of this Blog contained only the seven steps above. If  just one of those steps hadn’t happened, all 400 dead people would still be alive. But there was an essential eighth step that pushed the death toll to 400, and the number of injured to over a thousand:

Eighth: reject offers of assistance

On April 24, within hours of the building collapse, the United Nations and a number of governments, including the UK, offered emergency assistance – an offer most governments (like Japan’s in the 2011 earthquake) routinely accept. Bangladesh turned it down, claiming its government was “confident we could manage it ourselves" in the rescue operation and had "enough people”. For the following six days, crowds surrounding the rescue operations repeatedly demonstrated their disagreement with this bizarre view, as poorly equipped rescuers caused fires with ill-maintained cutting gear, performed grotesque amputations without anaesthetic and needed volunteers in sandals to carry out tasks humans just cannot do.

The spokesman for this rejection was Muhiuddin Khan Alamgir, the country’s Home Minster. The same Muhiuddin Khan Alamgir who on April 25 was blaming opposition demonstrators for causing the building to collapse (it had picketed the building during a strike) and in January blamed the Tazreen fire on saboteurs    

We’ll never know how many lives might have been saved, or how many injuries prevented, if Alamgir had accepted outside help. But we can be confident his judgement on the issue was every bit as deranged as his earlier inanities.