It’s irresistible to contrast the snail’s pace of American
retailers’ approach to a Bangladesh safety plan with their “criticise first:
plan later” attacks on their European colleagues. But that’s no reason for
dismissing what they’re doing
Let’s have fun with the contrast first. They went out of
their way to set themselves up for public ridicule, so it would be ungracious
to turn down the invitation.
On May 15, America’s National Retail Federation (NRF) claimed
that US “retailers are committed to a plan of action that is both workable and
sustainable,” as it savaged the Accord on Fire & Building Safety in
Bangladesh” (AFBSB). But no plan was revealed, and no US retailers appear to have
publicly committed to the Safer Factories Initiative, which a number of US
trade associations signed in mid May.
It now turns out that, whatever plan the NRF’s President and
Chief Executive Matthew Shay thought some of his members were committed to, it doesn’t
exist now. That didn’t stop him publicly attacking the judgement of NRF members
who did sign the AFBSB. But when he went on to say that his group “has been
working with stakeholders for a number of months to come up with a solution to
address the safety issues”, he gave a pretty pathetic impression of American
retailers’ ability to organise themselves. On May 30, the Bipartisan Policy
Center (BPC), a Washington think tank, announced it was facilitating a process
to be led by two former Senators, Democrat George Mitchell and Republican
Olympia Snowe, that will seek to “develop and implement a new program to
improve fire and safety regulations in the garment factories of Bangladesh”
The BPC said the ex-Senators, retailers and trade
associations would seek to release their plan by early July. Hardly an advertisement for the quality (or
sense of urgency) of the “several months’ work” the NRF was boasting about a
few weeks ago.
But some US retailers have been doing a
lot more than “working with stakeholders” over the past few months. Gap and Walmart
(widely assumed to be among the retailers participating in the BPC process)
have been exemplary recently in the work they’ve done – and certainly in Gap’s
case, in the money they’ve spent - to improve Bangladeshi factory safety. The
test of that work doesn’t lie in what bits of paper they’ve signed, or which
activist groups approve of them, but in the safety of people working in
factories they use.
That doesn’t stop the usual suspects from pillorying US
retailers for the crime of not signing the AFBSB. The attitude
of unions is predictable. But another knee-jerk reaction is a more
interesting one. Richard M. Locke, a political scientist at MIT’s Sloan School
of Management said, “I don’t think it’s good to have competing initiatives.”
Why?
Let’s take retailers’ policies on unapproved suppliers.
H&M have a policy of warning suppliers if they’re found using unapproved
factories: Walmart now have a policy of instant firing. Which is right? I’ve
got no idea. I think the better option is different in Bangladesh (where mass fatalities
are a real risk, but demand is booming, so any staff losing their job can find
an alternative quickly) from the better option in, say, Morocco: H&M’s policy
probably works in Morocco, and I’m convinced Walmart’s is the better in
Bangladesh. But I might be wrong. Neither policy is obviously preferable, and
it makes no more sense to require every buyer to share a policy on this than on
the colour of blouses a factory makes. One of the reasons MIT is a highly respected
university is precisely that it’s physically close to Harvard and a number of
other highly rated universities: having several different approaches to
learning in Boston adds to the quality of education at all those institutions.
Believing in just one philosophy is the kind of dogmatism that
caused the English king in the early 17th century to expel the Pilgrim
Fathers, ultimately to near Boston, where those Fathers imposed a near-identical intolerance
of any views other than their own for most of the following century. It’s
depressing to find academics in Boston just as wedded to doctrinal orthodoxy as
religious bigots four hundred years ago.
The BPC process starts off with a group of retailers and
trade associations who want to see safer factories in Bangladesh. George
Mitchell (or Sir George as some of us call him) happens to be a hero of mine: his role in the Northern Irish peace process
was a masterpiece of patient diplomacy, and I’m sure the BPC process will
create a programme that will improve factory safety.
In much of the developing world, aid and development initiatives work best when channelled through competing organisations. Journalists love writing bitchy
articles about how Oxfam (our local aid programme) does different things from CAFOD
(the Catholic Church’s aid consortium) and both differ from what the Melinda
and Bill Gates Foundation do. No doubt there are some disadvantages. But it’s
precisely because the three (and often it’s closer to thirty-three) have different
priorities and get their resources differently that aid can be targeted at different
needs in different ways.
The most important single sentence for our industry in the
past hundred years was Deng Xiaoping’s “do not care if the cat is black or
white: what matters is how it catches mice", which ultimately caused the
movement of basic manufacturing to Asia. A political scientist should recognise
the principle applies as much to safety as to tolerating capitalism in China.
So should we all. Given their recent history, I wouldn’t bet
on the US trade associations getting an agreement when they said they would.
But Gap and Walmart will keep on making sure their factories get safer however
long the talks go on. And the test of any eventual Plan isn’t what political scientists
or union activists think about it.
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