Rana Plaza: an eye-opener
'Fashion Revolution' is a not-for-profit global movement founded in April 2013. The day that the Rana Plaza building collapsed in Bangladesh with over 3000, mainly female, garment workers inside. More than 1,100 people were killed and more than 2,500 injured.
Based on publicly available press reports, it seems that only the day before, the building had been evacuated, the bank and shops on the lower floors had closed, and a warning to avoid using the building had been issued. A number of structural cracks had appeared in the building and an engineer had ruled the building was unsafe.
Yet despite this, the garment factory owners on the upper floors ignored the warning. Mr Rana, the owner of the building, demanded people return to work and threatened to withhold pay from anyone who refused to do so.
And when thousands of workers did return to work the following day, begging not to be sent inside, the building collapsed, in less than 90 seconds. Over 3000, mainly young female, garment workers were inside. The building's collapse has gone down in history as the fourth largest industrial disaster in the world.
According to Bangladeshi officials, the upper floors of the building had been built without a permit and were structurally unsafe. The building had also been designed for shops and not for facilitating factory machinery.
Mr Rana is one of the individuals blamed for the negligence contributing to the disaster and the choice he made to value profits over people.
But sadly, this isn’t the first garment factory disaster to have occurred. Just five months prior to the Rana Plaza disaster, over 110 workers lost their lives trapped inside the burning Tazreen Fashions factory just outside of Dhaka. And outside of India, a great number of other such garment factories subject their workers to unsafe, and sometimes also inhumane, working conditions. Far from investing in the training and development of their staff, these employers continue to prioritise short term profit over even the most basic of safety rights, fuelled by a constant demand for fast and cheap fashion in the world over.
Even some two years after the Rana Plaza disaster, only eight of 3,425 garment factories surveyed by New York University were found to have made the necessary safety improvements committed to by the international business community after the Rana Plaza disaster.
Images (from top to bottom): New York Times 2013, CTV News 2019, Reuters 2013, British Vogue 2018 and Sherpa.