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Rana Plaza Building Collapse
Caragh Young & Georgia Allison

The topic of modern slavery is reigning news headlines and businesses are becoming inundated with pressure to reduce and eradicate forced labour, exploitation and abuse of it's workers on a global scale. About 25 million people globally were estimated to be trapped in forced labor in 2016, according to the International Labour Organization. Since then,

Bangladesh has one of the largest garment industries in the world and over the last 20 years the number of people working in garment factories in Bangladesh has risen by over 3 million. In 1990 there were approximately 0.5 million people working in these factories, and this had risen to approximately 4 million in 2010. Despite such a substantial increase of workers, some fast-fashion retailers still fail to ensure that their offshore workers are adequately paid, given the same rights as their inland employees and that the working environment is safe and secure. Forbes reported that it takes a single garment worker 18 months to earn what a fashion brand CEO makes in a day, earning less than $3 per day and working an average of 14 hours per day in sweatshops.

An example of the negative impact that this negligence can have is the collapse of the Rana Plaza building. On the 24th of April 2013, the Rana Plaza factory building near Dhaka in Bangladesh collapsed killing over 1130 of the workers present inside. Most of the individual working inside the building were subcontracted by Western fashion retailers such as Primark and Matalan.

Although the collapse of the Rana Plaza building was a tragic event, this could also arguably be seen as the start of a revolution; proving that changes needed to happen regarding the safety of workers in developing countries. Clothing companies were quick to attempt to make a start at amending these issues as roughly 250 companies signed two initiatives, the Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh and Alliance for Bangladesh Worker Safety. Both were designed to improve safety dramatically in 2,300 factories supplying western brands.

Many other fast fashion incidents occur in Bangladesh, H&M and GAP have had reports in 2018 January and may time. These reports are from around 540 workers and it is reported as gender based violence. Most of the incidents are sexual and physical assault as stated by unions and rights groups, from the pressure of hitting deadlines to produce the clothing.To add to this the female garment workers fear retaliation in the workplace so the majority of them do not report these incidents. On another occasion when reporters came to interview a factory worker in the Bangalore factory explained that she was once grabbed by the hair and punched and then told “You whore, your caste people should be kept where the slippers are kept.”

The popular hashtag ‘whomademyclothes’ was implemented last year because of these incidents in Bangladesh

On the contrary, sustainable clothing is in popular demand because of the great insight we have had recently on the environment that workers have to be in. This means that customers are looking for companies who show off their sustainability and ethics.

Many companies have noticed the high demand in customers wanting to know who actually made their clothes and have taken action on this.

One strong brand is Adidas, they are making it clear of their tackle with modern slavery, it is known that they are the highest ranked out of 20 firms from the ‘efforts to protect its supply chain from forced labor’. Adidas have their own section on their website under sustainability, they explain that they noticed that there was a huge problem within employees and their well-being in the factories.