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Article Draft                                                                                                         Sam Chaffe

Rana Plaza Dhaka Garment Factory Collapse

On the 24th April 2013 at around the time 8:45 AM, an eight-story commercial building called Rana Plaza collapsed. The building was located in Savar Upazila of the Dhaka District, Bangladesh. The search for the dead ended on the 13th May 2013 with a death toll of 1,138, approximately 2,500 injured people were rescued from the building alive. 90% of the workers were women. It is considered the deadliest structural failure accident in modern human history and the deadliest garment-factory disaster in history. A true burden and a historic blow to the fashion world. The building's owners ignored warnings to avoid using the building after cracks had appeared the day before. Garment workers were ordered to return the following day, and the building collapsed during the morning rush-hour. The building was making strange noises. “Managers hit workers with sticks to force them into the factory that day” said Judy Gearhart, the executive director of the International Labour Rights Forum, at a recent event, organized by the Forum and the Workers’ Rights Consortium, focusing on Rana Plaza. The Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and the Exporters Association President confirmed that 3,122, workers were in the building at the time of collapse. One resident described the scene as if "an earthquake had struck”.

Clothing

A vast majority of people like to look great and feel good in their clothing. That is what represents us and helps everyone express themself individually as an identity. Clothes are our chosen skin, the clothes that we wear often represent the people we are, we inhabit them. The clothes we wear are our fingerprint on modern society. Do you ever put on an item of clothing from your wardrobe, for example, a top? A top that let’s say you paid £35 for. When you put the item on, or see it in a shop or is presented to you online, do you ever wonder where it has come from? How it was made? And who made it? Roughly there are currently 40 million garment workers in the world today, 34 million of them are female. The garment workers who make our clothes are not seen. They are hidden away and oppressed by people who have more power than them. They are waged poorly. An OXFAM study found that it takes just four days for a CEO from one of the top five global fashion brands to earn what a Bangladeshi garment worker earns in her whole lifetime. In the U.S, it takes slightly over one working day for a CEO to earn what an ordinary worker makes in one year. They do not work in a safe condition, which can be quoted by the Dhaka Garment factory collapse in Bangladesh. The old/poorly built buildings, filled with all these people that are unbelievably hot and humid, working extortionately long hours. With no idea what is in there working buildings.

Clothing Production & wastage

Global clothing production has more than doubled since 2000. More than 15 million tons of used textile waste is generated each year in the United States. We cannot produce this much, it’s not sustainable. We are buying more but wearing less, meaning that we wash, we treat things with very little care and we throw them away. There’s very little technology at the moment to befittingly recycle items of clothing into the type of fibre that can go back into clothe making. So most clothes are down-cycled so they are becoming current isolation or mattress lining. “Quality of life for the person that makes our clothing.”

In a working garment factory, there is information that the following occurs. Little dust fibres fly off the cotton, when the workers are carding it, and fill the air till it looks like all fine white dust. They say it circulates round the lungs and tightens the lungs up. There are many workers in a carding-room, suffering miserably. They are inhaling the poisonous particles. It was not that long ago that death by byssinosis was a fairly common occupational hazard. “In our department, it’s full of jeans and black dust”, says one worker in the 2013 report Breathless for Blue Jeans: Health Hazards in China’s Denim Factories. “It is difficult to breathe.” The dust comes from sandblasting the denim to achieve a worn look. So this goes to people who like their distressed denim look. Although the practice has been banned, it continues behind locked doors, and workers continue to die from silicosis, a fatal lung disease. Silicosis is not the only danger facing the modern factory worker. A 2014 study of garment workers in Bangladesh found “the majority” suffered from ill health, ranging from musculoskeletal disorders, through to hepatitis, this latter from a lack of clean drinking water. In Tansy Hoskin’s book Stitched Up, she reveals that in the Pearl River Delta in China some 40,000 fingers are severed each year in work-related accidents. And of course, this week sees the second anniversary of the Rana Plaza factory collapse in Bangladesh.

The day before the illegally extended building caved in on itself, large cracks had been identified by an inspection team, and the workers were evacuated. The following day gangs were sent to beat reluctant workers into the building with sticks. As an added inducement they were threatened with having their wages docked by a month if they did not comply. Faced with a stark choice between certain death by starvation, and potential death by crushing, the workers took their chances on the building. 1,133 people lost that gamble, with a further 2,500 injured, many disabled permanently. Two years later, they are still waiting for brands to pay them compensation. Rana Plaza made headlines around the world because of its sheer scale. But the reality is that workers are dying every day to produce the clothes that you are wearing as you read this article. They are dying to produce the clothes that I am wearing as I write it. Hoskins points out that on the same day as the Rana Plaza collapse, 25 people died in a shoe factory in Lahore.

Fashion Revolution

The Fashion Revolution is made up all walks of life, being a charitable cause. For example, clothing designers, authors, business holders, brands, traders, employees and fashion admirers’. This charity organisation has a set-out vision to impose confidence in a fashion industry that values human equality, the environment, individuality, creativity and profit in a fair level measure.

Why do we need a fashion revolution?

Because six years after the Rana Plaza factory collapse in Bangladesh, which killed 1,138 garment workers our clothes are still being made by some of the poorest, most overworked and undervalued people in the world. Since last December, at least 65 workers have been arrested on false charges, while factories producing clothes for some of our favourite brands have fired and blacklisted 11,600 workers with no legal justification. According to the WRC, some have paid with their lives, shot dead by the police as retribution for speaking out. “The industry and the government seem to be driven by a desire to maintain control and low prices, regardless of the risks to workers’ lives and well-being,” says the report. “They are betting that western brands and retailers care a great deal about prices and very little about labour standards” People want brands they give their money to for their product to care. “Fashion Revolution is campaigning for an industry where environmental protection as well as human rights, are the standard and not the exception,” says Carry Somers, who founded the campaign in the immediate aftermath of the Rana Plaza collapse. She started Fashion Revolution because she, like co-founder Orsola de Castro and many others working in the industry, felt that the disaster had to stand for something, “It had to lead to revolutionary change within the fashion industry.”

Fashion is a worldwide view of every aspect of each individual’s personal opinion. There are so many ideologies of how we should be treating people, treating our clothing and environmentally being friendly whilst incinerating and washing our materials. We need to make more people aware of how sustainably sourced their clothes are. And the factors associated with poorly disposed of clothing. It's regretfully easy to purchase items to this modern-day via the internet sphere. What the internet lacks in telling us, is where the item was made, designed and purchased. As you cannot see the clothing, or sometimes the information is not displayed about the brand you are purchasing. However, in a shop, it has a “made in” label on the item when you’re shopping. Furthermore, you have a general idea of where you are shopping because you have information on the organisation. And you have chosen under your own initiative to walk into the chosen retail store. As for on the internet, adverts pop up with all of these brands that it thinks you will be interested in. Going by your recent search history. They may be well known popular brands and they may be ones that aren’t that publically popular. Other sources, for example, social media display promoters and the brands that the app thinks you will be interested in and buy from. With tempting discount offers. Because new brands are forming and old brands are changing to adapt to in-fashion marketing focussing on the public sector that will thrive their brand. And most of them hit the same sector. Additionally, this disguises who sourced and produced the item and whether it was made in a garment factory. Which the possibility of that is dramatically high.

References:

Opensocietyfoundations.org. 2020. What’S Changed (And What Hasn’T) Since The Rana Plaza Nightmare. [online] Available at:  [Accessed 7 June 2020]. W. (2020). Who made my clothes? Stand up for workers’ rights with Fashion Revolution week | ExecReview. [online] Execreview.com. Available at: http://www.execreview.com/2019/04/who-made-my-clothes-stand-up-for-workers-rights-with-fashion-revolution-week/ [Accessed 23 Jan. 2020].

Newstatesman.com. (2020). Why don’t you care who made your clothes?. [online] Available at: https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2015/04/why-don-t-you-care-who-made-your-clothes [Accessed 23 Jan. 2020].

Newstatesman.com. (2020). Why don’t you care who made your clothes?. [online] Available at: https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2015/04/why-don-t-you-care-who-made-your-clothes [Accessed 23 Jan. 2020].

Newstatesman.com. (2020). Why don’t you care who made your clothes?. [online] Available at: https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2015/04/why-don-t-you-care-who-made-your-clothes [Accessed 23 Jan. 2020].

Newstatesman.com. (2020). Why don’t you care who made your clothes?. [online] Available at: https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2015/04/why-don-t-you-care-who-made-your-clothes [Accessed 23 Jan. 2020].

Newstatesman.com. (2020). Why don’t you care who made your clothes?. [online] Available at: https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2015/04/why-don-t-you-care-who-made-your-clothes [Accessed 23 Jan. 2020]. -->, W. (2020). Who made my clothes? Stand up for workers’ rights with Fashion Revolution week | ExecReview. [online] Execreview.com. Available at: http://www.execreview.com/2019/04/who-made-my-clothes-stand-up-for-workers-rights-with-fashion-revolution-week/ [Accessed 23 Jan. 2020].

W. (2020). Who made my clothes? Stand up for workers’ rights with Fashion Revolution week | ExecReview. [online] Execreview.com. Available at: http://www.execreview.com/2019/04/who-made-my-clothes-stand-up-for-workers-rights-with-fashion-revolution-week/ [Accessed 23 Jan. 2020]. Blanchard, T. (2020). Who Made My Clothes? Stand up for workers' rights with Fashion Revolution Week | Tamsin Blanchard. [online] the

Guardian. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/commentisfree/2019/apr/22/who-made-my-clothes-stand-up-for-workers-rights-with-fashion-revolution-week [Accessed 23 Jan. 2020].

Rushe, D. and Safi, M., 2020. Rana Plaza, Five Years On: Safety Of Workers Hangs In Balance In Bangladesh | Michael Safi And Dominic Rushe. [online] the Guardian. Available at:  [Accessed 7 June 2020].

Newstatesman.com. 2020. Why Don’T You Care Who Made Your Clothes?. [online] Available at:  [Accessed 7 June 2020].