Bangladesh is the fourth largest exporter of apparel to the US. Its garment sector accounts for 80 percent of the country’s exports and employs over 3.5 million workers. These workers face some of the worst conditions in the industry, including poverty wages, verbal and physical harassment, retaliation for advocating for better conditions, and extremely unsafe factory buildings.

Since 2005, these unsafe conditions have tragically killed nearly 2,000 Bangladeshi workers in fire and building safety disasters—all of which could have been prevented. In April 2013, 1,134 workers alone died when the Rana Plaza building collapsed, making it the worst disaster in the history of the industry. Factories at Rana Plaza were producing for several major brands and retailers, including JCPenney, The Children’s Place, and Walmart. Many of these companies had audited the factory in the months leading up to the collapse—yet these audits failed to identify or correct the safety violations that would lead to disaster.

A New Model: The Accord

When Rana Plaza collapsed in 2013, the WRC had already been working for years to press apparel brands to fundamentally change their approach to fire and building safety in Bangladesh in order to bring about genuine safety improvements in their supplier factories there. The international attention following the catastrophe forced brands back to the bargaining table, andthe WRC and our allies successfully convinced them to sign the historic Accord on Building and Fire Safety in Bangladesh. The Accord is the first modern legally-binding agreement between workers, factory managers, and apparel companies that requires brands and retailers to:

• Open their supplier factories to fully independent inspections by qualified experts and engineers
• Allow the results of these inspections to be reported publicly, in a searchable database
• Help pay for essential safety renovations
• Stop doing business with any factories that fail to make needed safety repairs

Additionally, the Accord outlines a complaint mechanism by which workers can anonymously report potential violations at their factory to the Accord. It also includes an enforcement mechanism by which legal action can be brought against non-compliant signatories.

The Accord represents a fundamental shift in how safety violations are addressed at garment factories. Previous corporate-led programs were voluntary and lacked both enforcement mechanisms and transparency. Under the Accord, brands and retailers are legally responsible for ensuring the workers who make their clothes work in safe conditions.

The Accord Today

Today, over 200 brands and retailers have signed the Accord, including three of the world’s four largest fashion retailers—H&M, Inditex, and UNIQLO. Together, these brands source from more than 1,600 factories, which collectively employ over two million workers.

Inspections at these factories uncovered close to 100,000 safety violations, ranging from structural damage to unsafe fire escape routes. To date, 50,000 of these violations have been corrected.

Factory inspections also forced the evacuation of 17 grossly unsafe factories, which were closed until extensive renovations could be undertaken. Without these repairs, any one of these factories could have been another Rana Plaza.

The WRC's role

The WRC continues to play a critical role in implementing and enforcing the Accord. As a witness signatory on the Accord Steering Committee, the WRC works with the Steering Committee members to ensure the principles of the Accord are being fully executed and that inspections and repairs are taking place in a timely fashion.