The search for bodies in Bangladesh's collapsed Rana Plaza has ended, leaving the official
death toll at 1,127. The question now is whether the country's garment industry will see real change; there are promising signs, but will the promise be fulfilled as the disaster recedes from the headlines?
The government of Bangladesh is convening a minimum wage board to issue recommendations on raising the minimum wage in the garment industry; it's currently at $38, having been raised by 80 percent in 2010 after worker protests. Despite that big raise, it remains low by global standards. So, will the wage board—which will include factory owners, workers, and the government—raise wages by a meaningful amount, or will the momentum for change slow in the three months before its recommendations are slated to come out?
Additionally, the government is announcing that workers will now be allowed to form unions without first getting permission from the factory owners they work for. That's a good step, but there's a distance between saying workers no longer need permission and creating conditions that realistically make it possible for them to unionize:
"The issue is not really about making a new law or amending the old one," said Kalpana Akter of the Bangladesh Center for Workers Solidarity, a group campaigning for garment workers' rights. "In the past whenever workers tried to form associations they were subjected to beatings and harassment," she said. "The owners did not hesitate to fire such workers."
In recent years the government has cracked down on trade unions attempting to organize garment workers. In 2010 Hasina's government launched an Industrial Police force to crush street protests by thousands of workers demanding better pay and working conditions.
The Bangladeshi government isn't the only force promising changes. Swedish retail giant H&M agreed Monday to
sign a binding safety plan. H&M, which sources more clothes from Bangladesh than any other brand, was quickly followed by Spain's Inditex, the parent company of Zara. Up to this point, only PVH, the parent company of Tommy Hilfiger and Calvin Klein, and the German retailer Tchibo had signed the agreement, which requires widespread adoption to be successful.
Each of these changes is promising but not in itself sufficient. Workers need not just the possibility of an increased minimum wage but the reality, even after international attention fades. They need not just the legal right to form unions without permission, but to be protected from beatings and firing and the government itself. And it's fantastic that the number of companies signing the safety and fire agreement has doubled, but it needs to double again, and more.
12:27 PM PT: British retailers Primark and Tesco and Dutch company C&A have signed onto the safety agreement. Now how about some American companies?
6:53 PM PT (kos): That minimum wage is per MONTH.