Amy Yee :
(From previous issue)
It remains to be seen whether safety standards can be enforced. Cost is only part of the issue. Even more important is changing mind-sets at all levels, and providing close, disciplined guidance on the ground. Greater awareness and acceptance of safety standards is essential for factory owners, middle managers on the floor and workers themselves. Although hazards abound, awareness of risk prevention and safety often does not exist.
In countries like Bangladesh and India, it is the norm that taxi drivers remove seat belts from passenger seats for comfort. At an airport in Chennai in south India I once watched in amazement as two workers carried a large sheet of glass as they walked across the hot tarmac with lungis (short sarongs), bare hands and bare feet. (My sense was that the lack of footwear was out of habit and comfort.) In India, the motorbike is a mode of transit for the masses. Indian motorbike drivers must by law wear helmets but their passengers – such as wives carrying babies – do not.
Safety training must be easy to understand and then monitored and scrupulously enforced. The Alliance is trying to address this by focusing on the quality of the training, not just the quantity, and its “train the trainer” approach has 40 master trainers from 12 independent inspection agencies with international standards. They train factory workers as “ambassadors” who are then supposed to pass along information to workers.
These two-day factory trainings are done in small groups of 30 and include graphics and illustrations for workers who have little education. In May, the Alliance will start “impact assessments” to see if the training was absorbed.
“The model is not scalable quickly, it takes time,” said Ian Spaulding, a senior adviser to the Alliance For Bangladesh Worker Safety. But it is more effective than previous trainings in Bangladesh that were rushed and done in groups as large as 500 or 1,000 workers. Those cursory trainings were often text-heavy and had neither discussion nor follow-up assessments.
Outside of factories, GIZ has set up 45 “women’s cafes” to reach out to female employees, get feedback about factory conditions and raise awareness about safety risks and labor rights. About 100,000 female workers regularly attend and 10,000 have been trained to conduct meetings.
“This is just at the beginning of changing something,” said Magnus Schmid, a program coordinator with GIZ in Dhaka. “This will take time. It’s still a process.”
Some Bangladeshi garment factories, especially those not covered by the Alliance or the Accord, do not have the money or resources to leapfrog to total compliancy. But simple improvements combined with strict enforcement can make an enormous difference.
This could mean simply making sure that fire doors open outward and are unlocked, bundles of textiles are not stored next to electrical outlets, wires and lighting are encased to prevent sparks and aisles are kept free for evacuation. Building safety could also be improved by removing heavy water tanks and cellphone towers from factory roofs.
Rana Plaza became a symbol of what is wrong with Bangladesh’s garment industry. Now Bangladesh – supported by global clothing companies, international aid organizations and consumers who demand better – has the chance to get it right. “A lot of international pressure is very, very much important,” said Schmid. “Consumers are very important.”
Change can happen in Bangladesh. It has before. The country, for instance, has a surprisingly effective cyclone warning system that relies on village volunteers. This simple, grass-roots system has been credited with saving tens of thousands of lives during violent storms.
Safety standards can be upheld if they’re taken seriously enough, as they have been in Bangladesh’s oil and gas industry. “How many times have you heard of a gas station that caught on fire?” one international safety inspector in Dhaka asked me. “Those standards are highly maintained – even in Bangladesh.”
( She is a Knight-Bagehot Fellow at Columbia University in New York. She is a former correspondent for The Financial Times.)
(Concluded)
