ASM Anam Ullah :
Who should be held responsible for this brutal incident in Sitakunda? The event was men-made and symbolised an inhuman state and poor governance of Occupational Health and Safety (OHS) of workers and the public in Bangladesh. I have been talking about fragile OHS regulations in Bangladesh for the last few years, but the policymakers and the government of Bangladesh have been very regressive on the decisive steps taken to stop the fires in the manufacturing plants in Bangladesh.
Forty-nine people (including nine firefighters) were killed and more than 300 injured in another fire at a container depot in southeastern Bangladesh on 4 June 2022. The fire broke out at the BM container depot in Sitakunda, Chittagong district, on Saturday night (4 June 2022), according to the state news agency Bangladesh Sangbad Sangstha (BSS).
Surprisingly, at this time, there wasa fire at Hashem Food and Beverage Limited in Bangladesh (8 July 2021), and the factory fire incident killed 52 workers, including child labourers.
On the other hand, Bangladesh lacks an OHS culture – as a result, thousands of people die in serious factory accidents, including RMG, leather, agriculture, fisheries, construction, scrap metal industries, etc. In road accidents alone, at times, at least 12,000 people are killed, and more than 35,000 are seriously injured. Moreover, the people of Bangladesh face untimely deaths in their homes, mosques, trains, ferries, restaurants, corporate offices etc.
Bangladesh’s informal economic sectors have flourished with the blessings of neoliberal globalisation, which began in 1980. Since then, the country has become a popular destination for multinationals as a cheap producing country. Low OHS regulations, low wages, and limited or no trade unionism was the main driver of foreign direct investment in Bangladesh’s informal economic sector, mainly ready-made garment (RMG).
Moreover, as the country needed more jobs, the successive national government perhaps ignominiously ignored the essence of industrial control since the 1980s. The assumption is the BangladeshGovernment probably did not want to control the informal economic sectors extensively for fear of losing a competitive market position to global investors as a source of cheap labour.
This reflects the views of critics and scholars that Bangladesh, as a cheap producer and a less regulated country, has disrespectfully ignored the importance of regulating its informal industries, such as RMG, leather etc.
Research suggests that the Government of Bangladesh lacks proper industrial policy and planning since the national policy was changed in the 1980s as a neoliberal state. As a result, the informal economic industries in Bangladesh have grown randomly. But, most importantly, industrial development, labour management and other important issues for building an industrial society were missing in Bangladesh, mainly in government policy.
Due to a series of factory incidents (e.g., Tazreen Fashions) and the building collapse (e.g., Rana Plaza), the Bangladesh Government and traders of the RMG business were on the backfoot for some time. Moreoever, inferior labour standards and Labour Act and disrespect to the United Nations and ILO conventions were other issues for the Bangladesh Government and local RMG traders to face robust criticism from internal and external levels.
For example, the Rana Plaza building was built on swamp landand used as a corporate building, whileon some floors of the building, garment factories were illegally established and eventually, the entire building collapsed on 24 April 2013. The incident claimed the lives of more than 1,133 innocent workers; thousands more were maimed and lost the ability to work permanently.
After the Rana Plaza building collapse, global apparel brands and multinational companies outsourced from Bangladesh faced intense criticism for outsourcing from a low OHS regulated nation like Bangladesh.
As a result, two international non-governmental organisations, Accord, led by European brands and Alliance and Western, Canadian and Australian clothing and fashion brands, came to observe RMG, Bangladesh’s most significant export-oriented economic sector. The initial plan was to monitor the RMG sector for five years.
After the initial term, the Alliance left the country and did not want to renew the factory inspections program even though they had only covered about 750 factories by December 2018. However, Accord intended to continue its unfinished monitoring work in Bangladesh and extend its initial five-year term. But the Bangladesh Government and local RMG traders did not show interest in the renewal process, and Accord was asked to leave the country while they had only inspected approximately 2000 RMG factories.
Finally, with the verdict of the High Court of Bangladesh, Accord was allowed to stay in Bangladesh until mid of 2020 for a smooth transition and hand over their project to the local monitoring agency, the Inspection for Factories and Establishments (DIFE).
Since 2020, DIFE, a factory and industrial monitoring agency of the Government of Bangladesh, has been responsible for monitoring the most informal economic sectors in Bangladesh. A new era of industrial control was expected to begin after the Rana Plaza building collapsed. Most importantly, it was expected by scholars and other stakeholders of the Bangladesh Government that they would reduce the number of catastrophic factory accidents, but it has not yet been seen.
However, DIFE’s credibility is another crucial issue as it is incompetent, inexperienced, unorganised, and lacks the resources to monitor Bangladesh’s vast informal manufacturing sectors with limited workforces.
The government is not keen enough to stop all this catastrophe by formulating and implementing a proper OHS policy, acts, regulatory framework, and agencies. Moreover, the Bangladesh Government always stand by the side of the employers or capitalist rather than the workers. As a result, the country’s growing capitalists are also ignorant of compliance with national labour laws and conventions of the United Nations and the ILO. If employers had respected the national labour act and ILO conventions, the situation would have been different today.
The incident in Sitakunda is not an isolated issue. Instead, it reflects the overall poor performance of the Bangladesh Government in OHS regulation of the most informal economic sectors of the nation.
Therefore, to avoid future catastrophe in the most informal economic sectors, the government of Bangladesh must show:
· Political commitment to regulate informal economic industries
· Formulate adequate and effective OHS policies and acts
· Amend the National Labour Act with practical clauses of punishment of the Labour Act violators in Bangladesh
· Ratify ILO OHS conventions and respect and implement them appropriately
· Establish a credible monitoring agency (e.g., increase the credibility of DIFE and resources). It is assumed that there are 20000 inspectors are needed to adequately monitor Bangladesh’s vast informal economic sectors while it hasonly around 600 actual inspectors/staff)
· Appoint OHS experts from overseas to build the OHS organisations with the support of the ILO, World Bank ADB etc.
· Establish a credible and efficient fire-fighting system in Bangladesh
· Most importantly, respect the national Labour Act and the United Nations and ILO conventions to establish human rights in Bangladesh.
(The author is an Australian Academic & OHS expert and member of Amnesty International Australia and Sydney Outreach Committee (SOC), Human
Rights Watch Australia).
