Levin and Miller Joint Statement on So-Called Bangladesh Safety Alliance
WASHINGTON – U.S. Reps. Sander Levin (D-Mich.), the ranking member of the Ways and Means Committee, and George Miller (D-Calif.), the senior Democratic member of the Education and the Workforce Committee, issued the following joint statement on today’s announcement of the U.S. corporate-led Bangladesh factory safety alliance by the Bipartisan Policy Center.
“This May, following a long string of preventable tragedies in the ready-made garment sector in Bangladesh, we called on the major U.S. brands and retailers – including Wal-Mart, Gap and others – to source from Bangladesh in a way that ensures that workers there have basic health and safety protections. In particular, we called on these brands and retailers to join the growing global coalition supporting the Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh, a fully enforceable agreement signed by 72 major brands and retailers from 15 countries around the world, including several from the United States.
“We are deeply disappointed that Wal-Mart, Gap, Target, Macy’s, The Children’s Place and the other major American retailers have rejected that call and, instead, have announced a competing program that borrows the rhetoric of the Accord but not its critical elements.
“The Accord, among other things, obligates its members to make the necessary funds available to fix unsafe factories. The Wal-Mart/Gap-led plan, called the Alliance, does not. Further, the obligation of the Alliance member retailers is limited to no more than $1 million per year, which is used for activities such as training, worker hotlines, and spot inspections, but not for remediation of building deficiencies. Notwithstanding that three-fifths of the garment factories are vulnerable to collapse, according to Bangladeshi engineers, the single effort undertaken by the Alliance to help with remediation is a strictly optional program to make “affordable capital” available to factories. Indeed, the primary purpose of the Alliance appears to be to limit the retailers’ liability – and therefore their responsibility – in ways that the Accord would not.
“The Accord is fully-enforceable. The Alliance plan, on the other hand, appears to have only one aspect subject to binding arbitration, namely the commitment to make an annual pay-in. Even the obligation to conduct inspections is not subject to arbitration, with the only consequence of that being ejection from the plan. There is, further, no apparent obligation to cease sourcing from dangerous factories. We fail to see how this will achieve a different result than the previous decades of voluntary corporate social responsibility plans that these companies have run in the past and that have utterly failed to prevent the pervasive, systemic, and profound worker safety and rights problems we see in Bangladesh today.
“Our concern is that under this plan, there can be a continuation of a business model for ready-made garments that drives sweatshop conditions in Bangladesh. Cut-throat competition among factories to keep costs low without regard to working conditions, spurred in great part by unsustainable pricing pressures from retailers, will continue the race to the bottom.
“There are other apparent shortcomings to the Alliance plan, including limited public transparency as to the results of inspections. The results of those inspections will be stored in a proprietary database accessible only to the brands and retailers. Only summaries will be made public. Meanwhile, the Accord requires full public transparency on the results of inspections. There is no binding right for workers to refuse unsafe work, which the Accord provides.
“These factors, as well as the lack of involvement of any worker groups in the formulation or enforcement of the Alliance plan, are also cause for serious concern.
“The Wal-Mart/GAP-led plan is a missed opportunity to improve the disastrous conditions of millions of workers – mostly young, poor women – who make clothes for Western consumers.”
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