Rapport sur l'effondrement mortel d'usine au Bangladesh trouve la faute répandue (document en anglais)

The document is a press article, extracted from the online version of The New York Times newspaper. Dated from May 22, 2013 and written by journalist Jim Yardley, it explains the causes that made the building collapse and give information about this horrible “accident”.

Back in April 2013 in Bangladesh, a factory building named Rana Plaza collapsed, killing more than thousand workers, which made it the deadliest disaster in the history of garment industry. This terrible accident has been analyzed and the results were published into a four-hundred pages report which clearly shows owners responsibility, Sohel Rana for “wrongly granting construction approvals”.

This disaster focused global attention on very unsafe working conditions in the garment industry in Bangladesh, which is for the record, the second biggest exporter of clothing, trailing only China. There are more than five thousand garment factories in Bangladesh, handling orders from most of the world’s top clothing brands and retailers (which were also taken for responsible of the tragedy), as the country is known by having the lowest wages for the garment workers in the entire world.

Conclusions of this report shows evidence of a “waiting disaster”. Indeed, Mr. Rana has illegally constructed upper floors to the building for being able to hire more workers. He also placed large power generators on these floors because of regular power failures. These power generators would shake the fragile building whenever they were on. On April 23, the day before the accident, cracks appeared inside and outside the building, making workers worrying about going to work. An engineer employed by the owner told it was unsafe to let people in. However the day after, Mr. Rana obliged his workers to start their job. As one of the generators was switch on, the building collapsed.

This accident showed how people were working inside theses factories, and also made them understand that developed countries needed to help the poorest increase their labor conditions. World’s famous brands, such as Benetton, Zara, Primark, & more, were taken responsible for this disaster as workers who died were manufacturing clothes for their brands. It has shown the world that big clothing brands they were buying, was the ones who gave orders to those factories and then, the ones making workers had to work in very unsafe labor conditions.

That is where Fair Trade comes in. Following this realization, lots of people are wanting to help at their level by buying Fair Trade products, as the promise is to provide good working conditions, good rewards, developing the economy in the area…

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