GARMENT INDUSTRY IN BANGLADESH

Beside “Made in China”, what other remarks do you usually find when you go shopping? “Made in Bangladesh”. They don’t only manufacture for common brands, but also for what we call ‘branded’. Let’s take a look the undercover behind Bangladesh’s garment industry.

The Garment Industry

In 2013, Savar Building or Rana Plaza in Bangladesh collapsed and it is considered as the deadliest garment-factory accident. Following this accident, NYU Stern Center underwent a year-long study about garment industry in Bangladesh.

The collapse of Savar Building

The research team documented 7,179 factories, and those previously uncounted factories are largely informal and unregulated. Most of the time, they’re set up as subcontractors.

Indirect suppliers or subcontractors are crucial due to Bangladesh’s ability to respond to the demand fluctuation. When orders are few, this kind of factories may close a few production lines or shut down altogether. When orders increase, then these lines will be reopened. This allows large, direct exporters with much higher operating costs to flexibly expand capacity through subcontracts without making expensive capital investments.

The research team found that it resulted millions of workers in subcontracting factories fell outside the protection of international safety-improvement initiatives, and were especially vulnerable in a country where unsafe working conditions were a chronic problem.

These factories are producing clothes for many famous international brands. About 3,200 are listed as direct exporters for those international brands. But, in a survey of 479 factories, the team found out that 153 of them were acting as subcontractors.

Final Words…

Safety. It’s the main issue here. The Alliance, Accord, Bangladesh’s government, and the International Labour Organization (ILO) have performed 3,425 inspections. Guess what, only 8 factories passed the final inspection.

It’s such a crucial thing to fix this problem because actually, Bangladesh’s garment industry has helped millions of people to escape from one of country’s biggest problem, poverty. The best solution, based on Labowitz and Baumann-Pauly, is to share responsibility, in which all parties acknowledge the scope of the problem, allow space for honest discussion, and act together to fix it.