Rana Plaza: Open letter to fashion companies for safety agreement
To ensure that disasters like the one in Rana Plaza never happen again, the Clean Clothes Campaign has initiated a building safety agreement together with other organizations. This ground-breaking "Accord" has already been signed by 145 international fashion companies, but so far only by Tally Weijl in Switzerland. This is why Public Eye is now launching an open letter to Chicorée, Coop & Co.
On April 24, 2013, the Rana Plaza factory complex collapsed on the outskirts of Dhaka, burying thousands of people. April 24, 2018 marks the fifth anniversary of that disaster, which killed 1138 people in Bangladesh and injured more than 2000, some of them seriously. On the occasion of the fifth anniversary of this accident caused by construction defects and greed for profit, Public Eye and the Clean Clothes Campaign call on all garment companies producing in Bangladesh to finally join the "Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh".
More than 145 international companies have already signed the recently extended agreement. With Tally Weijl, however, only one Swiss company is among them so far. Other Swiss clothing manufacturers such as Chicory, Coop, Mammut, Manor, Migros and Zebra also have cheap production in Bangladesh, but ignore the agreement and rely at best on voluntary initiatives.
The Building Safety Accord was created after Rana Plaza to supplement this patchwork of non-binding individual measures with often unclear effects with a comprehensive and legally binding program. The fact is that the "Accord" has made the jobs of around two million textile workers safer. To date, inspection teams have scrutinized more than 1,600 factories and identified over 118,500 hazards in the areas of fire protection, electrical installations and structural engineering. 83 percent of these hazards have now been eliminated.
All those companies producing in Bangladesh that do not join the agreement, despite its acknowledged impact, place company-owned, voluntary measures above binding, industry-wide programs. Given the scale of the problem, however, such measures can at best be a supplement to, but certainly not a substitute for, the industry-wide and legally binding Building Safety Agreement.
Therefore, Public Eye appeals to the Swiss population to increase the pressure on the Swiss fashion companies that are further away by signing the open letter "Never again Rana Plaza".
More information here or at:
David Hachfeld, textiles expert at Public Eye, 044 277 79 14, david.hachfeld@publiceye.ch
