In Bangladesh, one year after the worst accident in the history of
the garment industry, recovery remains a fragile process, justice seems
elusive, and reform has a long way to go.
Editor’s note: Explore the interactive timeline that traces the stories of some of the Rana Plaza disaster’s key characters, as well as a more detailed description with images.
Four Days in April
On the morning of Thursday, April 24, 2013, traffic on the
Dhaka–Aricha Highway was lighter than usual. On most days, the
industrial artery that connects the Bangladeshi capital of Dhaka to
suburbs in the northwest is choked with Suzuki hatchbacks, scooters, and
banged-up buses that honk and belch incessantly as they carry
commuters to construction sites and factories in towns like Dhamrai,
Gakulnagor, and Savar, a subdistrict of the capital dominated by garment
makers. But on that morning, they were in the third day of another
nationwide hartal, or strike, called by
opponents of the ruling Awami League party, the latest in a
never-ending cycle of political brinkmanship that had paralyzed the
country on and off for years. Like power outages and flash floods,
strikes are a fact of life in Bangladesh. In Savar and other
manufacturing hubs, the protocol among working-class people generally
is to heed them or be prepared for trouble.
Rana Plaza, a hulking commercial complex that fronts the highway, was
an exception that day. The building’s owner, Sohel Rana, insisted that
employees report for work as usual, in defiance of the opposition, with
plans to mobilize them for a possible street protest. This was not an
empty gesture: On any given day, the plaza’s eight stories held as many
as five thousand people, most of whom were employed by garment-making
companies linked to well-known Western brands.
At his pastry shop across the street from the plaza, Saiful Islam was
reading about the strike in the morning paper when he heard a shriek of
breaking glass cut the air. He looked up to see shards of blue glass
from the building that adjoined the plaza raining onto the far sidewalk,
cutting several people waiting at the bus stand below. For a moment
Islam assumed it was sabotage, a brick through a window, until the
ground started to quake. Rana Plaza seemed to be imploding.
As the quake intensified, more panels blasted out onto the street,
and several workers jumped to their deaths. Then the upper floors fell
in quick succession, one after another, causing the bottom half of the
building to pancake under their weight. In a matter of seconds, the
eight-story building was reduced to a heap of slabs and iron.
As the cloud of concrete dust began to settle on the rubble, Islam
and others bolted across the street to look for survivors. Police and
the fire brigade were called to the scene, but word of the collapse
spread even faster through nearby bastis—dense neighborhoods
of concrete and tin barracks where poor garment-making families live.
By the time fire-brigade officers showed up ten minutes later, an
agitated crowd of hundreds had already gathered and was quickly swelling
into a crowd of thousands, hindering authorities’ ability to access the
site. “It was a human sea,” says Islam.
Lutfer Rahman, whose wife, Rina, worked at Rana Plaza, was sipping
tea in their damp one-room home when a neighbor yelled through his
doorway: The plaza was gone. Lutfer and Rina had married in their
hard-bitten farming village and, like legions of people, moved to Dhaka
for better prospects. They soon had two daughters, Arifa and Latifa,
and Lutfer had supported the family by pulling a rickshaw until asthma
forced him to quit. So Rina had become the breadwinner, a factory helper
passing materials to sewing operators for 5,000 taka ($62) a month.
Now, for the first time since he’d given up his rickshaw, Lutfer ran:
about half a mile through the winding labyrinth of dirt lanes and
workshops, past blacksmiths and brick kilns, trailed by his daughters.
They reached the site just as two bodies were pulled from the wreckage,
neither of them Rina’s. Lutfer, overwhelmed by the rising din of sirens
and shouting, bent over to catch his breath.
At the edge of the plaza, Islam saw a passage that led to a public
prayer room and could hear voices calling from within, but he did not
dare go inside; he was too shaken by the destruction he’d just witnessed
and figured he would be of better use by simply opening up his shop as a
place rescuers could use. Within minutes a sixth-floor worker with a
broken back was brought in. Islam gave her a drink and washed her head
wounds until an ambulance was ready. Outside, victims with minor
injuries were sliding down repurposed bolts of fabric to safer ground
while packs of rescuers, including Islam’s younger brother, climbed the
stairs of the building next door, hammering through walls to access
crawl spaces where survivors might be trapped.
Deep inside the rubble, entombed in pitch black, Paki Begum awoke to a
stabbing pain that seemed to swallow her whole. She could hear others
nearby. When her eyes adjusted to the darkness, she saw the massive
concrete beam that pinned her down and a man’s head crushed between the
beam and her thigh. She looked to her right and saw the clothing of her
sewing assistant, only to find his stomach organs spilling out. Another
man lay to her left, his hand bent underneath her back. She wrenched the
hand out to see if he was still alive but felt no life.
Farther off, she could just make out the panicked voices of rescuers
and tried to call to them, but her voice was muted by the concrete that
enclosed her. Debris fell on her face. The jagged slab that hung above
her, angled like a reaper’s blade, seemed poised to slide downward. She
started screaming, choking with each breath. The heat was stifling. In
between calls for help, she would pass out. At one point, she pulled the
leg of a dead body under her head for support. In the minutes she used
to catch her breath, she prayed to Allah.
The previous afternoon, when she and hundreds of fellow workers
returned to Rana Plaza from their lunch break, they were prevented from
entering the building. Cracks two inches deep had formed in the walls
spanning several floors, prompting the bosses of the five garment
factories housed inside to send employees home for the day. The break
was sudden and welcome. Since starting work at Ether Tex Ltd. eight
months before, Paki had been pulling twelve- to fourteen-hour shifts
six days a week at her sewing machine for 8,500 taka ($110) a month,
with the rare day off. After she and other workers were sent home that
day, a local engineer was called in to inspect the cracks and had
declared the building “vulnerable,” recommending that it be sealed off
and examined by experts from Bangladesh’s leading technical university.
Word of the cracked columns reached a local TV station, which sent a
crew to the site. A cameraman slipped inside and filmed for just a few
minutes before being driven off by Rana’s men. A story about the cracks
was broadcast later that evening.
The next day, Rana Plaza was open for business. On returning to work,
Paki was nervous; she’d heard about the cracks, as had almost everyone
else in the bastis, and was unsure about what to do. Some workers didn’t
bother to show up, while scores of others gathered in front of the
building but refused to go inside. Next door, the bank that normally
would have been open for business was locked and closed. At Rana’s
behest, factory managers ordered workers inside.
Up on the fifth story, amid Ether Tex’s sprawling rows of electric
sewing machines and fluorescent lights, the mood was charged with
anxious chatter over how bad the cracks really were. Paki and her
coworkers approached a supervisor to voice their worries but were
reminded of a fast-approaching shipment deadline for an important
Western client: If they protested any further, he told them, they would
lose a month’s wages.
At 8:45 a.m. the power abruptly cut off, a common occurrence in
greater Dhaka; with a power-starved population of more than 15 million,
disruptions are known to happen up to fifty times in a single day.
Within seconds, four diesel generators, stationed at the rear of the
building near the main staircase, automatically started up, and the
factory lights flickered on again. The generators weighed several metric
tons each, and their relentless vibrations pulsed through the building,
now filled with more than three thousand workers spread from end to end
and across the weak points at its core.
Paki was attaching a zipper to a pair of denim jeans when the floor
and pillars began to shake all around her. A deafening clap echoed
across the floor that sent throngs of workers, most of them women,
scrambling for the stairwells. At less than five feet tall and weighing
no more than eighty pounds, Paki was knocked down as soon as she made
her move. The floor below her heaved, then fell away as she plunged
headlong into a cascade of calving concrete and machinery, where
everything went black.
The collapse is thought to have started with a column near the
southwest corner of the seventh floor, triggering a chain reaction that
took less than a minute from start to finish. Before army soldiers
arrived to lead the rescue, locals with little more than plastic sandals
and bare hands emerged as first responders.
One of them, Faisal Muhid, showed up with simple tools—a flashlight,
a hammer, and pliers. It was the first time the twenty-nine-year-old
high-school teacher had seen a dead body, and the mound of concrete
slabs and twisted rebar was far more intimidating than he had thought
while watching the live broadcast that had stirred him to action. He
scoped the front of the building and saw a passage that appeared to
offer a way inside, but it was shifting under the weight of other
rescuers. Walking, then scrambling on all fours, Muhid traversed to the
backside of the building, where he found a dark cleft. No authorities
were around, so he ducked inside. Muhid turned on his flashlight and
spotted two bodies, a man and a woman with their arms entangled. The
sight froze him in place, and for a moment he wondered if they were
related. Walking under a beam, he could see the outline of several more
bodies whose limbs dangled from between two collapsed slabs. One of
them, a man caked in blood-soaked debris, seemed to stir. Muhid reached
for the man’s hair and the scalp slid away. As jarring as this was,
Muhid didn’t retreat. Over the next three days, he would only go deeper
into the wreckage, coming to know and care for the dead in a way he
never could have predicted.
Another rescuer, a wiry bricklayer named Rafiqul Islam, was working
at a nearby construction site when the plaza went down. By noon he’d
brought six people out on his back, and for the better part of the next
few weeks he would pull the living and the dead out by any
means—digging them out at first, then cutting them out. When there were
no more people left to save, he set about unearthing what remains he
could find.
At first, everybody was taken to the same place, hustled into
ambulances and requisitioned flatbed trucks that sped off to the Enam
Medical College & Hospital, less than a
mile away. For four days, a torrent of dead and wounded kept rolling
into the hospital’s parking lot. Dozens of first-year medical students,
called in to support the staff, moved survivors relay-style,
off-loading them onto gurneys and wheelchairs and wheeling them as fast
as they could up to the sixth- and seventh-floor wards, where sheets
blanketed the floor to accommodate the crush of patients. Within a day,
the 750-bed facility was slammed to capacity.
Among those trying to make order out of the chaos was Taslima Akhter.
A photographer by profession and activist by impulse, she’d spent years
documenting the lives of garment workers, many of whom she’d
befriended. Her camera was slung around her shoulder when she turned up
at Rana Plaza, but she was too preoccupied with the rescue to snap a
single image. Along with members from her People’s Solidarity Movement,
the self-described Communist walked to Enam to help with the blood
drive and counsel relatives of Rana Plaza workers who were flooding the
hospital lobby, desperate for answers. She began compiling a list of the
missing in her notebook. At dusk, Akhter returned to the factory site
with friends who had set up a tent to collect food and supplies for
families and rescuers. Social media was fast emerging as a parallel
channel for mustering relief, and Akhter had more than a thousand
followers with whom she kept in touch via status updates and calls
for provisions.
Akhter preferred to record the daily lives of women garment
workers—at home brushing their hair, striding to the factories in the
morning, protesting for better wages, fists in the air, or back at home
putting their children to sleep. In Bangladesh’s male-dominated
culture, she admired how women found a new identity through industry,
earning a living in spite of the harsh labor conditions that kept them
perpetually at risk. Her photographs, taken in cramped slum dwellings
and tenements, captured a quiet dignity invisible to most outsiders. Yet
a responsibility to record the more familiar horrors gnawed at her
conscience. Five months before, at the Tazreen Fashions factory in
Dhaka, where a fire killed some 117 workers, she had spent long hours
photographing bodies charred beyond recognition; Rana Plaza demanded
even more attention. Around 2 a.m. on Friday, two friends insisted she
follow them to see bodies they’d discovered at the rear.
Akhter relented.
The ground beneath her feet trembled as local rescuers led the group
to the back of the site, still absent any authorities. She was hesitant,
but, seeing her camera, the locals insisted she get a closer look.
Climbing up into a narrow passage, Akhter peered inside. Flashlights
illuminated a man and woman locked in an embrace, their faces powdered
with dust. Akhter paused for a minute, maybe two. Then she raised her
camera. It was the last picture she took that night. Consumed by the
rescue effort, it wasn’t until a couple of days later that she uploaded
the images to her Facebook page, at which point they quickly went viral.
By Friday morning, the death toll had risen to 142, making the
Rana Plaza collapse already one of the worst manufacturing disasters on
record. Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina declared April 25 a national day of
mourning, ordering the arrest of Sohel Rana and the owners of the five
garment factories that leased the building. Within days, two owners and a
pair of government engineers were taken into custody, while Rana’s
father and wife were arrested and questioned on his whereabouts. Rana
himself was nowhere to be found.
As army soldiers, firefighters, police, and volunteers sorted through
the wreckage, outrage multiplied throughout the city and beyond. A
1,500-strong mob in central Dhaka threw rocks at the headquarters of
the Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association (BGMEA),
the country’s powerful trade body; another mob attacked a building where
garment factories remained open despite Hasina’s proclamation.
Elsewhere in Savar and in the garment-making industrial zones of
Gazipur, Ashulia, and Narayanganj, at least two factories were torched
while scores of workers smashed vehicles and clashed with police,
demanding the death penalty for Rana.
Though government agencies and the police knew about the cracks the
day before the plaza collapsed and could have shut the building down,
Rana was roundly blamed for convincing factory managers that the
building was safe. Speaking to the media, an official with Dhaka’s
development authority ticked off a list of building-code violations,
including substandard materials and two illegally constructed floors,
but failed to mention that Bangladesh’s Fire Service &
Civil Defense had signed off on Rana Plaza’s building and safety
compliance multiple times—giving it an “A” rating as recently as April
4, according to a BGMEA official.
As in previous factory disasters, including the fire at Tazreen
Fashions, activists scouring the rubble found connections to well-known
brands: At Rana Plaza they found tags for Italy’s Benetton and Spain’s
Mango, Canada’s Joe Fresh and Ireland’s Primark. And from the US,
Walmart. Some of those companies, such as Primark and Loblaw Companies
Limited (which owns Joe Fresh), quickly acknowledged their reliance on
the fallen factories and offered condolences, with a pledge to help
families and improve working conditions. Others, such as Benetton and
Walmart, issued flat denials, saying that no orders were being filled at
the time of the collapse, or that orders had been subcontracted
without their authorization. (Benetton has since entered negotiations
for compensation, and Walmart has begun studies to analyze its impact
in Bangladesh.)
Western diplomats, for their part, concluded that Bangladeshi
authorities were ill prepared for an urban-rescue operation of this
magnitude. Hours after the collapse, a senior UN official in Dhaka
reminded the director general of the fire brigade that the government
was part of a network of disaster-prone countries eligible for
international search-and-rescue assistance. The UK followed up with an
offer to dispatch an urban-rescue team equipped with potentially
life-saving micro cameras and scanners that could detect body heat
under the rubble. The offer went ignored. Internal documents obtained by
London’s Daily Telegraph later revealed that Bangladesh
rejected outside help, fearing damage to national pride. The documents
reportedly noted “face-saving” measures suggested by foreign diplomats
to help avoid offending Bangladeshi officials.
More than a day had passed, fading in and out of consciousness,
before Paki Begum heard a man’s voice booming down from above: a
passage. She called back with what she could muster. A bottle of water
tumbled down the shaft and rolled within reach. Paki shared it with two
others nearby, a middle-aged woman and a girl she had assumed were dead
but who were instead knocked out by the fall. The water was a cool
respite from sucking the sweat from their clothing.
A pair of doctors reached them several hours later. A beam was lifted
off the older woman’s leg, and the girl’s arm was freed from where it
had been trapped. But Paki was stuck; they could scarcely move the beam
that pinned her down, and she could feel the bones in her thighs
grinding under their added weight as they tried. “It’s too much,” she
pleaded with them. “I can’t stand it anymore.” Within minutes, a third
man shimmied down the shaft, hacksaw in hand.
Paki relented. “Please cut off my legs, but don’t delay anymore,” she
said. “You are pulling out dead bodies, but I am still alive. Rescue
me. I beg you, brothers.”
One of the doctors produced a syringe of anesthetic before pausing to
ask if she had any legal guardians. Paki named her husband, Jahangir,
but could not remember his cell-phone number. “If your legs are cut
off, you will get crippled,” the doctor warned. “Your husband and family
will no longer want you.”
“I don’t care!” Paki shot back at him. “I have two children—I want to see them again.”
The doctor, a large man, took the hacksaw and set to work, but he
couldn’t get enough leverage in the cramped space to drive through the
bone. The newcomer, Hira, took his place, bearing down as Paki screamed,
until finally she passed out. Some time later, the wail of an ambulance
stirred her awake.
As survivors were rushed from the rubble to Enam Hospital, the dead
were carried off to a different station, shuttled on flatbed trucks past
the hospital to Adhar Chandra High School. The sprawling cricket
grounds in front of the school were thronged with workers’ relatives,
some of them milling around in nervous groups, some camped out on tarps
with documents and pictures. Food had been brought in: rice, biscuits,
bananas, juice, and other donated goods (which later included body bags
and air fresheners to mask the rank odor of the corpses). Whenever a
vehicle arrived with more bodies, scrums of people rushed forward,
yanking at limbs. Unclaimed bodies were lined up cheek by jowl under the
white colonnade that rings the school, left to fester in the heat.
City officials later admitted that a lack of oversight and a gross
underestimation of the scale of the disaster allowed people to make off
with the wrong bodies in the days that followed. Some of those seizures
may have been unintentional; many of the victims’ features were damaged
beyond recognition, and in their haste to bury bodies in accord with
Islamic custom, overwrought families made rushed decisions. The lure of
cash may have also played a part, since authorities were doling out
20,000-taka payments to help cover burial costs. In at least ten
instances, bodies wrongfully taken had to be exhumed from distant
villages and returned to family members.
Hunched over in a makeshift passage, Faisal Muhid gazed into a
mess of hanging limbs that brought to mind a roadside meat stand. Behind
him, a voice called out: “Brother, please save me. I need my mother.”
He turned around to find a man pinned under a beam, barely breathing,
his legs swollen and purple. The man asked for painkillers, but all
Muhid had to offer was water. A woman called to him from the far side of
the beam. “Brother, please save us,” she cried out. “For god’s sake.
Don’t go without me. I have two children.” She added that there were
three others trapped with her.
Muhid could feel the building shift. He climbed back out from the
passage and onto the top floor, where he spotted a group of official
personnel below. He called down to them, holding up his fingers and
placing them on his heart to signify the people still alive inside. “Panch jon,”he
shouted—five people. They turned away. Incensed by their apathy, Muhid
still took care as he climbed down so as not to unsettle the broken
concrete, and walked over to the command tent and made his case with a
presiding officer, who was disinterested. “That part of the building is
collapsing,” he said flatly. “It’s time to get out.”
Soon Muhid was back in the hole, calling into the darkness. No one
responded. Shaken, he walked home to rest and vowed never to return to
the site. But sleeping was impossible; Muhid’s interlude in the plaza’s
horrific underworld had struck some inner chord that he couldn’t fully
understand—a strange kind of comfort in the presence of the most
desperate, the dying and the dead. “It was scary,” he said, “but it was
like an addiction. I spoke with them and said I felt their pain. My
feeling was that their spirits were coming over me.”
Rafiqul Islam, the bricklayer, had likewise found a sense of purpose
that he’d never known before. At one point he became trapped and spent
seven stifling hours in the black, gasping for air. Four other men were
with him; one who was too large to be extracted died in the hole. The
incident made Rafiqul second-guess his choice to volunteer—and his
friends encouraged him to quit—but a dogged compulsion to extract
survivors sent him back into the rubble the next day, this time with a
hacksaw. “I was only thinking that I have a great responsibility to pull
out bodies, even if it kills me,” he says. “I had no choice.”
He knew that time was running out. The combined effects of
dehydration, rapid blood loss, and low oxygen meant that most victims
who’d survived the collapse would not live beyond the seventy-two-hour
mark. Fewer people were being pulled out alive, and an animal intensity
had overcome the living: The first man Rafiqul attempted to extricate
by hacksaw tried to bite him. His left arm and leg were pinned down, so
Rafiqul bound the man’s free arm and covered his mouth with a piece of
cloth before using his blade without anesthetic. It was the first of
eight people he would cut out by hand.
At Enam Hospital, doctors worked around the clock to mend the hack
jobs of volunteer rescuers. The number of wounded tested the endurance
and expertise of the staff, but they found a rhythm. “The place was
oversaturated,” says Dr. Khalilur Rahman, the head of orthopedic surgery
who led triage, “but we never stopped working together.” Medical
students maintained reasonable order in the jam-packed wards as
relatives tried to push through; supplies from other hospitals
multiplied over the days. But the support barely kept pace with the
mounting pile of corpses in a white-tiled basement washing room: dead
Rana Plaza garment workers mistakenly delivered to the hospital
for treatment.
Though her bleeding had slowed to a drip, Paki was in severe shock
when nurses hauled her onto Rahman’s operating table. To create a
prosthetic-ready stump, he trimmed back the femur bones protruding from
her thighs to allow muscle and tissue to heal over them like a cushion.
By now her right thigh was infected, necessitating a second operation
and large amounts of blood transfusion. Luckily, the hospital’s blood
bank was flush (by Saturday, deliveries from other hospitals had to be
sent back).
When she awoke, several days after the collapse, her husband,
Jahangir, was standing at her bedside. He flashed his betel-stained
teeth and held her hand firmly with both of his. “Everything will be
fine,” he said. She thought about her children, the work she could no
longer perform. She stared at where the bedsheet fell flat just past her
thighs. But she was relieved to be alive.
Four days into the Rana Plaza rescue, Abul Khair was burnishing
his reputation as a national hero. A veteran rescue firefighter with
copper skin, close-cropped, silver hair, and a raspy voice from smoking
two packs a day, he’d made a living throwing himself into one disaster
after another—diving into fierce currents to retrieve the victims of
overloaded ferry boats that frequently sink in the country’s 230-odd
waterways; staying underwater for six hours at a stretch to locate the
body of a single missing boy; scaling multi-story factories to free
hundreds of workers trapped in a blaze—all for several dollars an hour,
no health insurance or overtime pay. At the disaster site, Khair was in
his element: thirty-seven, then twenty-two, and another eleven people
saved in succession. But the heat soon began to sap his strength,
claiming more victims than he and rescuers could reach in time. By
Sunday afternoon, only five people had been saved. The deeper Khair and
his team descended, the more dead bodies they discovered.
Then, late on Sunday afternoon, Khair heard a woman’s voice in the
depths: “Brother, save me, help.” He worked his way closer, keeping a
conversation going—her name was Shahina, she told him. Then supervisors
ordered him to the surface: A section of roof appeared ready to fall at
any moment, and the entire rescue was temporarily called off. Khair
insisted on going deeper, and ordered the installation of bottle jacks
and wood logs to stabilize the broken concrete. Saline water was
funneled down to the woman below. Once the improvised supports were in
place, he descended again, pulling himself through inches at a time. It
took several hours for Khair to reach the concrete beam that separated
him from Shahina. Though four oxygen lines had been run down into the
pile to sustain the air-starved workers, Khair found himself gasping by
the time he reached her. He cracked apart the beam with a hammer, then
took a hacksaw to the rebar inside. When Khair finally managed to cut
out a hole large enough to squeeze through, he could see Shahina in her
torn white and green kameez, a gash on her forehead. He poked his head through and saw that her two companions were dead.
Shahina tried to squeeze through the passage but couldn’t fit; her
clothing snagged on the concrete. Khair insisted that she take off her
clothes. “I’m your brother,” he assured her, “and your life is most
important.” Shahina did so, and Khair, stretched out on his belly,
pulled her by her arms. But the space was tight, and her breasts scraped
the wall. “I’m poor—I don’t have a husband, but I have an
eighteen-month-old son,” she said. His name was Robin. “Please don’t
damage my breasts,” she begged. “I must breastfeed him.”
Exhausted from hours of effort, Khair reluctantly went up for air. He
procured some bottles of shampoo and suggested that his boss send
someone else down; his hands could no longer grip. A volunteer rescuer,
Mohammad Kaikobad, went down the hole with a cutter machine. In all the
haste, everyone failed to remind him that the oxygen being pumped into
the shaft had made it highly combustible. As Kaikobad began cutting into
the rebar, a spark triggered a clap-blast that shook the building.
Smoke pushed the rescuers back. By the time they reached Kaikobad,
dragging him out by his legs, then smothering his flaming clothes with a
blanket, his body was a patchwork of third-degree burns. (Kaikobad was
rushed to a military hospital in Savar, then moved to Singapore, where
he succumbed to his injuries. He was later buried with state honors.)
Firefighters doused nearly two-dozen tunnels that wound from the
roof to the lower floors. Though they couldn’t extinguish the fire, they
did bring it under control and continued to send water down the shaft
as Khair descended yet again. He found Shahina’s lifeless, unburned body
a fair distance from where he’d left her: As the fire raged, she had
pushed herself through the hole, only to asphyxiate in the smoke-filled
passage, where the oxygen levels were poor enough that Khair himself
blacked out. He would regain consciousness at an area hospital later
that day.
By Monday morning, the odds of finding anyone alive were slim. At
around noon, Brigadier General Azmal Kabir, the rescue supervisor, told
reporters that the second phase of work was underway, “assuming that
there is no survivor.” Army engineers began using hydraulic cranes to
cut and move large slabs, to ensure no secondary collapses. Meanwhile,
relatives of the missing set about finding their dead.
The walls of Enam Hospital were soon plastered with posters of
the missing—a mishmash of old family photographs, ID cards, birth
certificates, and fake documents used to secure jobs for underage
workers, whatever families could muster. The faces extended down the
street to the periphery of Adhar Chandra High School, where crowds of
relatives held vigil from dawn until dusk.
The trucks from Rana Plaza were coming less frequently now, the
families more craven each time a new one pulled up. Scuffles broke out
among people competing for a closer look, though the combination of
radical injuries and decomposition accelerated by near 100-degree heat
made identification difficult. People walking single file under the
colonnade scanned the remains, bloated and decomposing under the
slanting sun. Now and then the pall was worsened by the fitful screams
of someone finding a loved one.
Short of breath, Lutfer Rahman sat under a tree while Arifa and
Latifa searched for their mother. Initially the girls were
horror-stricken, crying hand in hand as they went. But numbness
eventually set in, such that unzipping body bags seemed almost routine.
If a face was too badly damaged, the girls looked for clues in the small
plastic bags containing personal effects that were tucked next to
the body.
This collecting of possessions was Faisal Muhid’s doing. When he
first arrived at the high-school grounds twelve days earlier, his anger
over the Rana Plaza rescue was replaced by astonishment at the
treatment of the dead. Though police were manning a table near the gate,
there was no effort to maintain order among hundreds of people
searching for victims’ bodies. As he stared in disbelief, an elderly
woman grabbed his arm. “Give me some bones, please give me some bones so
I can bury them,” she said.
The plea resonated with the right person. Along with a genuine
sympathy for garment workers and their families, Muhid was possessed by a
macabre yet unexplored fascination with death. He was a fan of Gunther
von Hagens, an infamous German anatomist and promoter of Body Worlds, a
traveling exhibition of corpses whose flesh is preserved by
plastination, a technique he invented that pushes plastic directly into
tissue cells. Muhid had watched him at work on a National Geographic
Channel series, and it occurred to him that
some of von Hagens’s more basic methods could be applied to the plaza
victims. He called his brother, Saijul, and gave him a shopping list:
paint brushes, tissue paper, gloves, air freshener, bleaching powder,
and alcohol.
“Have you gone mad?” his brother exclaimed when Muhid started to
clean the face of one of the bodies. Perhaps he had, but the
circumstances were dire and Muhid was already consumed by the task. He
developed a ritual to mitigate the decay: collecting anything that might
help families with identification—keys, cell phones, papers, teeth,
nose pins, and tabij, a kind of prayer amulet—then sealing it all in ziplocked bags that were tucked next to the bodies.
People kept their distance, not sure what to do. Touching women’s
bodies was taboo, even more so when they were deceased. Yet Muhid knew
his examinations were critical to bringing grieving families some
closure. (He whispered apologies to dead women as he handled them,
assuring them that they would be reunited with their families, that they
had moved on to a better realm.) When a police officer walked over and
denounced him, he asked bluntly: Who would take his place? The officer
walked away.
As the days wore on and temperatures soared, the rotting flesh grew
harder to manage. At one point, while Muhid tried to straighten a head
before cleaning it, a mandible came undone; another time, a sudden push
from onlookers sent his forearm through the side of a face. Authorities
verbally harassed him but never lingered, nor did they provide any
supplies or monitor the crowds. Personal items were stolen, and the
zippers of the body bags frayed from overuse, leaving some of the
corpses exposed.
Muhid preferred to work at night, when things were quiet and fewer
people were around. One night, heading off to rest in a classroom, Muhid
was intercepted by a volunteer who’d rushed over to alert him—dogs had
arrived. Through a window, they could see a pack of five strays nipping
at a body bag. Muhid ran out and cursed at the animals, but they
refused to back off. He then called his friend, Iresh Zaker, a
well-known actor, and relayed what was happening. “There are still
seventy here and there’s no one guarding the gate, no media around,” he
said, pressing Zaker to get authorities to come. Zaker made some calls,
and within the hour a team of police officers arrived and beat the
animals back with batons.
Muhid’s diligence paid off. On May 10, after viewing well over 500
corpses, twelve-year-old Arifa Rahman found her mother. Her body was
badly damaged; Arifa may have passed her by several times. But the newly
added name on the body-bag tag read: Rina Rahman, husband: Lutfer
Rahman, district: Rangpur, taken from a stained document Muhid had
removed from a pocket. The family’s search had ended. It also secured
them a 200,000-taka ($2,500) check from an ad hoc relief fund
administered by the prime minister. They received another 20,000 taka
for burial costs.
The Rahmans loaded Rina onto a rickshaw bed and headed home. In the
family compound, relatives washed the body and cloaked it in a cotton
shroud. That same day, Rina was buried in a small graveyard near their
house. The land is overgrown and no headstone marks her plot, but Lutfer
knows the place.
A Slow Reckoning
Sohel Rana grew up the second son of a land broker named Abdul
Khalek, who, with profits from the sale of a parcel in Savar, opened a
mustard-oil factory on the site where Rana Plaza was later built.
Khalek cultivated ties with well-known film actors and politicians, a
wheeler-dealer style that Rana would learn to emulate even more
aggressively. He had a cold temperament well suited to the thuggery and
intimidation tactics that are a mainstay of Bangladesh’s cutthroat local
politics. In 1996, the Awami League party, chief rivals of the BNP,
came to power, and the president of the party’s student wing tapped
Rana, just a year after he’d dropped out of high school, to be his
political aide. Two years later, Rana was promoted to secretary.
Rana’s profile grew after he befriended Murad Jong, an aspiring
politician who became the Awami League leader of Savar in 2001, due in
large part to Rana’s muscle. When the Awami League took back the
government seven years later, Jong returned the favor by unilaterally
naming Rana to a leadership post of the Jubo League, the party’s youth
front. In parliament, Jong used his clout to manipulate police and
extort protection money from business owners, with Rana as his
faithful enforcer.
The rise of the country’s ready-made garment industry caused land
values around industrial suburbs like Savar to skyrocket. And when a
dispute between Rana’s father and his Hindu business partner erupted
over the plaza site, the Rana family dispatched thugs to seize the
property by force. The partner complained to local authorities, and says
that Rana threatened him for doing so. The police, meanwhile, did
nothing. Flexing his connections in the Savar mayor’s office, Rana
secured a construction permit and began laying the groundwork for the
plaza, erecting the six-story building on hastily filled-in swampland,
using cheap materials. At its August 2009 opening ceremony, Jong was
the guest of honor.
On the wall behind Rana’s desk, in the basement office where he
poured whiskey for local cops and political players alike, hung a framed
photograph of Jong kissing Rana’s forehead, the same photograph he had
plastered on walls around Savar. Their relationship was crucial to
Rana’s ability to prosper in both open and underground markets. While
presiding over a business portfolio that included brick kilns and the
sale of garment overruns, officials say Rana and his associates kept a
hand in the drug trade.
Most profitable of all were the garment-factory rentals at Rana
Plaza. By 2011, five floors were being leased out to garment
manufacturers, contributing the bulk of the plaza’s 1.5 million euro
annual rental income. Three years earlier, in March 2008, Mayor Refat
Ullah granted Rana a permit to add additional stories to the building,
without approval from the city development authority. By 2013, a ninth
floor was in the works.
When the cracks appeared, on April 23, Rana was dismissive. “Don’t
make my life miserable,” he told concerned factory owners, asserting the
building was safe for another hundred years. He was also unmoved when
the local engineer who’d been called in to inspect the site was shaken
by the large cracks he’d found in the building’s pillars and walls. For
days, Rana had been planning a counterprotest against the BNP-ordered hartal,
and his reputation in Savar hinged in large part on his ability to
mobilize grassroots defiance. On the morning of April 24, he was in his
basement office with colleagues calling people by phone, haranguing them
to report for work. When workers outside refused, he joined the factory
owners to bully them inside.
Oddly, the basement turned out to be one of the safest places in the
building. After the building caved in, bodyguards called Rana’s cell
phone, discovered he was trapped in his office, and dug him out. Three
days later, he was arrested in the border town of Benapole while
preparing to cross into India. His arrest was announced during a news
conference at the disaster site, where weary crowds burst into raucous
cheers and chanted for his hanging.
The menial workforce has always been susceptible to exploitation,
and for nearly a century the garment industry’s sweatshops have acted
as de facto laboratories for a variety of abuses and endangerment. Other
than mining, it is difficult to name another industry that has produced
so many public, large-scale catastrophes. And yet, for all the lives
damaged and lost in these sweatshops, little has been done in the way
of reform.
When the rescue and recovery operations were called off at Rana Plaza
on May 13, seventeen days after the collapse, at least 1,100 people had
been killed and some 2,500 injured, making it the deadliest event in
the history of the garment industry. Perhaps it was the scale of the
disaster, or the timing, occurring so soon after the fire at Tazreen
Fashions. Likely both factors forced the industry’s hand, so that by
summer 2013, more than seventy companies, most of them European, adopted
the Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh—a five-year,
legally binding commitment that subjects factories to independent
inspections and public reports while requiring retailers to fund annual
safety upgrades of up to $500,000. (As of March 2014, more than 150
companies have adopted the accord.) Participants include Swedish
mega-retailer H&M (the largest buyer of ready-made garments from
Bangladesh), France’s Carrefour, Britain’s Marks &
Spencer, and the Inditex Group, the Spanish clothing giant that owns
the Zara chain. Prior to the collapse, just two companies—American PVH
Corp (Tommy Hilfiger, Calvin Klein) and Germany’s Tchibo—had signed on.
The about-face drew comparisons to the infamous Triangle Shirtwaist
Factory fire in New York City in 1911. On March 25 of that year, 146
garment workers, mainly immigrant women in their teens and twenties,
perished in a factory that had been locked by owners. The horror of
workers jumping several stories to their deaths sparked an unprecedented
public outcry that ultimately led to improved safety standards,
stronger unions, and limits on working hours—a turning point for labor
rights in the United States. Scott Nova, the executive director of the
Washington, DC–based Worker Rights Consortium, hailed the post–Rana
Plaza safety accord as a “sweeping transformation” that departs from the
failed models and evasions shown by brands in the past.
American companies Walmart, Gap, J. C. Penney, Sears, Target, and
others refused to commit to the accord and in early July announced an
alternate five-year plan, the Alliance for Bangladesh Worker Safety. It
parallels the Accord on Fire Safety but allows the retailer to
“opt-out” of the agreement if disaster strikes. Critics labeled their
effort a foot-dragging attempt to avoid costly, long-term investments,
expressing doubt over whether the companies could legitimately police
themselves—noting, for instance, how an audit conducted by Walmart at
Tazreen Fashions the year before the accident pointed out obvious fire
hazards, and yet the company subsequently approved a higher
fire-safety rating.
To some observers, the Accord-Alliance divide was emblematic of
clashing approaches in the way European and American companies do
business abroad. But in the months after Rana Plaza fell, big-box
Western retailers linked to the complex were uniformly apathetic toward
victims and their families. Statements of sympathy were concluded with
denials. No long-term payment packages were formalized, neither to the
families of victims nor the rescue volunteers who were left traumatized
by the experience. Only nine of twenty-nine firms sourcing from the
complex attended September compensation talks in Geneva. By the time the
talks ended, only one company, the Irish budget-fashion chain Primark,
had agreed to provide short-term aid. Since then, other brands have
slowly begun to follow Primark’s lead, signing on to a proposed $40
million compensation fund, though none are American. And while these
companies have indeed made contributions to the fund, there is no
mechanism that guarantees it will reach $40 million. Nor is there a
timetable for when families will begin receiving payments.
As rescue gave way to recovery, Rashida Begum returned to Rana
Plaza almost every day with a photo of her daughter Nasima in a plastic
sheath. Just sixteen, with almond features and a fair complexion that
made the darker Rashida proud, Nasima had worked three years in garment
factories, two at New Wave Bottoms, on the plaza’s third floor. In
mourning, Rashida would kneel in front of the barbed wire that
surrounded the disaster area and wait, along with other relatives of the
missing, for the off chance that a government agent or brand
representative would come and give them something for their loss. Most
days were spent under a searing sun, staring at a dark pool of water
that marked where the plaza once stood. The void was heartrending, and
yet somehow, Rashida says, she felt solace lingering at the last place
where her daughter was alive.
After dozens of amputee victims were paid large, well-publicized
settlements, some relatives of the confirmed dead received payments of
about half as much, with promises of more. Hundreds of others without
positive identification of recovered remains, like Rashida, got nothing.
According to the Bangladesh Institute of Labor Studies, none of the
four thousand families affected by the tragedy received the full
payments promised by the government or the BGMEA. Protests over back pay
and compensation broke out around the city, including one occasion when
police fired tear gas and rubber bullets at former workers and
victims’ relatives.
In mid-September, Rashida and her husband traveled to the forensic
lab on the campus of Dhaka University, where, in a sterile tenth-floor
chamber, bone samples were tested for the purposes of finding a match to
the missing. Samples were stored in batches of test tubes that vibrated
on metal trays, part of the process of decalcification that helped
glean a genetic profile. This process was the couple’s last hope for any
government compensation. They had submitted blood samples back in May. A
match would qualify them for 100,000 taka (about $1,250)—a pittance
for a child’s life, but no small sum for a Savar family without a
breadwinner; a negative result would spell the end of their fight for a
settlement. After DNA samples were extracted, all unidentified remains
were buried at a cemetery in south Dhaka, a stone’s throw from where
unidentified victims of the Tazreen fire had been laid to rest.
After five months of waiting, Rashida was greeted by a technician
with disappointing news: Final results would not be ready for at least
several more weeks, at which time they would be published in local
newspapers. The technician explained that software was on its way from
the US to help sort through tens of thousands of possible DNA matches,
but that more time was needed. In the end, many relatives would be left
empty-handed: Nearly 550 blood samples had been submitted for 322
unidentified victims.
Picking up her folder for the long trip back to Savar, Rashida was
forlorn. “We go from place to place for some aid, but they all tell us
to come back later,” she sighed. Tears carved a line down her dusted
cheeks. “It was supposed to be that we would die and our kids would bury
us, but it happened in reverse. We thought we’d see happiness when
Nasima started work. But now she’s gone.”
The headquarters of the BGMEA stands apart from the fray of
downtown Dhaka. A tower of blue-green glass surrounded by water, it is
the preserve of the country’s garment barons, accessible via a single,
guarded footbridge. As much as the trade body tries to project power and
modernity, the building is also a symbol of a corrupt industry culture.
In 2011, Bangladesh’s High Court ruled that the land had been illegally
obtained and the building constructed without proper approvals,
jeopardizing a natural drainage system that runs through the heart of
the city. The court went on to call the headquarters “a scam of abysmal
proportions” and ordered it demolished within ninety days.
Three years on, the building still stands. When I first arrived in
August 2013, I had to push through a crowd of protesters clutching
pictures of missing relatives. Rashida was not there, but Nasima’s
picture was, held by an elderly woman on Rashida’s behalf. Riot police
loitered in the parking lot below, flanked by rows of white SUVs being
carefully wiped down by their drivers. I took the stairs up to the
fourth floor, passing cracked windows that let in the odor of the stale
water below.
Reaz Bin Mahmood, the BGMEA’s co-vice president, was on time for our
meeting, no small feat in Dhaka. A flurry of underlings came into his
office with papers to sign, only to be dispatched in an authoritative
baritone. Switching to crisp English, honed as an MBA student in Texas,
he said he could give me fifteen minutes; an event was planned that
afternoon in support of Rana Plaza orphans. And what of the protesters
below? Mahmood said that compensation packages were still being worked
out with the government, while extra money was raised by BGMEA members.
Sohel Rana and the arrested factory owners should pay, he added, but the
banks had frozen their money. “We are not a profitable organization,
you know.”
Though technically true—the BGMEA is a trade body—the notion was
disingenuous. Its members form the backbone of the national economy,
with an outsized role in government, media, banking, and insurance
sectors that gives it a degree of influence rarely seen in other
countries. Of the national parliament’s 300 members, more than thirty
own garment factories outright. These owners sit on high-level
committees that regulate and administer an industry that accounts for 80
percent of the country’s total exports, exceeding $20 billion per year.
For labor activists, the association’s ongoing defiance of the court
order against its headquarters is Exhibit A that Bangladesh is a
government of garment-factory owners, for garment-factory owners.
When I pressed Mahmood about complaints that the BGMEA was not doing
enough to clean up the industry, he countered that inspections were
underway and that twenty at-risk factories had already been shut down.
“We want to do it sincerely and transparently,” he said, but the task
was immense. The BGMEA had just ten inspectors on staff, the fire
department a tenth of what it needed. The Labor Ministry was struggling
to hire more than 200 inspectors by year’s end. This shortage in
manpower was compounded by the absence of a central coordinating body
that could ensure some factories weren’t being inspected twice while
others got a pass.
Of the 5,000 registered factories around the capital, Mahmood said,
about half were operational. Assessments took anywhere from several days
to several months, after which owners had to make costly upgrades for
re-approval. All of these factors made compliance a sluggish campaign
at best. What’s more, in addition to the export factories covered under
the Accord and Alliance frameworks, there were also thousands of
second-tier facilities requiring inspection. “You have seen the traffic
in Dhaka, our communications. Everything takes longer than planned,” he
said. “But we must try.”
In late June, the United States announced it would suspend
Bangladesh’s trade privileges, citing concerns over safety hazards and
labor violations in the garment industry. The move was largely
symbolic—garments were excluded—but it rattled garment-factory
owners, who feared a similar move by the European Union, Bangladesh’s
top global customer, which buys 60 percent of the country’s
exports duty-free.
Mahmood blamed the measure on labor unions, a reckless attempt to
bring jobs back to the US. “I am a manufacturer, but if I close down my
factory I will still make a living,” he said. “But what about my
workers? At the end of the day, if the factories are closed and the
workers are unemployed, will the AFL-CIO pay their salaries?” If there
was an upshot to the “harsh” US decision, he added, it was to push
owners to fast-track safety reforms. A new workers’ rights law was on
the books, and he expected the minimum wage to increase in the coming
months. “There should be no more excuses,” he said.
My time was up, but Mahmood wasn’t finished. Grabbing the collar of
his black tunic, he went on the offensive. “A shirt like this— c’mon,
everyone knows how much it costs. Fabric, buttons, and trims”—he did
some quick calculations. “It’s very clear how much profit we’re making.
The books are very open. But no one wants to pay more.” He recalled, for
instance, an H&M executive who came to Bangladesh demanding a wage
increase at a supplier while assuring shareholders in Stockholm
beforehand that prices would not be raised.
“If you really care about the workers, you must have proper pricing,”
he insisted. “If buyers paid a little bit more, they could make sure
more money was going to wages and safety improvements—they could check
the books and talk to workers.” As a businessman with 1,500 employees,
however, he was adamant that it was consumers who needed to assume
greater responsibility. “When Rana Plaza collapsed, we saw lots of
propaganda on the streets of London and New York. But when you’re
selling three-pound jeans, everybody loves it. So you have to come out
of that mentality as a consumer. You have to stop and think: Where are
these clothes coming from, and at what cost?”
Aftermath
Although Lutfer Rahman is grateful for the government’s 200,000-taka
settlement, and hopes to someday use it to help pay for his daughters’
weddings, the fact that injured victims have received greater
compensation than the families of the dead doesn’t make sense to him.
After all, Rina supported the whole family with her wages from Rana
Plaza. “She took care of me, and made sure I had food for the day before
she left for work—
I doubt if modern-day wives care for their husbands so much,” he said when I visited him in September. He shook his head. “The future is bleak with the burden of raising two girls on my shoulders.”
I doubt if modern-day wives care for their husbands so much,” he said when I visited him in September. He shook his head. “The future is bleak with the burden of raising two girls on my shoulders.”
Asked what she missed most about her mother, twelve-year-old Arifa
gave a blank stare. The silence lingered a few seconds until Latifa, not
yet fourteen, interjected: “We are in trouble now. I don’t want to work
in a garment factory. I’m afraid of that job. But we have to survive.
My father is weak, and if I don’t earn money my sister will not be able
to continue her studies, so I must leave school.”
For what kind of work?
“What job is there,” she shot back, “except in a garment factory?”
Paki Begum, meanwhile, considers herself one of the lucky ones. Two
months after the accident, she was discharged with 2.2 million taka
($28,000) from the prime minister’s fund. While recovering in the
hospital, she befriended two fellow amputees, Shahinur and Lovely. The
women have since continued their physical therapy together at a
rehabilitation clinic, where they practice walking along parallel bars,
adjusting to the awkwardness of prosthetic limbs.
Taking a break, Paki massaged her stumps and winced from the residual
pain. She blamed Sohel Rana for what happened, but didn’t want him to
hang. “I want him to experience the suffering I’m going through—of
being a burden on others’ shoulders,” she said. Her husband, Jahangir,
brushed off the thought and teased her playfully, stealing kisses and
darting away when she tried to swat him. His affections hadn’t wavered.
Ironically, the family now has the financial security that first drew
them to the capital in the first place. To Paki, the signs were clear:
She wanted no more of the city. “I’m done with Dhaka,” she said. Once
her therapy was completed, she hoped to move back to her village to open
a small shop and raise her two children. Paki left school for good when
she was eight years old and began garment work as a teenager. She swore
her girls would not follow in her footsteps. “I want my children to
grow up educated, but let’s see what Allah does,” she said.
For his heroic efforts, Abul Khair received a promotionand was
once again thanked in person by the prime minister. But he saved credit
for the civilians who stepped up during the crisis. “We worked shoulder
to shoulder,” he told me in September, at the fire brigade headquarters
in Dhaka. “A few got in our way, but largely the volunteer rescuers were
of great help.” He still thinks of Shahina almost every day. “I spent
nearly thirty hours close to her during the rescue effort—she told me I
was like her brother,” he told me. “I think that if I could have
rescued her, I would have some peace of mind.” Before the Eid al-Fitr
holiday, Khair and his boss delivered clothing to Shahina’s son, Robin,
who insisted she was still at work and would be back by the afternoon.
Like so many volunteer rescuers at Rana Plaza, Faisal Muhid and
Rafiqul Islam have struggled to recover from the trauma of their
experiences. For both men, the scars are obvious. Fitful nights give way
to disorientation and sudden outbursts during waking hours. These days,
Muhid collects documents from victims’ families to lobby the government
to pay for those who have not received DNA confirmation. If a family
calls him in need of money, he tries to raise funds from his network of
friends, who also support him so he can afford a cocktail of
prescription drugs to alleviate his sudden mood swings. “Am I going to
be psycho?” he once asked me, wondering if he should seek
clinical help.
Rafiqul, too, has never fully surfaced since he plunged into the
rubble on April 24. Following three weeks in a hospital, he left to be
with his wife before the birth of their fourth child, a son. Since then,
his wife has been uneasy around him, and he’s had trouble holding down a
job. The first time I went to the family home, deep in one of the
bastis that recedes from the highway, I found Rafiqul standing alone in a
baking-hot tin room, bewildered in the dark. The only nod to his
sacrifice was a medal from a local workers’ rights organization that
rested on his nightstand. He confessed that thoughts of bodies he’d left
behind made him angry and restless, and that he found himself wandering
the alleys at odd hours, unable to silence the voices in his head. They
often drew him back to Rana Plaza, where he said the cries grew louder.
On the day I followed him there, he stopped at the edge of the rubble
and stared, glass-eyed. A police officer nearby told him to leave.
Rafiqul ignored him. When the officer seized his elbow to escort him
out, Rafiqul flew into a rage: “Do you know what I did here? Do you know
how many people I cut out? Touch me again and I’ll do the same for
you!” He picked up a metal rod and cocked it back. A friend intervened,
walking Rafiqul out to the street to cool off. Then another
outburst—one that silenced all the chatter at the corner tea
stand nearby.
For a month or so after the disaster, Saiful Islam’s dreams were a
tortuous loop of workers plunging from the plaza’s upper floors. These
days the pastry-shop owner grapples with what he calls a
“building-collapse phobia.” Backfiring vehicles trigger a momentary
panic. A while back, he ran a snack bar inside the Rana Plaza complex
and befriended several garment-factory workers during his time there.
Many of those same customers followed him to his store across the
street. Their absence burns, as does his resentment over the “greed and
negligence of a few men to make money at the expense of the poor.” And
yet his grief is tempered by a deep admiration for his neighbors. “I had
no idea the people of Savar were so helpful and generous, so sincere
and sympathetic,” he said to me in his shop, recalling how teams of
locals spent their own money to procure food, oxygen, and tools for the
rescue. “These efforts were, for me, a never-before-seen example of
goodness and humanity in Bangladesh.”
Despite the industry’s exploitive reputation, there are plenty of
garment factories in Bangladesh where ethical management and
profitability go hand in hand. At one six-story facility I visited in
Gazipur, the work floors were well lit and fan-cooled, with multiple
stairwells and emergency instructions posted at every exit. Working
mothers dropped their children off at a child-care center, free of
charge, and regular tea breaks were allowed at a discount canteen.
Though most of the supervisors were men, women were clearly climbing the
ranks. When I asked one young woman who was recently promoted what her
goal was, she didn’t miss a beat. “I want his job,” she said, pointing
to the startled factory manager guiding me around. Such a direct
challenge was hard to imagine elsewhere; here it was part of the
company culture.
The factory owner, a top-ten jeans producer who counts H&M and
Zara among his clients, agreed to meet with me at his corporate
headquarters in Banani, an upscale Dhaka neighborhood. In exchange for
keeping his name out of print—we’ll call him Tareq—he poured me a
coffee and offered an honest assessment of the industry that has made
him very rich.
At the time of Bangladesh’s founding in 1971, tea and jute fiber were
the top export sectors. But within a few years, its economic trajectory
was forever altered by the Multi-Fiber Arrangement, an international
trade agreement intended to limit textile exports from the developing
world. In 1977, entrepreneurs from South Korea seeking to expand their
output through quota-free partnerships established a joint venture with
a Bangladeshi firm, Desh Garments Ltd. Within several years, more than a
hundred Desh employees left to start their own companies or work with
other emerging textile companies for better pay. Preferential market
access to Europe accelerated the industry’s growth, so much so that by
1980 garments were the country’s main export.
Tareq’s break came two decades later. Under the terms of the World
Trade Organization’s Agreement on Textiles and Clothing, in effect from
1995 to 2005, more-industrialized countries agreed to export fewer
textiles while less-industrialized countries saw their export quotas
increase. The new regime was a boom for Bangladeshi garment makers, who
enjoyed quota-free access to Europe and higher exports to the US and
Canada. Seeing the writing on the wall, Tareq and some college friends
pooled their resources and started producing pants. In a highly
unregulated industry with low start-up and labor costs, dominated by
unscrupulous players, he built a loyal client base by upholding higher
quality and safety standards, which soon distinguished him among
his competitors.
Today Bangladesh is the largest garment exporter behind China, where
rising costs and the growth of a middle class are driving manufacturers
to outsource more stages of production. Despite political unrest in
early 2014 that has disrupted production and led to order cancellations,
stoking fears that summer and fall exports may plummet, Tareq is
confident that Bangladesh’s bottomless supply of cheap labor will remain
a long-term trump card against would-be competitors like Vietnam and
India. “They simply can’t compete with us on this level,” he contended.
“Business is not leaving Bangladesh.”
Tareq’s high standing among factory owners has given him access to
negotiations with top Western companies working to improve safety
conditions post–Rana Plaza. More than 170 companies have signed the
Accord and Alliance pacts combined; for those companies that fall
outside the purview of the pacts, there is a third government-sponsored
program. The three groups have agreed to common inspections enforced by
qualified inspectors, with support from the International
Labor Organization.
While he thinks it is an important step toward better regulation,
Tareq insists the “wild west” style of doing business is fundamentally
the same today. Government inspections remain toothless, since agents
have neither the resources nor the competence to conduct them
thoroughly. What’s more, he said, bribery is rampant. Although auditing
certificates on the walls of his factory attested to a sterling record
on safety compliance, he was adamant: “Everybody is taking money.”
Then there is the murky matter of subcontracting, of thousands of
lower-level suppliers that are directly or indirectly involved in the
export trade, making zippers and trimming threads, attaching buttons or
brand labels. Located in basements, on rooftops, often sign-less and
buried deep inside teeming residential areas, they defy the notion of
what a factory is and remain completely outside the purview of
inspection, with no incentive to invest in safety. The truth is that no
one knows how many of these operations actually exist. And with frequent
political violence, worker strikes, shipping delays, and other
variables that threaten to stymie production, subcontracting is the only
reliable way to improvise around a work stoppage. “There will be
subcontracting every day—you cannot stop it,” Tareq said, conceding
that he must occasionally farm out smaller stages of production to
deliver orders on time or risk losing lucrative contracts. “Officially,
the brands will say no more, that they are controlling it. But
unofficially, it will always happen, and they know it.”
Late one afternoon in Dhaka’s Mirpur district, I went to see for
myself. Without thinking twice, I walked past a security guard who must
have assumed I was a foreign buyer, passing through a rusted gate and up
a dark staircase thronged with boxes marked for shipment to Spain. The
second floor was a windowless maze, full of workers ironing T-shirts
beneath fans and fluorescent lighting. The fire-code violations were
plenty: Evacuation maps were covered with flyers; hoses were missing
from their hinges; stacks of boxes and piles of fabric blocked
emergency exits.
To my left, a man was affixing labels to a set of pink children’s
jumpsuits. The retail price tag read: five pounds sterling. Another
woman was vacuuming glittery pants with hearts and suns printed on them.
The workers who had initially looked at me with curiosity suddenly
appeared more anxious. I turned around to face a supervisor, head low,
eyes raised. “Please follow me,” he instructed.
In an office strewn with clothing samples, he asked what my business
was. I lied that I was a wholesale buyer from the United States looking
for new suppliers, that I’d come to meet with his boss on a friend’s
recommendation. I posed some questions about their factory’s pricing and
output capacity, which he said he could not answer. Instead, he took
down my false name and contact information and advised me to call back
tomorrow to set up a proper appointment. I thanked him for his time and
walked out into the fading light, joining the stream of workers on their
way home.
It was easy to presume that those strangers I encountered in the
factory had difficult jobs, but it was also reasonable to wonder how
long it would be before they found themselves in danger. Indeed, before
the Rana Plaza collapse, fires were the most common killer of garment
workers in Bangladesh, averaging two to three fires a week during some
stretches. That choked stairwell wasn’t just a random hazard, but
emblematic of the country’s more pervasive industrial horrors. Ten weeks
before the Rana Plaza tragedy, on my first visit to a Bangladeshi
garment factory, I saw a burnt-out, second-story facility on the
outskirts of Dhaka, where eight people had died in a stairwell with a
locked gate, just a few steps shy of daylight. The blackened walls were
still streaked with hand marks.
On October 8, not six months after the Rana Plaza collapse, a
late-night blaze that tore through a garment factory in Gazipur killed
seven workers. Once again, inspectors found the fire-safety equipment
lacking. Shipping records found at the scene tied a familiar cast of
Western brands to the factory, as well as connections to producers at
Rana Plaza. Spokesmen for Loblaw, the Canadian owner of the Joe Fresh
label, denied that the company had placed any orders with the Gazipur
factory and claimed to be investigating whether subcontractors had done
so. Primark maintained that it had ceased using the factory several
months before, as did Hudson’s Bay. A Walmart spokesperson responded
that the company did not have “a direct contractual relationship” with
the factory and was therefore not responsible for its safety protocols.
The Gazipur fire broke out amid a rising tide of wage protests, which
in many cases turned violent. In Dhaka’s industrial zones, hundreds of
factories were forced to close as thousands of workers turned out to
demand a minimum wage of 8,100 taka ($104) a month, about triple the
existing amount. Owners continued to resist, walking out of meetings
with labor unions and threatening shutdowns until finally, last
November, the BGMEA, under intense pressure from the government to
acquiesce ahead of elections, agreed to raise the minimum wage to 5,300
taka ($68) a month.
In December 2013, another landmark was achieved: Delwar Hossain, the
owner of Tazreen Fashions, was charged—along with his wife and eleven
factory managers—with culpable homicide. Police initially said they did
not have enough evidence to bring a case against them following the
deadly 2012 fire; some even suggested that saboteurs were responsible.
But a high-level state investigation accused Hossain of “unpardonable
negligence.” This marks the first time Bangladesh has tried to prosecute
a factory owner in its garment industry. Activists hope the case will
set a precedent. Sohel Rana, meanwhile, remains in jail ahead of his
trial, which is expected to begin this year.
On the southern edge of Dhaka, the Jurain cemetery is walled off
from the swarm of the old city. Under the shade of palms, attendants
sweep around the graves of martyred fighters from Bangladesh’s 1971 war
for independence, which freed the country from Pakistan’s control.
Farther along a brick footpath, the crow calls fade and the cemetery
becomes a field of overgrown grass rows that stretch under the open sky.
It is here that the poor and anonymous are laid to rest, a repository
for dead garment workers. It is where Rashida Begum’s search for her
daughter ended early one morning last November, after the Bangladeshi
government announced the first round of results from the DNA testing. Of
the 157 confirmed identifications, 116 were female, and Nasima was
among them.
Three days later, Rashida traveled to Jurain. Upon arriving, she was
issued a number from a list. She then walked among the rows, looking for
her daughter’s resting place. All around her, relatives wore their
grief in different ways. Some wailed hysterically, others prayed, and
others still stood motionless as photographers snapped pictures from a
respectful distance. In a far corner of the field, a group of boys
played cricket.
Rashida stopped in front of a black placard—dna #155—and dropped to
her knees, hugging the plot mound with both arms. “My dear, look. I am
here,” she said, sobbing. “You have gone too long without us, and I
cannot live without you.” Then she offered a prayer: “Oh, Allah, please
keep her in peace, for she suffered a lot in her life. We couldn’t
provide her good care, education, or even food. We are very poor, and so
we had to send her to work. Please, Allah, forgive us for our sins, and
keep her in heaven.”
She lingered for an hour or so, surrounded by grazing goats and
curious onlookers. Beyond her, receding into the hazy distance, most of
Jurain’s burial plots were empty, a vast and foreboding number of them
at the ready.
