Kalpona Akter, a former child laborer in the Bangladeshi garment industry, had begun organizing on behalf of worker safety years before the collapse. She was in the U.S. advocating for the Agreement on Bangladesh Fire and Building Safety when she heard about Rana Plaza. She immediately changed her ticket to get back home as quickly as possible and spent two weeks at the disaster site, where volunteers were digging people and bodies out of the rubble.
Plus, added Mark Anner, director of the Center for Global Workers’ Rights at Penn State, these issues cross international borders. If Bangladesh increases protections for workers but Western brands remain committed to driving costs as low as possible, those brands will eventually leave Bangladesh for cheaper labor elsewhere, pushing old labor problems into new nations.
Inside multinational brands, another response was brewing. The Agreement on Bangladesh Fire and Building Safety that Akter and others had been campaigning for before Rana Plaza was thrust into the spotlight in a new way. Where brands had been making largely ineffective “voluntary commitments” to worker safety in their supply chains for years, the agreement — which eventually became known as the Bangladesh Accord — stood out because it was legally binding.