DHAKA: A group of 25 human rights, women’s and international development organizations is asking six of Canada’s leading garment retailers to join an international plan to improve safety conditions at clothing factories in Bangladesh.

The group has asked Canadian Tire, Giant Tiger, Hudson’s Bay Co., Sears Canada, Walmart and YM Inc., the parent company of Urban Planet and Bluenotes, to join the Accord on Factory and Building Safety in Bangladesh.

Those Canadian firms are already members of a rival group known as the Alliance for Bangladesh Worker Safety.

Workers’ rights activists have charged that the Alliance is less transparent than the Accord, and that its members can more easily walk away from any commitments they make to improve factory safety.

One important difference is that with the Accord, 110 retailers, including Loblaws, owner of Joe Fresh, have accepted legal liability for the conditions in Bangladesh garment factories. If a factory burned down or collapsed, the victims’ families could use binding legal agreements to file lawsuits in Canada or the U.S. against the retailers.

The 25 groups that wrote to Canadian Tire and others include the Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario, Oxfam Canada, the United Church of Canada and Kairos, a faith-based international development agency.

The letter was sent late Tuesday and comes eight months after the Rana Plaza collapse in the Dhaka suburb of Savar. More than 1,100 workers died when the factory in which they were working collapsed. Workers, who were making garments for western retailers, had seen cracks in support walls but had been assured by supervisors that the building was safe.

While the human rights groups’ letter said it was a positive development that the Accord and Alliance have reached an agreement on factory safety standards, there remains a wide divide about inspection methods.

The Alliance’s inspection model “seems to be identical to the discredited model used by individual companies over the past decade that has failed to detect and eliminate hazardous conditions that have resulted in numerous preventable factory tragedies and the deaths of hundreds of workers.”

The Canadian activists said Walmart, Hudson’s Bay and others also have not involved worker representatives in detecting hazardous working conditions and are not planning to release to the public the status of corrective action in subpar factories.

“At the end of the day, goodwill is critical, but you need independent assessment of the conditions,” Oxfam Canada executive director Robert Fox told the Star. “The workers need the confidence that they have a voice in identifying the risks they are facing.

“For the companies the easiest thing is to self-regulate and self-monitor. But the reality is that hasn’t given workers the assurance they need and have a right to. This isn’t about perks or benefits subject to negotiations. This is about a responsibility to ensure there is rigorous inspections.”

The Star sent copies of the group’s letter to spokespeople who work for each of the companies along with a request for comment, but did not receive a response from most companies.

Walmart spokesman Alex Robertson wrote in a statement that the company is “working every day to improve worker safety in Bangladesh. In fact, we did not have sourcing in the Rana Plaza factory specifically because it did not meet our safety standards.”

Giant Tiger spokeswoman Alison Scarlett said the company would review the petition.

“We will be reviewing it with our team, and have also forwarded a copy to the Alliance to provide a response,” she wrote in an email. “While we certainly appreciate you providing us with a copy of the petition, we would appreciate some additional time to review it, and the details listed within.”

Source: thestar.com
BDST: 1216 HRS, DEC 19, 2013
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