AILSA CHANG, HOST:
Rana Plaza was a fairly typical business constructing in Bangladesh. At eight tales tall, it housed 5 garment factories close to the capital metropolis of Dhaka. And in April 2013, it collapsed in a matter of minutes. Greater than 1,100 folks died, sending shockwaves all through the world and the style business, particularly. The Rana Plaza collapse is taken into account the deadliest accident within the fashionable historical past of the garment business and one of many deadliest industrial accidents ever. Elizabeth Paton covers style for The New York Occasions. She wrote in regards to the 10-year anniversary of the catastrophe and talked to a number of survivors. She joins us now. Welcome.
ELIZABETH PATON: Thanks for having me.
CHANG: Bangladesh – I imply, it is a main hub for the style business. In latest many years, it is turn into one of many greatest exporters of clothes on the earth. Are you able to simply begin by telling us a bit about what Rana Plaza was and the dimensions of the operation on the time?
PATON: Effectively, as you touched on in your introduction, there are numerous, many buildings identical to Rana Plaza throughout Bangladesh. Bangladesh is the second-largest garment exporter on the earth after China. It is turn into an enormous sourcing hub for all of the family style manufacturers which might be in your native shops. So, , whether or not it is the Hole or it is Goal, Walmart, Amazon – all of those manufacturers supply their low-priced garments from Bangladesh. And so there have been 5 factories that day powering out hundreds of clothes – T-shirts, sweatpants, youngsters’s garments – that might later be shipped all over the world.
CHANG: Effectively, after this devastating catastrophe, there have been some reforms applied all through the style business. Are you able to inform us about a few of the most notable reforms and the way a lot of a distinction they really made within the final 10 years?
PATON: So earlier than Rana Plaza, there have been no, or little or no, formal agreements between manufacturers that sourced their clothes from the creating world and the clothes suppliers themselves that might assure the protection circumstances that these garments had been made in. So Western manufacturers did not essentially need to take a accountability within the state of the atmosphere that their garments had been being made. I believe the diploma of public outrage and horror on the quantity of people that had been killed or injured actually compelled a number of manufacturers to consider the best way that that they had been doing enterprise in these international locations.
So the identical 12 months of the collapse, 2013, there have been two agreements that had been signed between manufacturers, employee unions and manufacturing unit homeowners. And what this did was created a framework by which manufacturers must play a task within the fireplace and security circumstances that had been in place in these factories.
CHANG: Would you say that these sorts of agreements have considerably – visibly – improved circumstances in garment factories over the past decade?
PATON: Oh, completely. I believe that no person would dispute that there is been big progress made within the security of employees in these factories from a hearth perspective and a constructing security perspective. However I believe it is also necessary to remind listeners that there are nonetheless main points – issues like low wages, harassment within the office, union busting. These stay main points for employees each in Bangladesh and in different international locations on the earth.
CHANG: Effectively, I do know that you’ve spoken with a number of survivors of the Rana Plaza collapse. What did you hear from them? How are their lives proper now?
PATON: The survivors of Rana Plaza have probably the most tragic tales to inform. The overwhelming majority of those employees had been ladies. And past the apparent traumatic nature of their bodily accidents, lots of them – I believe as much as half – have by no means been capable of work since or earn an unbiased revenue.
Among the ladies that I spoke to final week as a part of my reporting talked about the truth that that they had been deserted by their husbands or that their households noticed them as a monetary burden as a result of they might not work anymore. Plenty of them spoke in regards to the truth they nonetheless, 10 years on, have horrible nightmares or sleeping capsule addictions that actually hamper their on a regular basis life. And there was some efforts to compensate employees, each by way of charitable initiatives or by the Bangladeshi authorities, however the sum of money that the majority of them had been supplied may be very, little or no, and the typical wage in Bangladesh stays round $75 a month. So lots of them will not be simply haunted by what occurred to them 10 years in the past, they nonetheless have big fears about what the long run holds for them.
CHANG: That’s Elizabeth Paton of The New York Occasions. Thanks a lot to your reporting.
PATON: Thanks. Transcript offered by NPR, Copyright NPR.