Rana Plaza Concepts

We Are All Fast-Food Workers Now: The Global Uprising Against Poverty Wages

by Annelise Orleck · 27 Feb 2018 · 382pp · 107,150 words

Global CHAPTER 23 “The Girl Effect” CHAPTER 24 “Made with Love in Bangladesh” CHAPTER 25 “We Are Not a Pocket Revolution”: Bangladeshi Garment Workers Since Rana Plaza CHAPTER 26 “A Khmer Would Rather Work for Free Than Work Without Dignity” CHAPTER 27 “After Pol Pot, We Need a Good Life” CHAPTER 28

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Walmart in that country. Walmart workers across India marched for higher wages and safer conditions. And in June 2013, less than two months after the Rana Plaza factory collapse in Bangladesh, the worst industrial disaster in the history of the garment trades, Walmart associates chipped in to help bring garment union leader

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for about thirty minutes.” Over the years, they have even gotten face-to-face meetings with Alice Walton. In June 2013, two months after the Rana Plaza garment factory collapse in Dhaka, Bangladesh, Walmart workers helped bring Kalpona Akter to Bentonville. She spoke directly to the Walton family, asking why they would

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flock to see the newest designs. Kalpona Akter stood near the fountain outside Lincoln Center, New York’s iconic performance space. Five months after the Rana Plaza factory collapse, the worst disaster in the history of the garment trades, a group of top-tier models were picketing and chanting: “Nautica, Nautica, you

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.”1 Factory disasters were nothing new in Bangladesh. There had been hundreds of fires during the twenty-first century, claiming thousands of lives. But the Rana Plaza building collapse on April 24, 2013, had changed the global discussion, when 1,134 workers were killed and 2,500 more injured. The scale of

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not restricted to factories making inexpensive clothing for mass distribution. They are endemic to twenty-first-century garment work.2 Ziff was radicalized by the Rana Plaza collapse. Afterward, she traveled to Bangladesh, met Akter, and interviewed survivors. “As the faces of the fashion industry,” Ziff said, “models are in a unique

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make the clothes that we wear.” Models picketing Fashion Week chanted: “Exploitation is not a good look.”3 The scale of the carnage after the Rana Plaza collapse struck workers, consumers, and activists worldwide, evoking horror and sparking anger. Pressured by their customers, hundreds of companies soon signed the accord. Akter and

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who profited mightily from manufacturing in a country where workers were paid so little. And it was true that labor conditions had improved somewhat after Rana Plaza. But Akter urged the senators not to renew trade privileges until factories in Bangladesh were truly safe and garment workers free to organize without retribution

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. That was not yet the case.5 Reba Sikder, a slight eighteen-year-old survivor of Rana Plaza, testified next. She looked weary, a little dazed, and not a day over fourteen. Sikder wore a striped hoodie sweatshirt to ward off the chill

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find your label there, it’s your responsibility. That’s my word and I will make you pay.”5 Akter was in Washington, DC, when Rana Plaza collapsed, but she hurried home. A few days later, she stood with her feet buried by dust in a vast rubble field. Scraps of brightly

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with Love’ and thousands died under that building.” In a bitter irony, the labels she found were for children’s clothes. The biggest buyer at Rana Plaza was the American chain the Children’s Place. “This Children’s Place for a long time denied any compensation to the workers,” she says. So

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the families of workers who were killed. She brought several survivors. No executive would meet with them. Instead, she says, “they arrested me and the Rana Plaza survivors who were with us.” When the Savar building fell, Akter says, she was still suffering nightmares and other symptoms of post-traumatic stress from

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2006 and again in 2010 and 2013. Increases came again in 2017. A few negligent factory owners were indicted. Bangladeshi officials, on the defensive after Rana Plaza, swore they would make their factories safe. Two hundred and twenty clothing brands and retailers, holding contracts with 1,600 Bangladeshi factories employing two million

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, there would have to be continued pressure. And there was.10 CHAPTER 25 “WE ARE NOT A POCKET REVOLUTION” Bangladeshi Garment Workers Since Rana Plaza IN THE MONTHS AFTER RANA PLAZA, Bangladesh garment workers continued to push for victim compensation and a living wage. Fifty thousand workers led by Nazma Akhter shut down six

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not had a raise in three years. “We are not asking for mercy,” said Akhter. “Our labor moves this economy.” They also demanded compensation for Rana Plaza and Tazreen victims, and criminal charges against their owners. In an export zone outside Dhaka, ten thousand women went rogue and vandalized factories.1 In

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-us/policy-offices/press-office/press-releases/2015/january/gsp-review-bangladesh-recognizes; www.foreign.senate.gov/imo/mediadoc/Akter_Testimony.pdf. 6. Dave Jamieson, “Rana Plaza Survivor Left with Debilitating Trauma,” Huffington Post, March 19, 2014. 7. “Rep. George Miller Speaks Out About Garment Factory Conditions in Bangladesh,” February 12, 2014

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: campaign against workplace violence, 55; changing view of activists, 49; organizing strategies and activities, 32, 37, 39–41, 116, 118–19; 146–47; on the Rana Plaza factory collapse, 135; retaliation against, 139; sponsors, 39; and the Tazreen factory fire, 137–38; on working conditions for Bangladeshi garment workers, 119–20, 131

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low-wage labor, 67; on working and living conditions, 34–35 rain forest destruction, 188–89 Rally for a Living Wage, NY, 2015, 57–60 Rana Plaza factory collapse, Bangladesh, 32, 118, 120, 135. See also garment workers Reagan, Ronald, “A Time for Choosing,” 5 REAP (Resist Expansion of Agricultural Plantations), 181

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, 13, 15, 213–16 Santiz-Cruz, José Obeth, 196 São Paolo, Brazil, farmworker action against Vale Fertilizer plant, 182 Savar Building collapse, Dhaka, Bangladesh. See Rana Plaza factory collapse, Bangladesh Searcy, Rhett, 203–4, 212–13 security guards, unionizing by, 79–80 “seed keepers,” seed exchanges, 228, 230 SENTRO (Philippine union federation

Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism

by Harsha Walia · 9 Feb 2021

, Deprivation, Displacement: Reframing the Global Migration Crisis Rupaly was one of thousands of workers hesitant to go to work on April 24, 2013, in the Rana Plaza building in Bangladesh’s Dhaka District. Employed in a garment factory, she and other workers were uncomfortable with deep cracks in the walls of the

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manager tried to convince employees it was safe and threatened to withhold wages from anyone who refused to work.1 A few hours later, the Rana Plaza building collapsed. Rupaly and others were miraculously rescued from the rubble of the eight-story building, amid piles of bright cloth, but 1,130 garment

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industry in Bangladesh, resulting in charges against 3,000 workers and terminations of 11,600 workers in one hundred garment manufacturing units.41 Across from Rana Plaza, a memorial has been erected. In stark contrast to the edifice of greed that is every sweatshop, this monument is two calloused fists raised high

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/2017/jan/09/america-dropped-26171-bombs-2016-obama-legacy. Chapter 3 1.Sini Saaritsa, Janne Hulkkonen, and Carry Sommers, “Rana Plaza—The Survivors’ Stories,” Fashion Revolution, October 2018, www.fashionrevolution.org/rana-plaza-the-survivors-stories/. 2.Amirul Haque Amin, “Workers of the World Unite,” National Garment Workers Federation, May 29, 2017, www

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/files/Stitched%20Up.pdf. 4.Dana Thomas, “Why Won’t We Learn from the Survivors of the Rana Plaza Disaster?,” New York Times, April 24, 2018, www.nytimes.com/2018/04/24/style/survivors-of-rana-plaza-disaster.html. 5.World Bank, “Export Processing Zones,” Policy and Research Series 20 (Washington, DC: World Bank

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-crisis-in-bangladesh-from-dhaka-sundabans/#close. 26.Anna Plowman, “Bangladesh’s Disaster Capitalism,” Jacobin Magazine, January 22, 2016, www.jacobinmag.com/2016/01/bangladesh-rana-plaza-rmg-garment-industry-climate-change-environment. 27.Naila Kabeer and Simeen Mahmud, “Rags, Riches and Women Workers: Export-Oriented Garment Manufacturing in Bangladesh,” in Chains

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Quechua, 218 queer people. See gender; LGBTQ people; sexuality R Rackete, Carola, 119 Rakhine, 191–192 Ramsaroop, Chris, 157 Rana, Junaid, 55, 126, 187–188 Rana Plaza, 61, 68 Rapid Support Forces, 121 Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, 174, 189 Rassemblement National, 170, 183–185 Raytheon, 82 Razack, Sherene, 188 Reagan, Ronald, 41–44

Makers and Takers: The Rise of Finance and the Fall of American Business

by Rana Foroohar · 16 May 2016 · 515pp · 132,295 words

costs. But financiers rarely think about the risks that offshoring adds to supply chains—risks tragically evidenced in events like the 2013 collapse of the Rana Plaza textile manufacturing center in Bangladesh, which killed more than a thousand garment workers who spent their days stitching T-shirts and jeans for companies like

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at BP is one example, but a more recent and even more devastating event in terms of lives lost was the 2013 disaster at the Rana Plaza garment-making complex in Bangladesh. Of the 3,500 workers who labored there to churn out cheap clothing for brands like Walmart, more than 1

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that outsourcing introduces into the supply chain was also at play. In the aftermath of the collapse, Walmart claimed that it didn’t even know Rana Plaza was used to make girls’ jeans it was planning to sell. (After documents surfaced showing that its Canadian supplier had indeed ordered pants from

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Rana Plaza, that firm blamed a “rogue employee” for filing the order.)30 The revelations were all the more unsettling given that just eight months prior, Walmart-

The Golden Thread: How Fabric Changed History

by Kassia St Clair · 3 Oct 2018 · 480pp · 112,463 words

one firm threatened to withhold that month’s wages if they refused.44 In all, 1,134 people were killed by the collapse of the Rana Plaza building in Bangladesh in 2013, and many more were injured. Some of the survivors remain deeply traumatised from having been trapped for many hours – even

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it was the world’s second largest clothing exporter behind China; some five thousand factories employed 3.2 million workers, many of them women. After Rana Plaza, exports actually rose 16 per cent to 23.9 billion dollars.46 Cheap and plentiful labour – the minimum wage at the time of the accident

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was just thirty-seven dollars a month – makes it a popular place for large western brands to outsource production. Labels found amidst the Rana Plaza wreckage included Primark, Mango, Walmart and Benetton. Despite the presence of such large and profitable companies, redress for those affected by the disaster was slow

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anniversary of the disaster, only 15 million dollars of the required 40 million dollars had been raised. Benetton, who had sourced 266,000 shirts from Rana Plaza over the six months before its collapse, was finally shamed into paying into the compensation fund in 2015. Activists mounted a photograph of a victim

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800’. 44Ali Manik and Yardley, ‘Building Collapse in Bangladesh’; Devnath and Srivastava. 45Ali Manik and Yardley, ‘17 Days in Darkness’; The Editorial Board; Estrin. 46‘Rana Plaza Collapse’. 47Ali Manik and Yardley, ‘Building Collapse in Bangladesh’; The Editorial Board; Amy Kazmin, ‘How Benetton Faced up to the Aftermath of

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Rana Plaza’, the Financial Times, 20 April 2015 <https://www.ft.com/content/f9d84f0e-e509-11e4-8b61-00144feab7de> [accessed 4 October 2017]. 48Schlossberg; Lenzing Group; Scott Christian.

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-032573.html> [accessed 21 August 2017] Eaton-Krauss, Marianne, ‘Embalming Caches’, The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology, 94 (2008), 288–93 Editorial Board, ‘One Year After Rana Plaza’, New York Times, 28 April 2014, section Opinion, p. 20 Equiano, Olaudah, The Interesting Narrative and Other Writings, 2nd edn (London: Penguin Classics, 2003) Espen

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of American History, 78 (1991), 124–59 <https://doi.org/10.2307/2078091> ‘Public Sentiment’, Southern Banner (Athens, Georgia, 24 August 1832), p. 1 R ‘Rana Plaza Collapse: 38 Charged with Murder over Garment Factory Disaster’, the Guardian, 18 July 2016, section World news <http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jul/18

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/rana-plaza-collapse-murder-charges-garment-factory> [accessed 4 October 2017] Raszeja, V. M., ‘Dennis, Clara (Clare) (1916–1971)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography <http://adb.anu.edu.

Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth

by Ingrid Robeyns · 16 Jan 2024 · 327pp · 110,234 words

million less? Things are frequently made worse by local corruption, leading to poor enforcement of safety regulations. This was a major contributing factor to the Rana Plaza disaster that occurred on April 24, 2013, when an eight-storey commercial building in Dhaka, Bangladesh, collapsed. The building housed a bank, several shops, and

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2,600 were injured, many for life; in some cases, they could only be rescued by amputating limbs. The International Labour Organization set up the Rana Plaza Donors Trust Fund, to compensate victims and their families and cover medical costs and lost income. Many of the well-known brands that sell their

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clothes across the Global North had their garments produced in Rana Plaza, including Benetton, the Children’s Place, and Primark.23 According to the Clean Clothes Campaign, only Primark and Loblaw stepped up in any meaningful way

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fashion industry also promised improvements in the working conditions of the garment workers. But, as the business website Bloomberg put it: “A decade after the Rana Plaza collapse, garment workers are still exploited. Building safety has improved, but the economics of the clothing industry remains stacked against the people who make most

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fund, see cleanclothes.org/news/2015/04/17/ccc-believes-benettons-1-1-million-usd-contribution-insufficient. On the garment industry ten years after the Rana Plaza disaster, see Olivia Rockeman, “A Decade After the Rana Plaza Collapse, Garment Workers Are Still Exploited,” Bloomberg, April 19, 2023, bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-04-19

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/rana-plaza-collapse-a-decade-on-garment-workers-still-exploited. 25. On Amazon becoming the largest public company in 2019, see James Dean, “Amazon Takes Title of

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, 152, 171, 182 Quiggin, John 39–40 race 28–9, 194 racism 31, 88, 155, 174, 175, 191–2 Ramaswamy, Vivek xxv Rana Plaza disaster, Dhaka, Bangladesh (2013) 57–8 Rana Plaza Donors Trust Fund 58 Rawls, John 130 Raworth, Kate 213–4 Reagan, Ronald 33, 173 recessions xxi, 18 referenda 224 refugees 79

Work Rules!: Insights From Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead

by Laszlo Bock · 31 Mar 2015 · 387pp · 119,409 words

. The return on investment to business is automatic, with greater productivity, business growth, and inspired customers.” Contrast Brandix’s approach with the collapse of the Rana Plaza building in Bangladesh on April 24, 2013. Five apparel manufacturers, a bank, and several shops filled the eight-floor building. The day before

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, Rana Plaza was evacuated as cracks appeared in the walls. The next day, the bank and shops told their employees to stay away. The apparel companies ordered

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, June 7, 2012, www.wegmans.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/PressReleaseDetailView?productId=742304&storeId=10052&catalogId=10002&langId=-1. 13. Sarah Butler and Saad Hammadi, “Rana Plaza factory disaster: Victims still waiting for compensation,” theguardian.com, October 23, 2013, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/23

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/rana-plaza-factory-disaster-compensation-bangladesh. 14. Office Space, directed by Mike Judge (1999; 20th Century Fox). 15. Richard Locke, Thomas Kochan, Monica Romis, and Fei Qin, “

The Fissured Workplace

by David Weil · 17 Feb 2014 · 518pp · 147,036 words

April 2013, a multistory building in Savar, Bangladesh, collapsed, killing 1,127 people who worked in the numerous apparel manufacturing companies located in it. The Rana Plaza complex collapse was the deadliest accident in the history of the garment industry. Apparel contractors in the building produced goods destined for such global brands

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suppliers adhere to the labor standards of their home country. The Apple/Foxconn story illustrates that lead firms can take more responsibility. The Tazreen and Rana Plaza tragedies exemplify the failure to do so. Any effort to address wage levels, health and safety, labor standards compliance, or other aspects of work must

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At the same time, the death of more than five hundred Bangladeshi workers in factory fires between 2006 and 2012 and the collapse of the Rana Plaza factory complex leading to more than 1,100 fatalities in 2013, all in facilities primarily serving apparel export markets points to the continuing huge challenges

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model, 46–47, 301n14, 308n70; and company restructuring, 47; employment impacts of, 73–74 Property rights framework, 295nn14–15 Prudential Financial, 55 Quiznos, 127, 325n15 Rana Plaza complex, collapse of, 176, 263 Reengineering, 57 REITs (Real Estate Investment Trusts), 125, 293n16, 324n8 Residential construction, 218–219, 231, 350n8, 351n15 Restaurant hygiene, impact

Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization

by Parag Khanna · 18 Apr 2016 · 497pp · 144,283 words

baby formula. Maps 1, 24 and 25, corresponding to this chapter, appear in the map insert. On April 24, 2013, the upper floors of the Rana Plaza garment factory and apartment block in the Savar district of Dhaka, Bangladesh, collapsed and pulled down the whole building. When the search for survivors was

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. Thus even as our concerns about supply chains increase, our dependence on them grows. It takes great care to trace and manage supply chains. The Rana Plaza garment factory in Dhaka was the epicenter of six layers of suppliers—clearly more than anyone realized or was actively managing. To ensure the thousands

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is being designed not by lax local authorities but by a consortium including seventy European companies whose reputations depend on avoiding a repeat of the Rana Plaza disaster. Similarly, a franchise business can be more accountable due to strict rules set forth by a powerful parent company. McDonald’s has more capacity

Ghost Work: How to Stop Silicon Valley From Building a New Global Underclass

by Mary L. Gray and Siddharth Suri · 6 May 2019 · 346pp · 97,330 words

as inspiring is the signing of Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh, or the Bangladesh Accord. It followed the 2013 collapse of the Rana Plaza, in Bangladesh, the deadliest textile factory accident in history. The overcapacity facility, built with shoddy materials for nonindustrial use, with three illegal shop floors haphazardly

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for the safety of the workers in their supply chains. Companies like Aldi Nord, Aldi Süd, Primark, Puma, and American Eagle, all of whom used Rana Plaza to stitch together consumer goods, signed on. Even though some of the largest clothes makers using the plaza, like Walmart, Gap, Target, and Macy’s

The Age of Stagnation: Why Perpetual Growth Is Unattainable and the Global Economy Is in Peril

by Satyajit Das · 9 Feb 2016 · 327pp · 90,542 words

is around 20–25 times wealthier than the average poor nation. The reasons lie in the relationship between developed and emerging economies. In April 2013, Rana Plaza, an eight-story complex of clothing factories near Dhaka in Bangladesh, collapsed, killing more than 1,100 people. It followed an earlier fire at Tazreen

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, committed suicide. These incidents are only a miniscule part of the human cost of low-cost manufacturing in emerging markets. The proximate cause of the Rana Plaza collapse was clear. The original 2006 approval was for a five-story building, which was correctly designed and constructed. Subsequently, three more floors were added

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are compounded by weak government, corruption, rent-seeking, and poor administration. Bangladeshi building regulations are not enforced. Trade unions are aggressively suppressed. The owner of Rana Plaza was linked with one of Bangladesh's major political parties and allegedly used his influence to obtain approvals from the authorities, even though the building