American “counter-offensive”
Ever since1.100 textile workers lost their lives in April, when the Rana Plaza building
collapsed, security has been at the top of the agenda. At least, in Europe it
has, where almost all retailers signed an agreement for cleaner clothes and
safer working conditions. The Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh
has been signed by 72 big brands and retailers from 15 countries.
Retailers
in the United States didn’t seem that interested, until seventeen retailers (including
GAP, Walmart, JC Penney and Target) decided to create the Alliance for Bangladesh
Worker Safety. With that initiative they want to amass 42 million euro to make
Bengal textile workshops safer, to guide local managers and to inspect the
workshops on a yearly basis.
Massive
criticism
The
initiave of the American retailers is getting some criticism though, because it
seems to fall way short of the European efforts. First of all there is the
amount of money: the Americans promise 42 million dollar across five years,
while the Europeans are promising 60 million dollar for that same period.
Secondly
there are some doubts about the impartialness of the inspectors: the European
plan will ensure audits done by independent third parties, while the Americans
appoint their own inspectors and they only have a third party check if the
workshops have made the proposed improvements.
The
Americans are also not working together with local unions. “The Alliance has a
lot of the features of private regulatory regimes that research has shown over
the last 10 years is not very effective”, says Matthew Amengual of the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, who studies labour regulation and enforcement in
developing nations. In the European plan that cooperation with the unions is
one of the cornerstones.
Critics are
mostly disappointed by the fact that “Wal-Mart, Gap and other U.S. retailers
have chosen to go their own way with a plan that appears to lack meaningful
transparency and accountability” and that “their plan risks diluting the
effectiveness of a stronger, global effort to improve worker safety”.
