The fight for workers’ health and safety continues
Heather Rawling, Leicester Socialist Party
In Leicester, a city where garment workers were dying for less than £5 an hour during Covid lockdowns, people met to remember possibly the worst workplace disaster anywhere in the world. The meeting was held in Highfields where many sweatshop workers live. “Tears in the fabric”, a hard hitting film, made by Rainbow Collective, was shown.
Rana Plaza was an eight-storey commercial building in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Garment factories on the top stories employed 5,000 workers.
On 24 April 2013, the building collapsed, killing 1,134 and leaving two thousand more injured. More than half of the victims were women, along with a number of their children who were in nursery facilities within the building. Survivors have struggled to access medical attention and many are still dying from their injuries.
The day before the disaster, structural cracks were discovered in Rana Plaza. Warnings to stay out of the building were ignored by the factory owners on the upper floors. They pressured workers to return to the building. Hours later, the whole building collapsed.
Brand names made in the building included Benetton, Bonmarche, Monsoon, Accessorize, Primark, Mango, Matalan, and Zara.
Workers and the poor internationally were horrified by the gross lack of regard for workers’ lives. Ever since, many brands linked to the disaster have been on a charm offensive to redeem their reputation in the eyes of the public.
Some, but not all, donated blood money to compensate the survivors. However, Rana Plaza victims stated in the Rainbow Collective film that the trust set up to administer the money has been ‘mismanaged’ and they are still living without proper medical attention, and struggle to feed themselves. Brands signed up to an accord on building regulations and health and safety. Where unions exist, improvements have been made. But workers’ rights abuses are still rife and many are still working in unsafe conditions. Millions still work in factories not covered by the accord. As Claudia Webbe, Independent MP in Leicester East said at the meeting “we can’t trust the employers, workers need to have control of health and safety”.
To date, no brands have been prosecuted.
Informing workers of their rights at work is a start in the process of unions reaching out to workers. But much more needs to be done to unionise these factories to stop the abuse of £5-an-hour wages and lack of health and safety.
The Socialist Party calls for:
- A massive trade union recruitment campaign to unionise garment workers
- An amnesty for all migrant workers from deportation and other punitive measures so they are not afraid to report abuses.
- Trade union and workers’ control of health and safety in the workplace.
- Close down the sweatshops and create new, safe, publicly owned workplaces. Job guarantees for all workers. If needed, share out the work with no loss of pay. For democratic workers’ control and management of publicly owned industry
- Pay a living wage! No one should earn less than £15 an hour, as a step towards a real living wage
- The big retailers who buy and sell these garments knew about this extreme exploitation. Nationalise the garment industry under democratic workers’ control and management to prevent future abuses
