A decade on, we remember Rana Plaza through a series of indelible images. Drone shots captured from across Dhaka’s Aricha Highway render eight factory floors to a concrete smash cake; workers crushed in the grim grey layers of industrial machinery. Survivors, bereft, swarming ground zero, desperate to recover their loved ones alive among the rebar, cement and fulminated fabric bolts. The unidentified deceased, draped in white sheets, laid out in nearby hospitals and makeshift morgues.
Each is a mind bomb (a term coined by late, great Greenpeace co-founder Bob Hunter), marking, for many of us, a definitive before the collapse and after. But has our shock and awe at this deadly tragedy translated into any real or lasting change in an industry rife with problems? Are we addressing the fragmented supply chains, culture of subcontracting, unliveable wages, systemic racism, sexism and infrastructural overhaul needed to protect garment workers? Yes and no.
In the early months post-collapse, an unprecedented community-organization effort rose from the rubble. Founded by British fashion designers Carry Somers and Orsola de Castro, Fashion Revolution served to mobilize global citizens and turn up the heat on fast fashion brands through use of the Socratic method. Fash Rev’s #WhoMadeMyClothes campaign has generated 979,000 impressions on Instagram alone, placing steady pressure on the apparel industry and centring garment-worker rights at the heart of the sustainable fashion conversation.
Since 2017, the non-profit’s annual Fashion Transparency Index has ranked 250 of the biggest fashion brands and retailers based on their public disclosure of human rights and environmental policies, practices and impacts. While nearly half of these now disclose their first-tier manufacturing lists, only 4% of brands reveal whether their garment workers earn a living wage.
In the last 10 years, the chorus of voices addressing fashion’s social impacts has grown. Organizations including the Clean Clothes Campaign, Remake, the Fair Wear Foundation, Labour Behind the Label, GoodWeave and others continue to call for proper compensation for Rana Plaza’s survivors, many of whom suffer deteriorating health, and commitments to ensure worker safety, which was the aim of the short-lived but not inconsequential Alliance for Bangladesh Worker Safety and Accord on Fire and Building Safety (which became the RMG – short for “ready-made garment” – Sustainability Council in 2020).
In 2021, an International Accord for Health and Safety in the Textile and Garment Industry was formed, now 190 brand and labour union signatories strong. Efforts to date include 56,000 independently overseen building safety inspections at more than 2,400 garment factories, the resolution of more than 140,000 occupational health and safety issues, and the implementation of factory-wide rights and safety trainings and much-needed complaint-reporting mechanisms. Undoubtedly, the accord has made factories safer for Bangladesh’s 4.1 million garment sector workers
But while accord signatories hail from countries around the world, its protections extend to workers in exactly two: Bangladesh and Pakistan. The majority of global brands remain unsigned and continue to abide by their own internal policies, obligated only to enact voluntary remediation efforts in the event of violations. In a post–Rana Plaza world, anything less than the accord's legally binding commitment to worker safety is performative virtue signalling.
Mounting pressure on the fashion industry since Rana Plaza has led to a push for regulatory changes in the West. The Fashioning Accountability and Building Real Institutional Change (FABRIC) bill was introduced in the U.S. last spring and proposes both workplace protections and major incentives to accelerate domestic apparel manufacturing, while simultaneously putting an end to piecework – payment per unit produced, the conventional driver of productivity – in favour of hourly wages.
Calls for apparel brands to be better corporate citizens have enveloped both the industry’s haunting labour practices and environmental exploits. At the state level, New York’s Fashion Sustainability and Social Accountability Act aims to address both the social and environmental outcomes of companies exceeding $100 million in revenue. The act will mandate supply-chain mapping, impact disclosures and the implementation of science-based climate targets. The attorney general’s office will handle enforcement and fine companies up to 2% of revenue for infringements.
Across the pond, the EU has set an ambitious intention to become the first climate-neutral continent, which will mean big changes in the garment sector. As part of its Green Deal, the Circular Economy Action Plan includes strategies to end greenwashing and the use of misleading environmental claims, to stop overproduction and overconsumption, to discourage the destruction of unsold or returned textiles, and to establish circular design requirements for textiles to increase durability, longevity and recyclability.
We need to see more of these top-down approaches. As it stands, the current system obfuscates where responsibility should lie – with industry – rather than on increasingly cash-strapped consumers, who, bombarded with options from a 52-season fashion calendar, are somehow expected to either abstain or pay a premium to shop responsibly. While there are sustainable options that won't break the bank, it’s time to redirect our energy to push for policy change.
For the fashion community and beyond, April 24 will always be a solemn day worth observing. But an overemphasis on extremes like Rana Plaza can dull our senses and exacerbate our indifference to the more mundane and quotidian instances of suffering experienced by garment workers around the globe.
As author and activist Mariame Kaba reminds us, “Spectacle as the route to empathy means the atrocities itemized need to happen more often or get worse … in hopes of being registered.”
There is a silent acceptance of “ordinary” terror in our preoccupation with worst-case scenarios. In Rana’s case: 1138 dead, 2,500 injured, 322 unidentified.
Indeed, there is much more work to be done to bring safety and transparency to an industry that remains largely self-regulated. As horrific an example as it is, Rana Plaza is the iceberg’s visible tip – a factory built on a swamp, two storeys too tall, overloaded beyond structural capacity with heavy vibrating machinery. Rana was not the deadliest accidental structural failure in modern history but a wholly preventable one, which deserves to be remembered as much for the systemic changes it incited as for the grievous loss of life and livelihood.
Sarah Jay is a sustainability consultant, researcher and filmmaker who visited the site of Rana Plaza in the fall of 2014.
