“Ten years later, we are not done with modern slavery”, laments a specialist

Ten years after the collapse of the Rana Plaza, a building in Dhaka (Bangladesh) that housed clothing workshops for various major Western brands, “we are not done with modern slavery”, deplores Monday, April 24 Anne-Catherine Husson Traoré, director of Novethic, a media that works on issues relating to the environmental and social impacts of companies. On April 24, 2013, 1,130 people died when the building collapsed. Since then, France has adopted a law on the duty of vigilance of companies, which obliges French manufacturers to “enforcing human rights throughout an entire subcontracting chain”explains Anne-Catherine Husson Traoré.

>> “Security has improved, not salary conditions”: ten years later, has the Rana Plaza tragedy in Bangladesh changed “fast fashion”?

franceinfo: In your opinion, did this tragedy help open the eyes of Westerners to the conditions in which clothes were, or are, made?

Anne-Catherine Husson Traore: Yes, we can really say that. Not only was the building not standing, but the workers had also refused to enter this building which was in danger of collapsing and they were forced to come back. It really was modern slavery and the consumers didn’t know. The first reflex of companies [après le drame] was to say that they did not know. Consumers have [eux] understood that the clothes, small or big brands, that they bought could come from this kind of thing and that they therefore indirectly had a little blood on their hands. It caused a rejection and it brought out a new type of clientele, namely consumers who want traceability and who want a guarantee that they don’t have clothes that are responsible for this type of system.

Since this tragedy, Bangladesh has adopted an agreement to better protect workers. A structure inspects the factories and the big brands have to pay to repair the sites of their subcontractors. Have the working conditions of workers improved since then?

There has been a global awareness of the change needed. It can go through the law, but for that the law would have to be able to apply. The problem we have today is that Bangladesh does not really apply these regulations. As with any law, if on paper it is fine but there are no means implemented to enforce it, that is a problem. And in Bangladesh other fires that occurred a few years later [l’effondrement du Rana Plaza] showed that, in reality, working conditions remained extremely precarious.

Since 2017, France has had a law on duty of care, engaging the responsibility of large manufacturers vis-à-vis their subcontractors, including abroad. Does it work?

It is perhaps even the most important gain. There was a realization [afin de savoir] what we could do, from the West, to try to control this infernal machine of the factories of the world, and especially to make respect the human rights on a whole chain of subcontracting. The concept of the duty of vigilance was brought by France, it was the first to adopt this type of law. There is now one in Germany and there will be one Europe-wide in a few weeks, if all goes well.

“The idea is that a company is obliged to organize the prevention of environmental or social risks throughout its subcontracting chain. It must set up training and control its subcontracting chain. due diligence is changing the way we view globalization.”

Anne-Catherine Husson Traoré, director of Novethic

at franceinfo

I’m not going to tell you that buyers are not always looking for the lowest possible price. It is all the ambiguity, all the paradoxical injunction in which we are today: on the one hand we have a duty of vigilance and on the other a purchasing system at the other end of the world which continues to be social dumping.

With this duty of vigilance, have the major French industrialists already financed work in Bangladesh?

In France, the movement of these shareholders pushing companies to better respect human rights was very weak. Today we can clearly see that a type of textile has collapsed. Camaïeu and Gap are in difficulty today, and we can consider that their difficulties started there [avec l’effondrement du Rana Plaza en 2013]. They couldn’t maintain an economic model where we produce a lot and as cheaply as possible while having enough consumers to buy. The bad news ten years later is that instead of fast fashion, we have ultra fast fashion. Ultra fast fashion is a textile production that is done in the same appalling conditions, with condemned windows, of modern slavery. The worst part is that ultra fast fashion is getting closer to the end consumer. For example, in 2020 working conditions amounting to modern slavery were discovered in a factory in England and this caused an extraordinary scandal for the Boohoo company, which has since lost 45% of its value. So we are not done with modern slavery ten years after Rana Plaza.