SAFETY AT BANGLADESH RMG FACTORIES
Alliance claims huge success
Former US ambassador and country director of Alliance for Bangladesh Worker Safety, Jim Moriarty, yesterday said 60 Alliance factories have substantially completed their corrective action plans (CAPs).
In addition, 68 per cent of all required repairs across active Alliance factories have been completed, Moriarty told reporters at a city hotel.
This includes 62 per cent of the repairs of the highest priority and high prioritythe most critical items including the structural retrofitting of columns and the installation of fire doors, he said.
The former envoy also said that Alliance continued to maintain a no-tolerance policy for factories that were not making sufficient progress on remediation. Thus, we had to suspend 129 factories till date, he added.
Moriarty said: I would also like to note that in December, we reinstated three previously suspended factories in recognition of their progress, showing that a course-correction on safety is possible. We are committed to working with factories that are fully committed to the task.
About the role of Alliance, Moriarty said the first was to help make the Bangladesh garments industry one of the safest in the world. The second was to leave behind a lasting legacy of safety that would protect workers and secure the continued growth of this vital industry.
That needs to be the legacy of the Alliance: The world needs to know that the garments industry of Bangladesh will remain one of the safest in the world, he added.
As many as 24 American retailers had formed an unprecedented partnership among competitors to create the Alliance in 2013.
We are a five-year initiative formed on the premise that protecting the safety of garments workers is a moral imperative, the former US ambassador said.
From the beginning, we realised that to create a culture of safety, we had to work with owners to help remediate the physical problems within a factory. It also meant we had to help to create a culture of safety within the factory. That meant we had to provide safety training and a helpline to address problems as they occurred, he added.
The country director further said Alliance would not depart from Bangladesh until the systems and organisations were in place to ensure that the work we have done is continued and does not go to waste.
Moriarty pointed out that in the past two years, zero deaths have been reported in Alliance-affiliated factories. Having said that, I must also stress the fact that we are taking the garments industry to a start line, not a finish line, he added.
No one wants to see a disaster in 2019 that undermines all the great work we have done. That is why we will not leave Bangladesh without putting in place the necessary measures to sustain our safety gains, he said.
The former ambassador said so far they have trained 1.3 million workers T 947 factories on fire safety and evacuation skills. Moreover, approximately one million workers have received refresher training on basic fire safety.
We have also trained approximately 24,000 security guards to play a leadership role in protecting lifenot propertyin an emergency, he added.
