As they jostle for space on the floor, with the door to their fire escape padlocked, the seamstresses cannot help but recall the carnage when another of Bangladesh’s garment factories collapsed three years ago, reports AFP. “We always worry what will happen if a blaze breaks out or the building caves in,” one woman worker told the news agency on condition of anonymity. “We’ll just die like the workers of Rana Plaza.” More than 1,100 people died when the Rana Plaza complex collapsed on April 24, 2013, prompting shocked calls for better working conditions in the world’s second-largest garment exporter. But three years on, only a fraction of Bangladesh’s 4,500 clothes factories have been certified safe and experts warn another industrial disaster could happen at any time.
While there have been improvements at some of the larger factories, many of the smaller sub-contractors have yet to be inspected and appear to have done little to address safety concerns. When an AFP journalist visited one backstreet complex in the Rampura suburb of the capital Dhaka, workers could be seen crammed elbow to elbow on the floor while they stitched tags of Western retailers into garments. The fire escape stairwell was blocked by a padlocked iron gate, while cigarette butts littered the main passageway floor.
The handful of fire extinguishers around the building, which is yet to be formally inspected, were are all out of date. “We know our factory is not safe. It is not a compliant factory,” said a 25-year-old worker who refused to give her name for fear of losing her job at Style Fashion Ltd, one of four textile firms housed in the complex.
Production manager Mohammad Khairuzzaman said all four factories were subcontractors for local manufacturers and said safety concerns were being addressed. The fire extinguishers “will be changed very soon,” he told AFP, adding that “in the event of an emergency, we’ll open the gate,” motioning to the bolted fire escape. Bangladesh is second only to China when it comes to clothes exports, shipping $27 billion worth every year and employing some four million people in the industry, mainly women. But it has a woeful safety track record. A fire at the Tazreen factory in Dhaka in 2012 killed 111 workers, many of whom were unable to escape due to a lack of proper fire exits. “If they search properly, they’ll find Rana Plazas everywhere,” said Israfil Hossain, a worker who was trapped in the building’s ruins after it collapsed.