The Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association has started an initiative to work out the actual status of the progress in remediation in the readymade garment factories following allegations of slow progress from the two global retailers’ groups. Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh, a platform of European retailers, and Alliance for Bangladesh Worker Safety, a consortium of North American buyers, frequently alleged that the progress in remediation was not satisfactory in many factories. Accord has already terminated business relations with eight garment factories as the companies failed to make progress in remediation in time. At the same time, the platform warned more than 120 factories of cutting business relations as the progress of the implementation of corrective action plan in the factories were going on a slow pace. Alliance has recently suspended 23 factories from its supplier list and warned 12 more due to failure to make adequate remediation progress. Following the allegations from Accord and Alliance, the BGMEA started to collect information from its member factories regarding factory inspection and remediation progress. ‘We have developed a format for updating inspection status and factory owners have been asked to provide information as per the format to the BGMEA,’ Mahmud Hassan Khan Babu, vice-president of the BGMEA, told New Age on Thursday. He said that 45-46 factories had so far provided their inspection statues and other factories would send their reports within short time. ‘After collecting the inspection status from the factory owners we would compare the reports with that of the Accord and Alliance to understand the actual picture,’ Mahmud said. He also said that the trade body would sit with the authorities of the factories which failed to make progress as per expectations. Mahmud said that the BGMEA wanted to identify the real problems of the factories which lagged behind and to provide support to the factories so that they could be compliant. According to the BGMEA statistics, 47 factories provided its inspection status reports to the BGMEA till January 6 as the trade body asked its members for the information in the last week of December 2015. Of the 47 factories, two claimed that they had completed 100 per cent of the corrective action plan, 16 factories achieved progress above 80 per cent, 21 progressed between 50-79 per cent and the progress made by seven factories were below seven per cent, the BGMEA data showed. After the Rana Plaza building collapse in April 2013 that killed more than 1,100 people, mostly garment workers, EU retailers formed Accord while North American retailers formed Alliance. Both the initiatives launched inspection programmes in the Bangladeshi RMG factories from where their members procure products and the initiatives completed their primary safety assessments in their listed factories numbering over 2,300. The government in association with the ILO announced a separate inspection programme for rest of the garment factories which were not on the lists of Alliance and Accord. The government-ILO initiative inspected about 1,500 factories.
