Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association on Monday objected to western buyers groups publishing on their websites the names of the factories with whom they have suspended business relations. In a meeting with the Alliance for Bangladesh Worker Safety, a North American retailers group, the BGMEA on Monday urged the platform not to publish the name of the factories on its website which have been dropped from its supplier list, pointing out that the announcement made by the retailers’ group has been influencing other buyers to shift business elsewhere. In the meeting, the Alliance officials said it was the mandate of the retailers’ group to make the names of the suspended factories public on its website and only the board of directors of the Alliance can take any further decision on the issue. The BGMEA suggested Accord and Alliance to send the names of terminated factories to their signatory brands and buyers through e-mail. ‘Alliance executive director M Rabin suggested us to raise the issue to the Alliance board of directors and we have decided to send a letter to James Moriarty, former US ambassador to Bangladesh and one of the directors of the Alliance board,’ BGMEA vice president Mahmud Hassan Khan Babu told New Age. He said the trade body also made same calls to the Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh, a platform of EU brands and retailers, and the Accord said they would discuss the issue in its next steering committee meeting. The two platforms have so far terminated business relations with 83 readymade garment factories, but all the terminated factories have not failed to make the required progress in remediation, Babu said. He said the Alliance suspended 60 factories from its supplier list, but only one fourth of the factories failed to achieve remediation progress and some of the factories were dropped from the list due to relocation or closure, while some withdrew their names willingly from the Alliance list. Babu said there are a good number of buyers who are not members of the Alliance or Accord but doing business with the factories. ‘When the Accord and the Alliance on their websites publicly name a factory as a terminated supplier, other buyers feel shaky to place order to that factory,’ he said. After the Rana Plaza building collapse, which killed more than 1,100 people, mostly garment workers, in April 2013, North American retailers, including top brands Walmart and Gap, formed the Alliance and European retailers formed the Accord undertaking a five-year plan which set timelines and accountability for inspections and training and workers’ empowerment programmes.”
