Alliance for Bangladesh Worker Safety executive director Jim Moriarty on Thursday said if Bangladesh failed to set up a competent body to oversee the post-remediation safety activities in the country’s readymade garment sector, North American brands and buyers might form an independent platform to monitor the activities after the expiry of the Alliance in June this year.‘We will transfer our activities to a safety monitoring organisation managed by credible, trusted, local partners by the end of this year, with the continued values of transparency, objectivity and oversight,’ he said at the first-quarter press conference of the platform of North American brands and buyers held at the Westin Hotel in Dhaka.Moriarty said that now the Alliance was poised for transition as 90 per cent of remediation works in its supplier factories had been completed and its workers’ empowerment initiatives had been implemented fully throughout the entire workforce of Alliance-listed factories.‘I believe the member brands will be interested in having started up independently, in other words, a body that sits here in Bangladesh but is not under any sort of governing umbrella that encompasses RCC (Remediation Coordination Cell),’ Moriarty, also former US ambassador to Bangladesh, said.He said that this entity, in parallel with the RCC, would continue to oversee factory inspections, monitoring and highly successful helpline and training programmes of the Alliance.‘Make no mistake about it: Alliance member brands are committed to safety. The new safety monitoring organisation, funded largely by member brands, will continue to require that factories meet the high safety standards implemented by the Alliance,’ Moriarty said.He said that the Alliance was now in conversations with the government of Bangladesh, Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association, International Labour Organisation, and other stakeholders on the exact details of this transition and the platform expected to announce details in the coming weeks.The Alliance’s executive director said 322 out of 666 member factories have been considered as substantially remediated with the full implementation of corrective action plans.Following the Rana Plaza building collapse in April, 2013 that claimed lives of more than 1,100 workers, North American retailers formed the Alliance and European buyers Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh, undertaking a five-year plan which set timeframes and accountability for inspections and training and workers’ empowerment programmes.As per the statistics provided by the Alliance, 88 per cent of the factory remediation works is complete across all active factories, including 84 per cent of items most critical to life safety.It showed that 91 per cent of 290 factories, which required structural retrofitting, fully completed retrofitting while 118 out of 141 factories completed installation of sprinkler systems.The Alliance provided safety training to more than 1.5 million workers while the platform trained more than 27,000 security guards in the skills necessary to protect life, rather than property, in the case of an emergency.‘We are extremely proud of the progress we have made in just five short years. And with all of the investments we have made in the training and empowerment of the workers themselves, factory remediation remains on schedule,’ Moriarty said.He said that the government and all other parties involved must commit themselves to making safety the rule, not the exception, in factories throughout the country.The tenure of Accord will expire in May this year.
