Clean Clothes Campaign, a global alliance of garment industry workers, on Tuesday demanded complete justice and full compensation for Tazreen survivors and families. ‘… full and fair compensation and complete justice are still far off for the Tazreen survivors and families. Even more so because eight years on, the prosecution of Delwar Hossain, the owner of Tazreen Fashions, has still not been concluded,’ the platform said. The rights group said that due to the absence of International Labour Organisation convention 121 in Bangladesh full and fair compensation and complete justice were still far off for the Tazreen survivors and families after eight years of the incident. ‘Eight years after the tragedy, we continue to call upon the government of Bangladesh to make haste with the pilot project for an employment injury insurance scheme that it has committed to five years ago,’ the CCC said in a statement. A life-long pension scheme, rather than payment through a lump sum would be a long-term contribution to easing the hardship of those who survived work-place incidents, even though without compensation for pain and suffering justice remains incomplete, it said. For the loss of income payments to furthermore be a real form of relief, the minimum wage in Bangladesh’s readymade garment sector urgently needs to be raised to a living wage level and the country can and must leave the time behind that injury on the job equals life-long deprivation, it said. For international norms to be more applicable in a country like Bangladesh, and for worker welfare in general, the minimum wage for garment workers would have to be tripled at least, the CCC said. The platform call upon the global brands that sourced from the factory to contribute Tazreen Claims Administration Trust established in 2015. The Tazreen Claims Administration Trust was set up to oversee calculation and distribution of loss of income payments to the Tazreen survivors and families, and the platform urged brands to contribute financially but many brands and retailers failed to take any responsibility at all, the statement said. The rights group disclosed the names of some of the brands and retailers including Edinburgh Woollen Mill, Piazza Italia, Disney, Sears, Dickies, Delta Apparel, and Karl Rieker, who failed to make any contribution to the fund. On November 24, 2012, a devastating fire at Tazreen Fashions Ltd in Ashulia killed 119 workers and injured more than 200, mostly women.
