A new academic analysis has criticised NYU Stern Center for making some errors in its recent report on Bangladesh garment industry mainly overestimating the number of factories and the size of workforce. Mark Anner from Pennsylvania State University and Jennifer Bair from the University of Colorado Boulder, released Thursday the analysis on ‘The Bulk of the Iceberg: A Critique of the Stern Center’s Report on Worker Safety in Bangladesh’. The NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights in its second report titled “Beyond the Tip of the Iceberg: Bangladesh’s Forgotten Apparel Workers” published on December 15 last claimed that there are more than 7,000 garment factories in Bangladesh creating employment for about 5.1 million. Of the total, 3,800 are indirect suppliers and the majority of them are small-sized units while the average number of workers is 55. It also claimed that some 3.0 million workers are excluded from Accord and Alliance safety programmes. The BGMEA also disagreed with the total number of factories and workforce while denied unauthorised subcontracting. “We have carefully reviewed the Stern researchers’ methodology and data, and come to the opposite conclusion,” Mark and Jennifer said in the critique. “Contrary to Stern’s assertions, more than 70 per cent of garment workers in Bangladesh are covered by the Accord and Alliance and if we include workers employed in the factories inspected by the ILO-advised National Initiative, the percentage of covered workers reaches 89 per cent,” it added. The database compiled by Stern of current export factories included a large number of closed factories and a substantial number of duplicate factories, it said. Even the database included five factories destroyed in the Rana Plaza building collapse. The critique also slated the NYS for including many factories that produce only for the domestic market. “We estimate that Stern’s database of 7,165 export factories is inflated by at least two thousand factories,” the analysis claimed. When Stern researchers attempted to validate its official factory list via field research in two sub-districts of Dhaka, they could not find the majority of the factories in these areas which further indicates that Stern’s database includes many faulty entries, it alleged. The analysis also termed the 5.1 million garment workers in Bangladesh ‘unreliable’ saying that the Stern Researchers based this estimate on the flawed factory database. Additionally, a data entry mistake erroneously added more than 335,000 workers to this total. The report emphasised the prevalence of small, unregistered subcontract factories in the export sector, suggesting that this phenomenon is of great importance for evaluating current efforts to secure the rights and safety of garment workers. But Stern’s own estimate of the average size of such facilities (55 workers) suggests that unregistered, informal factories employ a very small percentage (approximately less than 2 per cent) of workers producing garments for export, the academicians said. Stern researchers failed to properly categorise several hundred factories, including dozens of the largest factories, as Accord and Alliance suppliers, resulting in an underestimate of the number of workers covered by these initiatives, they added. By properly categorising these factories, they found that 2.75 million workers are covered by the Accord and the Alliance, not the 2.3 million posited by Stern. “Using what we believe to be a more accurate employment estimate of 3.85 million workers, we conclude that the Accord and the Alliance initiatives cover 71.4 per cent of workers in the sector,” Mark and Jennifer said. The report fails to consider workers covered by the National Initiative, the ILO-advised government factory inspection program. “Taken together, the Accord, Alliance and National Initiative cover nearly 3.43 million workers representing 89.1 per cent of all workers-a percentage that is more correctly described as the bulk, rather than the tip, of the iceberg,” they concluded. In response to the critique, the NYU Stern Center in a statement said, “The analysis relies on loose assumptions unsupported by evidence to discredit Stern’s research and advance a disproven hypothesis that the number of workers and factories in Bangladesh stands at 3.85 million and 5,000 respectively.” The conclusion of the critique missed the point that existing commitments don’t go far enough, either in the number of factories and workers they cover or in practical plans to actually fund factory repairs for direct and indirect sourcing factories. “Undoubtedly, the facts we have presented over the last two years are uncomfortable,” the Center said. “They reveal that existing solutions to address poor working conditions in the apparel supply chain don’t hold up, especially for workers beyond the first tier of direct suppliers.” The comprehensive evidence the Center has gathered over more than two years points to the need for “a fundamental rethinking of existing efforts, and reallocation of resources to address the massive number of workers that…are not covered by any existing safety program,” it noted. “We remain open to serious and thoughtful criticism of our research while also remaining hopeful that additional research will be more directed at practical solutions to improve working conditions across the supply chain.”
