European Union flags flutter outside the EU Commission headquarters in Brussels. A delegation from the EU Parliament is now visiting Bangladesh, which has called for improvement in labour safety standards for GSP Plus facilities REUTERS  Visiting European Union parliamentary delegation has suggested that Bangladesh should improve labour standard in line with the enhancement of safety and security issues for availing GSP Plus after graduating from Least Development Country It also stressed the need for democratic development and freedom of expression to get the additional trade incentives from the new status. Bernd Lange, chair of the International Trade Committee of European Parliament and leader of the delegation team, came up with the suggestion after a meeting with Commerce Minister Tofail Ahmed in the city yesterday. “We have heard about the ambitious plan of Bangladesh becoming a developing or a middle-income country. That means we have to look forward after its Least Developed Country (LDC) status is gone.” The country has set the target to become a middle-income country by 2021. After the graduation, it will not enjoy the GSP facilities. GSP Plus would be the trade agreement, which links to value-based trade relation, not only looking on customs and growth rate, but also on trade-related values, said Lange. It is a clear message of the EU parliament that trade has not an end in itself, it has to be vehicle instrument to improve living condition in society on both sides of partnership for sure, said the EU leader. This is also reflected in GSP Plus regulation that the EU expects from its partners that 27 international conventions on labour standards, workers rights, protection of environment, safety and security, democratic development and freedom of expression will be ratified and implemented, said Lange. “We have to prepare for that as the process is going on and the time is limited and focus should be on requirement for GSP Plus,” he adds. Currently, the EU offers duty- and quota-free market access to 48 Least Developed Countries under GSP. This is a unilateral measure to LDCs given to have their own development in the economic field. Compared to other 47 LDCs country, Bangladesh has used the opportunity at its best. In his address, Tofail Ahmed said: “We are optimistic to get the GSP Plus status from the European Union (EU) after graduating from LDC by 2021.” Challenges are ahead in availing GSP Plus status, but Bangladesh would be able to overcome challenges and meet all conditions, hoped the commerce minister. The delegation expressed satisfaction over Bangladesh’s attainment of desired progress in labour safety and security, trade union, fire and structural safety issues, added Tofail. “I am sure in the phase of dialogues to reach GSP Plus to fulfill the commitment of 27 conditions, the EU will give some support in capacity building so that at the end of the day result is expected to be good. I think it is a clear signal for fruitful partnership in future,” according to Lange. “I am an optimistic man and that we are really able to go together to that path and improve conditions, which are needed to fulfill GSP Plus.” Replying to a query about ethical buying, he said it is not in the hands of politics. Since the EU consumers want fair conditions and a lot of investment has been made, there is also responsibility of European brands to recognize these efforts, added the delegate leader.

Accord, the garment factory inspection agency sponsored by European retailers, is in discussion with the government to extend its tenure in Bangladesh beyond June 2018 to ensure completion of remediation works in all its member factories. The platform is planning to extend its stay in Bangladesh by another three years, much to the displeasure of garment factory owners. The number of factories from which the 220 Accord signatories source has expanded much since the inspections started in February 2014, said Rob Wayss, executive director and acting chief safety inspector of the agency. At present, it stands at upwards of 7,000The platform is now conducting its fourth batch of preliminary inspections, meaning the more recently inspected factories will not have finished with their remediation by June 2018, he told The Daily Star in an interview last week. “Our experience to date has been that approximately 18 percent of items that are reported to us as corrected prove not to be corrected or not to be properly corrected when our engineers do our follow-up verification inspections. ”Accord’s first batch of inspections concluded in September 2014 and the remediation works in this group of factories will most definitely be complete by June 2018. “We expect that the factories inspected in our first batch of inspections in Feb-Sept 2014 will complete initial remediation in the first half of 2017. ”About 72 percent of the total findings from the initial inspections are reported as corrected by the factories and/or verified as corrected by Accord engineers, Wayss said. After the Rana Plaza building collapse, 220 retailers joined hands to form the Accord with the view to fixing the structural, electrical and fire loopholes in Bangladesh’s garment factories.

The latest assertion of the US envoy in Bangladesh that restoration of the Generalised System of Preference (GSP) largely depends on the improvement of the country’s labour standard and factory conditions is not a new thing. She reiterated the so-called precondition a few days after the finance minister’s statement that the government would renegotiate GSP restoration with the Donald Trump administration of the USA.  The US suspended GSP for Bangladesh in the middle of 2013. Some 243 Bangladesh products used to enjoy the GSP facility. This covered one per cent of the country’s total export to the US which increased to $6.22 billion in FY16, registering 7.61 per cent growth over the previous fiscal year’s export of $5.78 billion. Moreover, GSP, the oldest trade preference scheme, excluded Ready-made garment (RMG), the leading exportable item of Bangladesh, was excluded from GSP facility. But the suspension of GSP was due to the RMG sector. The Rana Plaza disaster, which killed more than 1,000 garment workers and sparked global outcry, drove the US administration to suspend the trade preference as a symbolic penalty. The US placed a set of 16-point conditions, focusing on better labour standards, for Bangladesh to fulfil for regaining the trade preference. While the door of renegotiation for GSP is always open, the linking of labour issue with international trade is flawed. The World Trade Organisation (WTO) has make it very clear that labour-related issues would not be the purview of the multilateral trade negotiations. So, labour principles and standards are not the subject to WTO rules and disciplines. At the first ministerial meeting of the WTO in 1996 in Singapore, the issue of labour standard was taken up and addressed in the ministerial declaration. The members defined the role of the multilateral trade body on the issue saying that the International Labour Organisation (ILO) is the competent body to negotiate labour standards. The declaration noted that the WTO “rejects the use of labour standards for protectionist purposes, and agree that the comparative advantage of countries, particularly low-wage developing countries, must in no way be put into question.” ILO, an arm of the United Nations founded in 1919, is the multilateral organisation with the responsibility to deal with labour issues. For nearly 90 years, the organisation has been working to frame conventions to regulate labour standards. Eight ILO conventions define four ‘core labour’ standards. These are: freedom of association, no forced labour, no child labour and no discrimination at work (including gender discrimination). Nevertheless, developed countries, led by the US, have long been lobbying with the WTO to make provisions for imposition of trade sanctions on countries that don’t enforce international labour standards. The inconclusive Doha Round multilateral trade negotiations of WTO also excludes labour related issues. The developed countries  now want to scrap the Doha negotiations and  introduce labour standard as a new issue covering e-commerce, SMEs and global value chain, fisheries subsidies and domestic regulation in services. Labour standards may appear to be simple tools of dealing with workers. But these are actually very complex and cover  a wide range of things: from child labour and forced labour to the right of organising trade unions and strikes, to minimum wages, health, safety and working terms and conditions. Moreover, any attempt to apply uniform labour standards in all fields throughout the world ignoring the differences in the level of development as well as socio-political-cultural conditions in various locales will not be practical at all. The United States claims use trade preference laws helps improve workers’ conditions in developing countries. GSP is one of the preferential programmes – and also the oldest one. By linking labour issue with trade preference, the US clearly defies WTO principle. This is also an example why developed countries are trying to bring the labour standards in the WTO as a new issue. Once labour standards become a subject to negotiation in WTO, it will be very easy for the developed nations to impose stringent conditions on developing countries regarding labour-related issues. AFL-CLO, the umbrella federation of the US trade unions, argues that the most efficient way to protect labour right is to reward or punish a certain product through the global trading system.  This does not obviously serve the cause of global trade system but actually promotes US interest. Again, some experts believe that both developed and developing countries do not really look at the linkage of labour standards to the international trade from a fair and rational perspective. Developed countries consider the low labour standards in the developing countries as ‘social dumping’ while developing countries find it as a new kind of trade barrier termed as ‘blue barrier.’ Thus, both actually want to protect their own trade interests at the cost of labour. One thing is clear. In the coming days, pressure from the developed world will increase to include labour standards in WTO agenda. Two mega-regional trading agreements,   Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), contain labour standards as important components of the agreements. And these two mega-regional trading agreements are spearhead by the US. However, the developing countries as well as the Least Developed Countries (LDCs), including Bangladesh, should improve their labour standards by ensuring better working  conditions at workplaces. It is for the greater interest of these countries and for their sustainable development. Keeping millions of workers poor and vulnerable, these countries can’t be competitive in the long run. While Bangladesh may use the flawed link of trade and labour as a bargaining chip with the US for the time being, more efforts are essential to improve skill and standard of  their workforces.

State minister for labour and employment Mujibul Haque on Thursday said that from 2018 Bangladesh would no longer require assistance of Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh and Alliance for Bangladesh Workers Safety, two platforms of global buyers, for RMG factory safety inspection. ‘We have told the 15-member European Parliament delegation that Bangladesh has strengthened the Department of Inspection for Factories and Establishments to a great extent and the body would be fully capable of taking over the responsibility of safety inspection by the year,’ the junior minister said at a briefing after a meeting with the visiting team at the Secretariat in Dhaka. European Parliament international trade committee chairman Bernd Lange, head of European Union delegation to Bangladesh Pierre Mayaudon, labour secretary Mikail Shipar, inspector general of the DIFE Syed Ahmed were present at the meeting, among others. H&M, a Swedish multinational clothing-retail company and one of the signatory of the Accord, has already made a proposal to the Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association in favour of extending the tenure of the Accord for additional three years. The retailer apprehended that the remediation work at the garment factories in Bangladesh might not be completed by July, 2018. Replying to a question in this regard, the state minister told reporters that any decision on extension of tenure of Accord and Alliance depended on the consensus between the governmentand the buyers’ groups. The buyers’ groups (Accord and Alliance) cannot extend the tenure unilaterally, he said. Mujibul said that the EU delegation wanted to know about the status of implementation of labour act, elimination of child labour, women empowerment, registration of trade union, and labour rights in the export processing zones. The state minister informed the delegation that the child labour in 38 hazardous sectors would be eliminated by 2021 and the country would be fully free of child labour by 2025. ‘Replying to queries, the labour ministry informed the visiting delegation that the government has no plan to amend the labour act further and the government is formulating a new act for the EPZ workers ensuring right for collective bargaining,’ Mujibul said. The ministry also informed that the rate of rejection of the applications for trade union registration decreased to 26 per cent in the year of 2016 from 73 per cent in the year 2015 and the total number of trade unions in the readymade garment sector stood at 532. ‘We have told the delegation that with the assistance of International Labour Organisation the ministry is working to form a remediation coordination cell to oversee the safety situation in the RMG sector. A good number of Bangladeshi experts will be included in the cell and it would be capable to maintain international standards in factory safety,’ Mujibul said.