Three weeks after announcing it would suspend Bangladesh’s trade preferences, the administration released an “action plan,” which calls on Bangladesh to significantly increase the number of labor, fire and building inspectors and to improve their training. The plan urges Bangladesh to impose stiffer penalties, including taking away export licenses, on garment factories that violate labor, fire or building safety standards.
In addition, the administration recommended that Bangladesh create a public database of all garment factories for reporting labor, fire and building inspections, including information on violations found, penalties assessed and violations corrected, with the names of the lead inspectors.
The administration suspended Bangladesh’s trade privileges after a widespread outcry that the country was doing too little to safeguard worker’ rights and safety in light of the Rana Plaza factory building collapse in April that killed 1,129 workers and the Tazreen factory fire in November that killed 112.
The action plan calls for establishing “an effective complaint mechanism, including a hot line” for workers to anonymously report fire, building and workers’ rights violations.
With regard to the garment industry, the Obama administration said Bangladesh should enact and carry out measures to address concerns that factories were suppressing workers’ rights to unionize and bargain collectively. The administration urged Bangladesh to ensure that unions and their supporters do not face reprisals and to “expeditiously” grant recognition to unionization efforts when enough worker signatures have been gathered to meet legal requirements.
Union leaders in Bangladesh say that after they gather the needed 30 percent of worker signatures at a company to qualify for union recognition, the country’s labor department gives those lists of names to factory owners, who then often proceed to fire union supporters or bully them into withdrawing their names from the list — so that there is no longer the 30 percent needed. Labor leaders say that is a major reason so few of the nation’s 5,500 garment factories and four million garment workers are unionized.
On Monday, the Bangladesh government adopted a new labor law that it said would be critical in making it easier for workers to unionize. One provision bars government labor officials from giving that list of union supporters to factory owners. Nonetheless, Bangladeshi labor leaders pointed to several new provisions to assert that the law was in ways a step backward and made it harder to unionize.
The Obama administration called on Bangladesh to publicly report information on the status and outcomes of individual unionization efforts and on whether the government had officially registered them, including the time taken to process unionization applications and the basis for any denials. It said Bangladesh should make sure that its export-processing zones allow full freedom to unionize.
The administration also said Bangladesh should proceed with a “transparent investigation” into last year’s killing of Aminul Islam, a prominent union organizer. Bangladeshi news media have reported that government officials might have been involved.
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