© AP / Kevin Frayer

The Savar building collapse last month was a catastrophic event, but it was not the first of such tragedies for us and probably won’t be the last either. Before the nation could recover from the Tazreen Fashion fire incident a few months ago in November 2012, the Rana Plaza collapse shook the country again. And by the time this piece was written, there were already more such news in the media including a Sea-Truck sinking with 100 on board on May 5^th, leaving 8 dead and a garments factory fire in Mirpur, Dhaka on May 8^th that killed 8 more people.

As we close the rescue and recovery operations at Savar, we should take a hard look at our national mind-set on three very important areas – our perception around safety related compliances, our view on emergency and disaster response mechanisms and finally, our approach towards victim rehabilitation.

We are a nation that pays very little heed to complying with law and regulations in almost every aspect of our lives. Specific to this discussion, compliance with building codes is not something we take very seriously. A casual chat with a professional who is involved in the industry indicated that majority of the residential and commercial buildings in the country do not comply with the laws one way or the other. It probably won’t be a stretch to assume that more than a third of the readers of this article at the moment are sitting in a building that either has more floors than it is approved for, or has some other non-compliant feature such as a protruding balcony on one side of the apartment or an illegally added structure somewhere in the building that pose real dangers for its occupants. And, even if we are aware of such non-compliance, we are probably not thinking of addressing it any time soon. It is important that we start seeing the link between these inactions to the tragedies such as the one that took place at Savar.

When it comes to responding to a catastrophe, we as a nation have thus far taken an ad hoc, more or less unmanaged and decentralized approach. This was also evident during the Savar tragedy. Though the passion and energy of the volunteers during the rescue operation were certainly commendable and the Prime Minister herself claimed this effort to be an example for the world, we do need to recognize the issues around safety and effectiveness of such an operation. It could be argued that, it was the responsibility of the government to conduct this rescue and recovery operation using only trained professionals and not allow ordinary citizens to get involved because of the dangers involved. As concerned citizens, we should look ahead and channel our energy in demanding our government and its respective departments to develop and modernize the state’s emergency response capacities to that end. This is not only because we want to stop seeing our youth put themselves in harm’s way by diving right into the centre of such events, it is also because that would enable us to utilize the benefits of professional training and efficient resource management while ensuring overall safety protocols.

Lastly, after a disaster strikes, our commitment towards helping the victims and the affected population is usually short lived. We see an initial outpouring of financial and other kinds of help but it dies down within a short period of time. As a nation we let the need for long term rehabilitation slip into oblivion. Our government also promises all sorts of help in the initial days, most of which do not eventually see the light of day, or get tied up in bureaucratic red tape. Furthermore, resources often do not reach many of the victims because in the midst of numerous lists and conduits, some always fall through the cracks. To address this, we need a paradigm shift in how we address the victim rehabilitation issue. The government’s emergency response system discussed earlier needs an infrastructural setup that can facilitate coordination and channelling of all private and individual contributions throughout the process and make sure the help reaches the intended recipients in a uniform way. In addition to short term help, we also need to be aware of the need for longer term medical attention for the victims and sustainable rehabilitation of the surviving family members.

The recommendations discussed here may seem ambitious and involved. However it is imperative that we weigh these options against the price we keep paying dearly every so often. As a close friend described it, “We are a nation used to fighting bushfires and when that fire is under control, no one perpetuates the demand to know why the fire started in the first place and how to structurally change the system so that the fire is prevented the next time.” This article argues that it is time that we start addressing these issues and work towards introducing those structural changes. It is time that we start making sure that lessons learnt from such tragedies are neither lost nor forgotten. We owe this to the victims of Rana Plaza.

The author is an international development professional and works for Grameen Intel Social Business Ltd. Opinions expressed here are his own.

“This week, Fisher proposed to his readers what he titled “A fascinating map of the world’s most and least racially tolerant countries.” The deepest-red, or most racially intolerant, countries were India, Bangladesh and Jordan. Russia and China fell in the middle; much of Africa was left out for lack of data, but South Africa came out light blue (highly tolerant), and Nigeria light red (highly intolerant). Other highly tolerant countries included Pakistan and Belarus.”
The Cartography of Bullshit
by Siddhartha Mitter for Africa Is A Country, crossposted on AlalODulal.org

With the gutting of foreign coverage by most U.S. newspapers and the need to populate infinite Web space with content, a new creature has emerged: the foreign affairs blogger. Max Fisher, who hosts the Washington Post’s WorldViews page, is a leading exemplar of the species. Fisher’s newsy nuggets are often low-priority zeitgeist items that may or may not be vignettes of greater themes: examples in recent days include the tunnel-smuggled delivery of KFC chicken into Gaza, the video of the Czech president possibly drunk, a staff-passenger brawl at Beijing airport, and New Zealand’s “war on cats.” Fisher also concocts FAQ-style explainers on places in the news that he judges to be obscure to his readers (Chechnya and Dagestan, Central African Republic, Mali). And he is very keen on global surveys, whose results he summarizes, augments with his own interpretation, and typically renders with color-coded maps that drive home the key message.

This week, Fisher proposed to his readers what he titled “A fascinating map of the world’s most and least racially tolerant countries.” The deep-blue, racially tolerant areas included the US, UK, Canada, Australia, Scandinavia, and much of Latin America. The deepest-red, or most racially intolerant, countries were India, Bangladesh and Jordan. Russia and China fell in the middle; much of Africa was left out for lack of data, but South Africa came out light blue (highly tolerant), and Nigeria light red (highly intolerant). Other highly tolerant countries included Pakistan and Belarus.

A cursory glance at this distribution of results would suggest something deeply suspect about the exercise; moreover, anyone who studies the concept of race knows that it is hard enough to operationalize in a single-country context, let alone in cross-national comparison. Still, Fisher soldiered on, offering bullet-point findings: “Anglo and Latin countries most tolerant,” “Wide, interesting variation across Europe,” “The Middle East not so tolerant,” and the like. He offered country-level speculation: tolerance was low in Indonesia and the Philippines “where many racial groups often jockey for influence and have complicated histories with one another,” and lower in the Dominican Republic than in other Latin countries “perhaps because of its adjacency to troubled Haiti.”

Where did these numbers come from? As Fisher explained, they came from the long-running World Values Survey, which has polled attitudes around the world for decades. Fisher was drawn to the topic by news of a new paper, by a pair of Swedish economists, on the links between economic freedom in a country and its level of tolerance. (The paper was described in a post at Foreign Policy, itself a hub of foreign-affairs blogging.) To measure racial tolerance in particular, the authors used question A124_02 in the World Values survey, which asks respondents whether they would “not like to have as neighbors people of another race.” Intrigued, Fisher went back to the survey itself and, as he put it, “compiled the original data and mapped it out in the infographic” that led his post.

Although the results don’t pass the sniff test in the first place, I took a look at the data as well, in an effort to identify the exact problems at play. It turns out that the entire exercise is a methodological disaster, with problems in the survey question premise and operationalization, its use by the Swedish economists and by Fisher, and, as an inevitable result, in Fisher’s additional interpretations. The two caveats that Fisher offered in his post – first, that survey respondents might be lying about their racial views, and second, that the survey data are from different years, depending on the country – only scratch the surface of what is basically a crime against social science perpetrated in broad daylight. They certainly weren’t enough to stop Fisher from compiling and posting his map, even though its analytic base is so weak as to render its message fraudulent.

For one thing, the values for each country are indeed from different years, some in the past decade, others as old as 1990. As Fisher put it coyly, “we’re assuming the results are static, which might not be the case.” Indeed: by a rigorous methodological standard, this would be enough to throw out the cross-country comparison in the first place.

Second, a visit to some of the other tolerance questions in the A124 series reveals absurd results and design idiosyncrasies that should render the results of question A124_02, on race, suspect. The other questions ask respondents if they would accept a neighbor who had various other traits: homosexuality, a different religion, heavy drinking, emotional instability, a criminal record, and so on.

To take an example of the weakness of the data, it would appear that in Iran in 2000, only 0.9 percent of respondents “mentioned” an objection to having a homosexual neighbor, whereas in 2007, 92.4 percent mentioned it. In Pakistan in 2001, according to the survey, 100 percent of respondents “did not mention” objection to a homosexual neighbor. These are obviously particularly buggy examples, but these are the data points that the survey offers for analysts to work from; readers can visit the database to form their own opinion.

Moreover, the menu of traits available in the survey for respondents to tolerate or not tolerate varied by country. Thus, Iranians were asked about Zoroastrians; Puerto Ricans, about Spiritists; Tanzanians, about witchdoctors; Peruvians, inexplicably, about “Jews, Arabs, Asians, gypsies, etc.” (A124_33). In other words, the question about race was presented as part of a different menu of questions depending on the country, another red flag signaling a need for caution in isolating it and using it to produce grand findings. And further issues abound: as Fisher noted, self-reporting of prejudice is unreliable to begin with; as the scholar Steve Saideman pointed out, the “neighbor” question is not the best measure of tolerance; and so on.

But the biggest problem, of course, is that “race” is impossible to operationalize in a cross-national comparison. Whereas a homosexual, or an Evangelical Christian, or a heavy drinker, or a person with a criminal record, means more or less the same thing country to country, a person being of “another race” depends on constructs that vary widely, in both nature and level of perceived importance, country to country, and indeed, person to person. In other words, out of all of the many traits of difference for which the WVS surveyed respondents’ tolerance, the Swedish economists – and Fisher, in their wake – managed to select for comparison the single most useless one.

Fisher has an active social-media presence and his posts circulate quite broadly among international-affairs geeks and journalists in many countries; this one found the usual echo on the networks, plus a fair amount of skepticism. In India and Pakistan, Twitter readers were shocked by India’s ultra-high and Pakistan’s ultra-low racial intolerance ratings, both on their own merits and in comparison to each other. Lakshmi Chaudhry and Sandip Roy, at India’s Firstpost, wrote a detailed objection. (Less productively, Philip Weiss at Mondoweiss objected that Fisher’s map excluded Israel, implying that this deliberately overlooked racism in Israel – a spurious accusation, since there are no data available for Israel for question A124_02 in the WVS in the first place.)

On Twitter, Fisher engaged with Saideman but brushed off other queries, tweeting archly: “Coincidentally, readers from red countries are much more likely to say they doubt the methodology behind this study.” When I raised many of the issues in this post, he offered no response or acknowledgment at all, except to block me on Twitter. (That’s why I’m not bothering to seek comment from him before running this piece.) He summarized a few of Saideman’s objections in a follow-up post, but much of this goes down the rabbit-hole of political-science arcana about ethnic conflict and, for some reason, the specific case of Somalia. A more intellectually honest move would have been to take down the map and explain to readers why the exercise was doomed from the start.

Instead, we are left with a shiny color-coded “fascinating map” on the Washington Post site that sends a strong message of Western, Anglo-Saxon moral superiority, assorted with a mystifying portrayal of the rest of the world, and accompanied by near-gibberish interpretations – all based on a methodological process that fails pretty much every standard of social-science design and data hygiene. In other words, pseudo-analysis that ends up, whether by design or by accident, playing into an ideological agenda.

But the problem here isn’t the “finding” that the Anglo-Saxon West is more tolerant. The problem is the pseudo-analysis. The specialty of foreign-affairs blogging is explaining to a supposedly uninformed public the complexities of the outside world. Because blogging isn’t reporting, nor is it subject to much editing (let alone peer review), posts like Fisher’s are particularly vulnerable to their author’s blind spots and risk endogenizing, instead of detecting and flushing out, the bullshit in their source material. What is presented as education is very likely to turn out, in reality, obfuscation.

This is an endemic problem across the massive middlebrow “Ideas” industry that has overwhelmed the Internet, taking over from more expensive activities like research and reporting. In that respect, Fisher’s work is a symptom, not a cause. But in his position as a much-read commentator at the Washington Post, claiming to decipher world events through authoritative-looking tools like maps and explainers (his vacuous Central African Republic explainer was a classic of non-information verging on false information, but that’s a discussion for another time), he contributes more than his weight to the making of the conventional wisdom. As such, it would be welcome and useful if he held himself to a high standard of analysis – or at least, social-science basics. Failing that, he’s just another charlatan peddling gee-whiz insights to a readership that’s not as dumb as he thinks.

***

Painting India red: Why the global racism map is wrong

By Lakshmi Chaudhry and Sandip Roy for First Post

The map of the world’s most and least racially tolerant countries. Image courtesy: Washington Post

Washington Post has put together “a fascinating map of the world’s most and least racially tolerant countries,” a nifty infographic that paints the world in hues ranging from deep blue tolerant to a dark red racist. India is swathed in crimson.

The underlying data was culled by WaPo writer Max Fisher from the World Values survey which measures public attitudes around the world across a staggeringly broad range of issues, ranging from family values to political beliefs, from thoughts on women as single parents to taking soft drugs. The polls were conducted at different times between 1981 and 2008, and a number of questions were tested across many countries, while others were only polled in a couple of nations.   In this case, Fisher drew his map on the basis of responses to a single query (inspired by Swedish researchers who published a study doing the same):

The survey asked respondents in more than 80 different countries to identify kinds of people they would not want as neighbors. Some respondents, picking from a list, that also included “drug addicts”, “homosexuals” , “unmarried couples living together” chose “people of a different race.” The more frequently that people in a given country say they don’t want neighbors from other races… the less racially tolerant you could call that society.

Fisher finds that more than 40 percent of respondents said they would not want a neighbour of a different race in only four of the 81 nations. These are India (43.5 percent), Jordan (51.4 percent), Hong Kong (71.8 percent) and Bangladesh (71.7 percent). And also this: Only 6.5 percent of Pakistanis objected to a neighbour of a different race, making them more racially tolerant than even the Germans or the Dutch.

Influenced by the expression of white racism in the West, they assume that preferring a neighbour of your own race — i.e. not black, Latino, Asian et al — is an accurate barometer of prejudice. AFP

The last is likely to prompt squawks of incredulity — Fisher dismisses it as an “outlier” — but it also points to the hazards of measuring a complex phenomenon such as racism in a cross-cultural context. Here are five reasons why we think Washington Post’s global map of racism doesn’t hold up to scrutiny — and why it is a fallacy to treat “racism” as a universal term.

One, what is ‘race’ anyway? In a nation where the chances of living next to someone of a different race is fairly remote, it is odd that we should hold such a strong opinion on the matter. This isn’t to say we are not bigoted, but the language employed by the survey question fails to capture the nature of our biases. For example, it is far more likely that Indians would prefer living next door to, say, a white expat than a person of a different religion. In fact, the presence of foreign tenants usually indicates a desirable neighbourhood. Unlike the West, ‘race’ is not a culturally charged term in India where differences of caste, ethnicity and religion are far more important. Indian respondents may have interpreted the term more broadly to include other categories of difference — but that still requires a leap of interpretation glossed over by the colourful map.

Moreover, both Fisher and the Swedes picked this particular measure of intolerance because of their own cultural bias. Influenced by the expression of white racism in the West, they assume that preferring a neighbour of your own race — i.e. not black, Latino, Asian et al — is an accurate barometer of prejudice.

Two, one size doesn’t fit all.  A question that merely looks at the kind of neighbours one might prefer is a rather clumsy and ill-fitting indicator of racism. India, for example, is full of housing societies of various persuasions. People who live in a Parsi housing society might prefer to have a Parsi as neighbour. Does that necessarily imply that everyone who lives in a Parsi housing society is ipso facto racist? Is a vegetarian housing society justified because it’s about a deeply-felt religious belief that cooking meat is polluting while an all-Brahmin housing society is not?  Is the Polish landlady in an old-style London house with poor ventilation being racist because she doesn’t want Indian tenants frying fish? But this matter of convenience could easily acquire a tinge of racism in a survey that just polled people’s preferences in tenants or housing association rules.

Three, to Chinatown or not to Chinatown? One man’s Chinatown might be another man’s ghetto, but the fact is people congregate with their own because it’s more comforting and just plain convenient thanks to little neighbourhood stores selling, say, little Mexican candies or Chinese flu medicines. Created by racist housing policies in many American cities, ethnic neighbourhoods, their Chinatowns and Koreatowns, are now flaunted with pride as bustling proof of their multicultural credentials, and touted as tourist stops, the  go-to places for an “authentic” taco or a bowl of ramen noodles.  And it’s a matter of regret when these neighbourhoods, whether its Brooklyn, New York or Japantown in San Francisco, become more integrated and therefore less “ethnic.” A city of many separate ethnic neighbourhoods could pride itself on its diversity but could well be viewed as a patchwork quilt of racism if its residents are polled in a survey like this.

Four, there’s race and there’s race. A catch-all option like “People of a different race” does not begin to capture the complexity of race relations and racism. It divides all races into two giant buckets – mine versus other. It has no way to measure what Indians think of a white neighbour as opposed to a black or Chinese neighbour. The real racism is revealed in our very different attitude towards different racial groups and the stereotypes we assign to them. As newly landed graduated students in the US, many desis are warned by perfectly well-meaning seniors in the Indian Students Association not to rent houses in the “black” parts of town — but no one ever warns them off predominantly white neighbourhoods. The survey does include immigrants/foreign workers as possibly undesirable neighbours, but fails to recognise that a “foreign worker” can be a diplomat or NGO worker in Afghanistan; Filipino maid or Indian labourer in the Middle East; a Latino farmhand in the United States.

Five, whatever happened to the Shias? If the ‘race’ option is problematic, so are the other options that were omitted. As we noted earlier, the choices offered to respondents often varied from one nation to another. The Indian version, for example, does not include caste as a criteria for exclusion. The survey does include specific groups as potentially undesirable neighbours but only in certain countries. For example, South Africans can pick blacks, Iranians can opt for Zoroastrians. Oddly, Slovaks, Spaniards, Czechs and Argentines along with Indians have the choice of nixing Hindu neighbours but Pakistanis, Bangladeshis and Sri Lankans do not. More astonishingly, the options offered to Pakistanis do not include Shia neighbours — who only appear on the Iraq survey. Given the level of anti-Shia violence in Pakistan, and a historic Shia-Sunni divide, we can reasonably guess that the results would be less than heartening. Again, this does not mean that Pakistan is more racist than India. But its “outlier” status points to the need for culturally specific categories required to measure the level of tolerance in any given society.

A genuine cross-cultural survey of racism — or more precisely, intolerance — requires far more elaboration and care. Such a barometer would go beyond mere neighbour-preference and tap into active forms of bias. For example: questions linking violence to certain communities, be it in the form of riots or crime. The survey would take into account a nation’s specific racial, ethnic, or religious divisions, and the ways in which they find expression.

Until such a survey comes along, we can only assume what we already know about ourselves: India is a deeply biased society. We are notoriously racist toward black foreigners and our own fellow citizens from the North East. For instance, 43.9 percent of Indians are uncomfortable with neighbours of a different religion. But neither the World Survey nor Fisher’s map tells us whether we are more or less racist than the rest of the world. The so-called racism map is more egregious because it offers an alluring and misleading distillation of context-less data, painting entire nations as racist or liberal in one fell swoop. If we want to hand out scarlet letters for racism, we will need more than a paint-by-numbers palette.

A colleague said: “If we force the issue (double the minimum wage) and it is firmly imposed, there is a danger that costs will increase too rapidly and business will be lost. The strategy is to shame the foreign buyers to reduce their profits (by paying a higher price for the products to support higher wages).  Will it work?”

My short answer to your question will be it won’t. This is from my experience as a businessman who had been involved in a similar trade for many years. In the case of the garment industry, the buyers had been advocating higher wages for garment workers for a very long time, not to see that it will come and eventually land on their lap. Many say it was a PR exercise on their part, I don’t think it was, simply because too much effort went in from their side.

In 2010 the top ten buyers wrote a joint letter to our PM almost pleading that the minimum wages be increased, link below:
http://about.hm.com/content/dam/hm/about/documents/masterlanguage/CSR/Others/Letter_to_BD_Government_18_August_2010.pdf

Also see H&M’s fair wages advocacy website which is quite detailed on their activities on this front: http://about.hm.com/AboutSection/en/About/Sustainability/Reporting-and-Resources/Case-Studies/Wages-Bangladesh.html

Why were they doing this, if it is only low wages that they seek ? I think they are much more aware of the ground realities than we are. While we are waiting for ‘credible’ research to tell us how much are the cost inputs that finally translate into price for the buyer, they ask the factory owners and some do tell them. I myself know from some of my garment owner friends (in some of their more disarming moments) that for every 100 of the final price to the buyer (not the price to the consumer) 31 comprises of wages + profits, of which roughly 9 is wages 22 profits. When it comes to workers wages our garment buyers would naturally think the buck should stop at the factory owner’s doorstep.

I think it is also important I think to make that distinction between ‘wages’ and ‘the wage bill’, the latter is what matters to the factory owner. The ratio of the wage bill in proportion to total value of output can remain the same with the same number of workers and higher wages if productivity goes up, thus keeping the unit price same. Because most of the factories produce at the lowest end of the efficiency ladder, simple shop floor management enhancement, improved skilling, better equipments and yes, better working conditions can deliver much required efficiencies in these factories. It will be difficult for us to get the buyers to pay for such inefficiencies when they know that this will not incentivise the factory owners to do it themselves. You will note, as a smart factory owner, Rubana Huq knows this, and in her recent write-up quite wary of advocating that the buyers ‘subsidise’ the factory workers wages, which in turn would mean ‘subsidising’ factory owner’s profits, much that we would want them to. If you take the strategy of naming and shaming the buyers, they will simply go away, rather than pay a higher price for the product, as they will deem the strategy grossly unfair on the part of the factory owners.

On whether, most garment workers are getting higher than minimum wages, here is a study done by the organisation Fair Wear Foundation that shows that they aren’t. I know this is a very popular claim made by the factory owners for obvious reasons, but not borne out by facts. We must remember when the minimum wages were doubled in 2010 none of the factories cost themselves out of the business, despite extreme resistance by the then President of BGMEA who threatened closure of hundreds of factories, neither did the price to our buyers go up even marginally.

http://www.fairwear.org/ul/cms/fck-uploaded/documents/countrystudies/bangladesh/MinimumWageImplementationBangladesh.pdf

I feel Bangladesh should not continually play poverty to outsiders, especially not the factory owners and should not make the case that our abject state of affairs are somehow their responsibility. I would like to quote a paragraph from Harvard Business Review:

“In Europe and the U.S., just about every substantial step forward in workplace safety and employment rights was wrested from unwilling employers by organised labor”.

http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2013/05/preventing_another_bangladesh.html

Further quotes from that article:

“This means eschewing simplistic labels (“ethical,” “green”) that ascribe products with a magical quality that absolves us from culpability. The truth is that the world is complicated, and supply chains are tangled and dynamic. Labels are a good way of giving consumers partial information, and maybe selection between alternative products might do some good: Fair Trade and similar initiatives have had some unequivocal successes. But let us never delude ourselves that they capture the whole story or that they do not often bring serious unintended downsides. “Ethical consumption” might be a great way to raise awareness and maybe leads some to serious engagement in the real economics and politics of global supply chains. But if it serves to close our minds in soporific smugness, it is a very bad thing indeed”.

It is important to make that distinction between ‘good player’ and ‘bad player’, but it is also necessary to see how both are intertwined, and perhaps culpable. We do have world class factories with working conditions comparable to anywhere in the world, but these came out of a need to go beyond extracting profits out of low cost labour and adding value in terms of manufacturing higher end products and improved productivity. The factories are owned by owners relatively wealthier (making more profits ?), working out higher margins not from low labour cost alone. Nothing wrong with that, but the problem lies in the fact that these same producers are also sold on profits they can make from a lower cost production function from the 3rd tier factories (Rubana’s example), thus end up taking orders for products they will not produce in their factory but outsource to the 3rd tier ones that they subcontract or literally run as their own.

It is common knowledge in Bangladesh that most of the top producers in the country have now become order-procurers playing the role of a buying agent rather than a producer. It is very easy to do that. They take the order in the name of their factory, pass off the manufacturing to these 3rd tier factories, the manufactured goods are delivered to their godown prior to shipment. On a related but separate note, this developed the popularity of the Inland Bill of Lading, a banking instrument that the Halmark Group later used for their fraudulent practice which was recently exposed. So I don’t think the problem will be so simple as Rubana suggests, that the 1st tier factories become shining example for the 3rd tier factories on which they will ‘impose’ their standards. How can they do that when they are wilfully perpetuating the the sub-standards in these factories ?

Please note, most of us overlooked this statement of hers when she was describing the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd tier factories: “The first tier factories are also the ones who run many third tier factories as their own or as their sub-contract establishments”.

http://www.thefinancialexpress-bd.com/index.php?ref=MjBfMDVfMTFfMTNfMV8yXzE2OTA3NQ%3D%3D

If and when the wages are increased, the unnatural margins which allow for this to happen will be depressed, creating a disincentive to carry on such activities for the larger producers. Unless that happens, the 1st tier factories will neither have the moral authority nor the will to bring changes in the 3rd tier factories in spite of having better standards in their own factories.

My views would be only from the point of view of a businessman, although it may appear that I am supporting only the interest of the workers. What others are saying is very correct; the departure of the buyers will be disastrous for our economy. My only point is, all this was predictable and we didn’t do anything about it. Not very long ago (but before Tazreen and Savar) I argued with my friends the urgent need to increase workers wages, improve the workings conditions (all of which means costs to the industry) before we are compelled to do so, as we are doing now. Otherwise the problem would be that we may fall into the danger of doing too little too late if it is part of a damage control exercise rather than part of a strategy. At that time I was mistaken to be a ‘leftist buddhijibi’, the worst kind of name you can call people these days.

The issue isn’t, and never was, whether the garment industry is good or bad for our economy, but what it is. Any country with a large number of agrarian workers will have a pool of low wage workers as competitive advantage to draw on for industrial transformation. As with many other countries with similar characteristics, Bangladesh too wisely capitalised on it. But three decades on, unlike other such countries who eventually moved on to a trajectory of adding value, triggered by a rise in wages, we choose to cling on to our natural ‘comparative advantage’ with its obvious disastrous consequences. This happened because even though the garment industry is the ‘sacred cow’ of our economy, we forgot that if we milk it to death we will be sacrificing it on the alter of economic nihilism.

Farhad Mahmud is an entrepreneur working in the carbon consulting industry.

Further Reading:
H&M looks for alternatives as Walmart blacklists 250 factories

This is part 2 of a series that looks into deeper underlying causes behind recurring political crisis in Bangladesh. Part 1 is here:,
Where Do We Go From Here? (Part 1- The Belgian Incident)

http://alalodulal.org/2013/04/17/where-1/

Let us consider a hypothetical scenario. Bangladesh 5-10 years down the road. Another national election is looming. But the political scene has changed a lot in the last few years. After dominating the national arena for three decades, both Sheikh Hasina and Khaleda Zia have taken exit from the stage. Naturally their sometimes adversary, sometimes partner Ershad is also not in the scene. People from Zia and Sheikh family are nominally in charge of the big parties but they do not hold sway over the organizations like the two women did. Divisive factionalism is rife in AL, BNP, JP and several factions led by regional political heavyweights have already broken away from the main party. Meanwhile, both because of domestic and international trends, Islamist political parties have gained strength, with Jamaat making the highest advancements. Its popular support is now solidly over the double digit mark.

Meanwhile the country’s socioeconomic scene hasn’t changed much. Economy is growing along as before but for the middle class the downward slide in quality of life has not reversed. Corruption and mismanagement are as rampant as before. Now that the two ladies are not there to bear all the opprobrium, people’s frustration has only increased as the hope for a new era in politics and governance is coming to a naught. In this uncertain political environment a leader rises to the occasion. He is a veteran of nationalist, right-wing politics and is known widely in the country for his uncompromising stances against India, USA and Awami League. He has good academic and professional record. Firmly in control of one of the large factions to break away from BNP, the new leader announces a simple electoral manifesto. Installation of Islam as the guiding principle for law and administration, zero tolerance for government corruption, active resistance to foreign interference, price-control and subsidy to alleviate the distress of the working poor. He promises a clean break from the past and dawn of a new era. His message catches fire, particularly among the conservative middle class. Jamaat joins his electoral-alliance. His political faction began to dominate the right-of-center vote bank.

In the election, the alliance wins around 35% of the vote but because the vote of rest of BNP, AL and JP were such fragmented that they managed to win 180 seats out of 300. As it became clear who is going to be in charge of the country for the next 5 years there was a scramble among breakaway faction to join the majority alliance and be a part of government. With the help of the factions the alliance go over the magic 200 mark and get a two-third majority in the parliament.

The new government moved swiftly on several front but most sweeping changes were made with the constitution. The government created a new constitutional body like the Guardian Council of Islamic Republic of Iran. The body was made of appointed Islamic scholars, academicians and ex-functionaries. The task of the council was to oversee that civil and criminal laws of the country follow Islamic guideline, vet the laws passed by the parliament and provide approval of candidates for political office whether they have the character and record conforming to Islamic principles. Many of political opponents became quick victim to the Guardian Council’s scrutiny and since no one in the country could claim to have a clean slate, the Council found it easy to bar many of the vocal opponents from the political arena. The new government quickly made broad personnel changes in the leadership of bureaucracy, police, judiciary and the Army. Gradual rise of religious conservatism over the years meant that there was no shortage of people in every branch of the state who were sympathetic to the politics of the new government. With the control of the machinery of the state firmly in hand, the government now cast its radical eyes on the wider national arena.

The government was prudent enough to leave the economy alone. Despite public rhetoric, the government also pursued a cautious foreign policy of not stirring up any confrontation with large powers. The lives of the working poor continued pretty much as before. Just as Islamist governments elsewhere in the world, the government channeled its evangelizing fervor mostly on social and cultural fronts and the educated middle and upper middle class were the main targets. Dress code for public places, sex-segregation in school, college, university and workplaces, severe curtailment of speech deemed to be anti-religion, withdrawal of state support for cultural activities not approved by religion etc were quickly implemented. At the same time a very ostentatiously public drive against corruption among high officials and a no holds barred anti-crime drive helped the government reach high level of popularity. The government’s indefinite continuation in power seemed to be taken for granted by most of the people. Such is the way a radical theocratic autocracy got complete control of the country with support from just one-third of the voters in the election that propelled them to power.

This is not a far-fetched scenario. There is nothing in our constitution, our institutions, our tradition or our inclinations that preclude such an eventuality. A radical government can make radical change to the country without even a majority support. In Bangladesh, the whole country becomes the ruling party’s oyster after winning the election. In fact they didn’t even need two-thirds majority, untrammeled executive power usually found its way to do whatever it wished throughout our four decades of history. But the problem worsened with two thirds majority; like a group of young boys in command of a King Tiger heavy tank, governments have laid a trail of waste across institutions of the republic when armed with two thirds majority. The worst part is that two-thirds majority may become the norm rather than the exception. We have become a nation of bi-polar patients with repeated political trauma. We become so despondent with every current government that we rush en masse to the yesterday’s fiend, optimistic beyond reason that things will change somehow.

The worst consequence of this unfettered government power for our country is not the blatant misrule of successive regimes but the catastrophic transitions of power. Power is the ultimate drug (or aphrodisiac, according to Henry Kissinger). Even in advanced democracies, leaders and parties find it hard to adjust with loss of power. Margaret Thatcher, George Bush Sr., are few of the leaders who found it quite hard to cope with post-power depression. In Bangladesh, the change of fortune associated with loss of power is so stark that ruling parties try to move heaven and earth to forestall the downgrade. From master of the domain to the leper of the village; it’s no wonder governments have to be taken down kicking and screaming. Crude Joke, Why is Bangladesh like a five-year clock? Because there is a revolution in every 5 years!

One thing must be admitted though; the 1996-2001 Awami League government made least amount of fuss in our history in giving up power. Probably that’s why they are now making as much fuss as possible. The price of these revolutions do not merely consists of the hundreds of lost lives and billions of GDP lost to the economy; it also includes our loss of faith in rule of law. The idea is becoming entrenched that the only antidote to rampant government power is to unleash chaos of violent people’s power.

This tragicomic pattern of autocratic fiefdoms culminating with revolutionary overthrow has reach such level of morbidity that now people are seeking answers that go beyond Khaleda-Hasina. There are two schools of thought prevailing among both the general people and the opinion makers. A pessimistic strand of thinking believes we are condemned to this labor of Sisyphus because of our national constitution (as composition or structure of the people), a more optimistic thread contends that our national constitution (as the formal system of fundamental laws and principles) bears the main burden of blame. As I mentioned in the first part of the essay, blaming our national makeup is an exercise in futility. National character, just as personal character is something that remains consistent in time with remarkable solidity. I would argue later on that our national composition is not uniquely antithetical to constitutional democracy. We shall also see that there are systems that take account of the flawed nature of the people. For now, we must direct all attention to the National Constitution (with capital C) because that’s the only mechanism through which we can attempt a course correction from the quickening slide towards a dark abyss.

In the recent years a view is increasingly gaining currency that the main problem in our system of governance is too much centralization of power at the hand of chief executive. This view holds that design and by evolution we have reached a situation where our heads of government enjoys almost omnipotent executive power; this unbalanced concentration is subverting our democracy and preventing moderation in politics. I would say that this is a consequence of our original flaw rather than the cause. Since independence, we had head of governments who were unitary executive exemplified. Transitioning back to parliamentary democracy was supposed to remedy this problem since conventional political wisdom says that parliamentary democracy offers greater protection against executive abuse and political stability. This is largely true. In most of the newly independent countries of the 2nd half of 20th century, parliamentary system proved generally better for safeguarding democratic stability than Presidential system. But even within Parliamentary system there are different types of democratic representation. We shall see later that some variants of parliamentary democracy is far better in providing check and balance of power than other forms of parliament.

I would contend that the main problem is not that the chief executive of government in our country is inordinately powerful rather that government itself is too powerful. By now it should be clear to us that a powerful central figure completely dominating a political organization may be the rule rather than the exception in our politics. Right from the independence up til now, our main political parties are always organizations that revolved around a supreme leader. We always had Supero Omnia (I above all) leaders rather than Primus inter Pares (First among Equals). In any kind of social or political organization power tends to gravitate towards central heavy weights. Lack of egalitarian sensibility among our people and our general deference to power mean that we actively facilitate this accumulation of power to the center. Hoping that the future will be different may be wishful thinking. Who in early ’80s thought that Khaleda and Hasina would dominate their parties for three decades? A national political system can have little say on how an organization can evolve or conduct itself. But the system can have lot of say on how the organization run itself in the outside environment because there are many other organizations, state, public and private institutions operating in the same sphere and they are competitors for power. The best remedy for too much power at the center of the ruling party can not be found in the inside workings of government but in how government itself works with others.

Time has now come to lay down the main thesis of this series plainly. I believe that our four decades of political history has amply demonstrated that our system of governance as codified by the constitution, has failed to protect our democracy from two fundamental concerns of constitutional democracy, Majoritarianism and lack of Check and Balance; which are basically two aspects of the same deficiency. The importance of Check-and-Balance and restraint of Majoritarianism in developing a democratic polity cannot be overstated. Majoritarianism by definition seems innocuous enough, “the philosophy or practice according to which decisions of an organized group should be made by a numerical majority of its members” (Merriam-Webster Dictionary). In practical human affairs majoritarianism has always meant a majority imposing its will ruthlessly upon the minority. The meaning of check and balances is self-evident.

Bangladesh’s political system is a direct inheritance of British Westminster-style Parliamentary democracy. This is not a trivial inheritance. When we consider that Britain boasts the world’s oldest continuously functioning democracy, we can be thankful that our country had already extensive experience of Parliamentary democracy at independence. This legacy probably protected us from worse kind of instability and strife. But when we look at the main institutional characteristics of Westminster-democracy and take account of our national experience, some alarm bells start to ring loudly. These features are (1) one-party majority cabinets, (2) executive dominance over the legislature, (3) two-party systems, and (4) majoritarian and disproportional electoral systems. We can plainly see that a lot of our political woes can be directly traced to these features.

I must state here that I do not believe the authors of our first constitution had the slightest motive to subvert or undermine democracy. In many ways our constitution is a remarkable achievement. The rights of individuals and mechanisms of democratic governance are boldly enshrined. Because of the Path Dependency of politics, any other form of government other that Westminster-style would have been very risky. The risk factor was probably very high on the minds of the framers. In a newly independent, war-ravaged country, powerful and stable government was a high priority. The seeds of Majoritarianism and lack of Check and Balance become understandable when we consider that the only viable political opposition at that time was the crazy communists. But the writing of the constitution in ’72 also highlights one of the core issues of all human affairs, the problem of incentive compatibility. People who were going to rule over the land were writing the rule book themselves. The framers probably had their own benevolent selves and their benevolent leaders in mind when they specified the rights and rules. But as any systems designer would tell you, design with the worst case scenario in mind not the best.

Liberty and Freedom do not come from specification; it comes from limitation of power. The fundamental nature of power is aggrandizement. Only checks and balances of power keep unbridled power at bay and provide the space for liberty and freedom for the powerless. In Bangladesh we keep yearning that governments will respect our freedom. We are not aware that Freedom by the grace of ‘Sarkar Bahadur’ is not freedom at all.

“Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote.” (Popularly attributed to Ben Franklin)

[In the next part of the essay I will highlight some features of the constitution that may have showed themselves to be inadequate for safeguarding liberty and rule of law. I will also discuss some recent incidents in other democracies that clearly points out that some of our seemingly most intractable political predicaments have ready solutions in other democratic systems]

Image Source: Shyamal Mahmood

Canada’s Tristan Style has now withdrawn the anti-Bangladesh ad and posted an apology on their public Facebook page. Below is the apology they posted and the comments on the public Facebook page. Please add your comments as well.

• 

  Farah Ghuznavi Dear Tristan
  
  I note that while you rush to offer your apology to consumers about the so-called miscommunication (which was in fact a cynical attempt to profit off the misery of others wrapped up in a cloak of self-righteousness), you have not yet bothered to even write directly to those of us who first wrote you letters initiating this ‘conversation’ yesterday.
  
  The fact that clearing yourselves on social media takes priority over clarifying the alleged miscommunication with individuals who called you out on it shows very clearly exactly where your priorities lie – in getting yourselves out of this mess asap – no matter how many mealymouthed explanations you choose to provide here.
  
  *Not* impressed!

  Write a reply…
• 

  Leesa Gazi Good that you WANT to apologize as we WANT to forgive you too!
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  Fahmida Nasrin Shuchi This is how you mourn ? Get some heart and brain as well
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  Laura Fari OH Maybe recruit some good ad and PR staff.
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  Sheikh Shahana Pervin Shila Hang a poster now saying that you appologize for your stupid marketing policy.
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  Eshita Rahman You trying to promote “ethical manufacturing” is quite laughable as you don’t seem to know the first thing about ethical marketing. What an excuse!
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  Monzur Ahmed I dont buy that you are saying “it may have been misinterpreted by some. The true intent of our message was to promote awareness of the importance of ethical manufacturing practices, something we remain committed to.” It was a very bad choice of word. You ostensibly wanted to profit by insulting Bangladesh and the wole world are still mourning the death of 1100 poor factory workers. You have great products as we can see your website. You really didn’t need such unthoughtful add. Unfortunately your such add lowered your brand image significantly. Thanks very much and good luck.
  • 

    Tanvir Ahmed Bravo. I’m with you.

    Write a reply…
• 

  Asm Fakhrul Islam “want to apologize”, not “apologize”? “miscommunication”, not “wrongdoing”? “misinterpreted”, not “offended”? “true intent”, or “underlying intent”? Have a noble heart while apologizing at least. Nevertheless we accept the eyewash (apology) as we are not you.
  • 2 Replies
• 

  Asif Ahmed Khan Your marketing strategy sucks! How can you say Misinterpreted ??? Do you think all people are dumb as hell like you!!! It was a cheap trick for making some bucks!! Awareness my arse!! If that was your intent, you would not have added any country name!!
• 

  Sheikh Salauddin as far as I knw u just recently opened your store .. dont forget u need us as your customer . for me who earn Well enough to shop at any luxury brand here in Canada . I’ll never shop at your store and I’ll also make 10 other not shop at your store .. What a cheap marketing trick
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  Sheher Imam Chowdhury You must publish your apology in daily newspapers. Else there will be a sit down protest in front of your store within a week
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  Nowrin Tabassum Nothing was misinterpreted, we got your ugly marketing message…
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  Samit Basu On the bright side for you guys, I’m sure every racist in Canada will want to buy your clothes. I don’t think anyone else will, but there’s a market there.
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  Alexandra White It was a deplorable marketing tactic. I think Tristan needs to go the extra mile here to demonstrate remorse and understanding of the situation. What is the company prepared to do to support the garment workers of Bangladesh – or other developing countries where you perhaps source your clothes? Beyond a heinous sign, what is your company doing to promote ethical manufacturing practices?
• 

  Shahariar Arifeen Tausif congrats! you’ve just saved your ass from a massive cyber attack, good for you.
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  Shahriar Taha I’ve never seen anyone promoting awareness in such a fatally naive way.
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  Sarah Bari there was no misinterpretation. As i had mentioned in my mail, this was an utterly distasteful form of marketing. You should be ashamed of yourselves for capitalising on a tragedy of this magnitude. clarification not needed ..neither accepted!!
• 

  Saif Russell …we got your ugly marketing strategy……
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  Samiun Nabi I hope like other socially responsible brands, you can also contribute to the victims of this tragic accident and that can give you a positive business exposure you seek!!
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  Fahd-uz-Zaman Chowdhury Sorry is not enough .. should have sued you for that
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  Ahnaf Saber I dont see how insulting a country creates awareness. The intent of the poster was very clear to us thank you very much. Next time try marketing without looking down upon other people?
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  Ishtiaque Khan Yes, you should fire your advertising agency, post an apology in the newspapers (not only facebook) and also send an official apology letter to the government of Bangladesh.
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  Farah J Shoreef Hello! Now it’s time to apologize in a better way! In compensation of insulting the death of the tragic accident, don’t you think you should now help those families? Go start that!
• 

  Muhammad Mahbub Hussain No business should be heartless. We appreciate your understanding of our feelings and the Apology in result. We believe, true Canadian Spirit will never support any activity which insults any nation or community for achieving better numbers in trade. Thank you …
• 

  Saiful Islam I really want to know how much this company has paid for the sufferers in Bangladesh! The policy they used to increase sale was the cheapest, dirtiest, nasty, racist marketing strategy I have ever known.
• 

  Abu Naser Muhammed Mashuk Thanks for removing the poster
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  Mds Jamal Thank You
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  Mahbub Alam Do not think they had removed the poster just out of love for Bangladesh?,but they have other motives.Bangladesh should take it seriously,otherwise our RMG sector will be in shambles.One of neighbouring country is furling this propaganda for their own market strategy to popularise their garments.
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  Aftad Zaman Thanks for removing it, and the apology. People (and companies) make stupid mistakes, it’s good to learn from them and do better in the future.
• 

  Sadia K How about contributing some of ur profit in helping out the victims of the tragedy. That could be considered an apology. Not just a mere status on the Facebook page.
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  Jannat Snigi “awareness of the importance of ethical manufacturing “???seriously??so you are sure that each and every garments factory in Bangladesh is practicing unethically,is that what you are implying??? your “attempt” of apology makes me laugh!!
• 

  Toufique Chowdhury Kichuy bolar nai
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  Sharif Shaham What do you mean by “May have been” “Misinterpreted by some”????? You are still not sure ? We DONT accept this apology as it “May have been fake” !! Looks like you still didn’t fire your PR person.
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  Mohammad Sadat Chowdhury I will never buy anything from you and tell everybody not to buy. Shame on you!!! You don’t want to pay for labor but play politics against the poor Garment Workers of Bangladesh!! Please fix yourself first and then tell others to be fixed. Anyway, thanks for the apolozy and please don’t do anymore stupid activity! After all you will live by selling products like theese and you should have respect to the worker. What you can do is keep pressure on Bangladesh Govt. to take care of the Garment sector so everybody gets the benefits- the workers, you and me. Thanks
• 

  Selima Sara Kabir As everyone here has already pointed out on several occasions, there was no room for misinterpretation here. I believe it was a gross violation of ethical marketing when you decided to use the death of nearly 1100 factory workers as a marketing ploy. Even if you intended to promote the importance of ethical manufacturing, you did so by degrading Bangladesh and thereby trivialising the lives that were lost. Perhaps a better phrased apology, alongside responses to all of us who e-mailed, might be a better strategy.
  
  Your sad marketing ploy has cost you possibly all your Bangladeshi clients and several others who sympathise with the situation.
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  Ariful Haque Subin so i guess your plan have backfired! congrats on losing customers!
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  Diavee Hossain Nothing at all was “misinterpreted”. You tried to profit of a tragic event, and that’s all there is to it.
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  Farhana Mahamud You think its gonna help your brand??? How could give such a message? You didnt even think how disrespectful it can be for a nation. What happen to our country was just an accident & you are using that for advertisement of your brand…shame on you
• 

  M Mashfiq Huq If thats what you meant then thats what you should have written.
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  রাহাত খান Now think if we boycott to buy your brand, how much that will hurt you guyz..
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  Mishal Ali Disgusting marketing ploy. I think I will have your gimmick features on papers all over Bangladesh.
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  Kazi Sayeed Thanks for removing you bigoted dogmatic poster. But that’s your condolence for deliberately trying to impairing the wound of thousands of victims and their family members of the worst industrial disaster in the history of the country? How xenophobic can you people be! You should bend down low and render your apologies….if you want to stay in business!
• 

  Ahmed Abu Insaf With that thought .. have u planned to extend your help to those families suffering from losses ? … or only to make more sale – insulting their blood …
• 

  Tanveer Rahman Sajeeb please learn some ethical strategy for marketing, promotion and public relation work then apply it for business purpose. your apology statement is ambiguous and really does not make any sense. the next step should be make a same banner regarding confession for previously showed provocative message about Bangladesh Savar tragedy. Pathetic to watch this type juxtaposition of mourning and apparent profit earning message.
• 

  Badru Ahmed Funny the Tristan company can apologize in perfect English and yet being a Canadian Company cannot advertise in “proper English”?! Really?! It is almost laughable! But somehow I dont feel so merry!
• 

  Mohammad Sadat Chowdhury Hang a poster now saying that you appologize for your stupid marketing policy
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  Nuzhat Rifa Dear Tristan: u realised the importance of ethical manufacturing and ur offer of apology to Bangladesh lately.
• 

  Rubel Kanti Mohajan Ranju Dear Tristan, You must hang a sign on your store by apologizing to the country man of Bangladesh as you have hurt badly their feelings! This is not the ‘ethical manufacturing’ This is unethical marketing. You will face a very bad time my dear Tristan If you don’t hang a sign on your store too.
• 

  Anwarul Hawk Shame !!
• 

  Rashed Khan Well, good for you! better hire some real marketing agents now, who can express the ”idea’ or ”intent” truly. You must understand, you made shhitt out of that ad. For one, I’ll never buy anything from you guys, i promised myself that!
• 

  Mahmudul Karim Rubel Thank you….. We appreciated….

Contact Tristan Style on Facebook to complain about racist anti-Bangladesh ad

sarah.service@tristanstyle.com
information@tristanstyle.com

“About —Tristan, a Love Story at Heart: Tristan`s story began in the 1970s, when Gilles Fortin and Denise Deslauriers met and embarked on a wonderful journey by founding what would become a major Canadian fashion company, making them retailer and manufacturer. A love affair with fashion that was sparked nearly 40 years ago! First known as Tristan & AMERICA, the brand name was shortened to Tristan as the fledgling company continued to offer stylish, high-quality garments for both men and women. Today, Tristan pour Elle and Tristan pour Lui are appreciated by individuals seeking a distinctive image and affordable luxury. The Tristan brand is known for its ready-to-wear clothing, quality fabrics and impeccable cut. The perfect balance between accessible and sophisticated fashion, the collections take a modern and refreshing approach.”

Tristan Style website

© Christoph Niemann/The New Yorker

[W]hen you consider that these reforms happened in a country with a shaky government, recovering from tremendous civil strife, and building a garment industry from scratch, their success suggests that change is possible. As Locke succinctly put it, “If Cambodia can do it, why can’t Bangladesh?”

After Rana Plaza
by James Surowiecki, The New Yorker, May 20, 2013

The collapse of the Rana Plaza factory complex, in Bangladesh, last month is now the deadliest accident in the history of the garment industry, and one of the worst industrial accidents ever. Coming after a string of South Asian factory fires last fall that killed hundreds of workers, it provides painful evidence that, two decades since big Western companies started adopting codes of conduct for their suppliers, too little has changed. The problem isn’t so much evil factory owners as a system that’s great at getting Western consumers what they want but leaves developing-world workers toiling in misery.

Most of us have a sense that low prices in Dubuque have something to do with low wages in Dhaka, but that’s just one aspect of the pressure that we as consumers exert on global supply chains. Our insatiable demand for variety and novelty has led to ever-shorter product life cycles. In consumer electronics, the average product is replaced in just eight months. The rise of fast fashion means that clothing stores get new products almost every week. Richard Locke, a political scientist at M.I.T. who is an expert on global supply chains and the author of the new book “The Promise and Limits of Private Power,” told me, “Instead of buying lots of inventory with long lead times, brands wait as long as possible before ordering.” That way, they can ramp up production if a product takes off or shut it down if the product bombs.

Flexible supply chains are great for multinationals and consumers. But they erode already thin profit margins in developing-world factories and foster a pell-mell work environment in which getting the order out the door is the only thing that matters. Locke says, “Often, the only way factories can make the variety and quantity of goods that brands want at the price points they’re willing to pay is to squeeze the workers.” Suppliers in the garment industry rarely have contracts that last more than two seasons. “If you don’t deliver on time,” Locke says, “you don’t get the next order.” The problem is made worse by the fact that many of these factories are simply poorly run, with managers who generally have little training. This means that profits are smaller and there’s less money to pay workers or to invest in better conditions. And since in many developing countries, including Bangladesh, labor unions are frowned upon, there’s no one to speak up for workers in these factories. So safety becomes an afterthought at best.

Western companies’ preferred solution has been to create codes of conduct for their suppliers, backed up by factory audits. Unfortunately, as Locke has found in a detailed study of companies like Nike and Hewlett-Packard, corporate codes can accomplish only a limited amount. Auditors often miss serious problems—two of the factories in Rana Plaza had recently passed audits. And suppliers are adept at gaming the system, turning the typical audit into what Locke calls a “ritual of compliance.”

Just as most Western consumers seem reluctant to pay more for T-shirts, most Western companies have been reluctant to take real responsibility for what happens on their suppliers’ factory floors. But, if they’re serious about preventing future Rana Plazas, there are measures that these companies could take—from helping pay for safety improvements in developing-world factories to investing in training for managers. Locke studied two Nike suppliers: one worked closely with Nike to improve performance and working conditions; the other maintained more of an arm’s-length relationship. The factory that Nike worked with not only was significantly more productive but also had higher pay and better working conditions.

Even so, while there is much that companies can do themselves, the real lesson of the past two decades is that if labor standards are actually to improve government has to play a role. Private power alone won’t cut it: as long as consumers and companies insist on the lowest price and endless variety, there’ll always be factories that are willing to cut corners to get the business.

It’s encouraging, then, that Bangladesh has announced that it will work with the International Labour Organization to institute and enforce minimum labor standards. There’s understandable skepticism about the government’s ability to achieve this, given widespread corruption, and there’s also concern that tougher standards will lead Western companies to pull out of Bangladesh. Yet research shows that smart regulations work, particularly when they’re backed by international pressure.

A recent study of reforms in Indonesia in the nineteen-nineties demonstrated that they improved conditions without increasing unemployment. Locke points to the Dominican Republic, where an “incompetent and corrupt labor inspectorate” has been overhauled, working conditions have improved, and the country’s export industries have become more competitive. And in Cambodia the Better Factories Cambodia program, administered by the I.L.O. in collaboration with the Cambodian government, has significantly improved not just working conditions but also workers’ rights, even as Cambodia’s exports have grown briskly. The program has its critics, and Cambodia is still no workers’ paradise. But, when you consider that these reforms happened in a country with a shaky government, recovering from tremendous civil strife, and building a garment industry from scratch, their success suggests that change is possible. As Locke succinctly put it, “If Cambodia can do it, why can’t Bangladesh?”

Her husband, Shomlal Das quietly preparing for her cremation. They forgot to bring sindhoor. She is a married dead. She must wear sindhoor, someone from the small crowd whispered. They opened the bodybag. Part of her face was smashed, there was barely any hairline. Shomlal sprinkled sindhoor on her face... He pauses and sighs, “the government officer just treat every dead as muslim.”

Even when they mourn, they mourn from the margin
by Nischintapure Nribiggani (Anthropologist in Nishchintapur)

Pramila Rani Das Dead!
Doly Rani Das Missing!
Tema Murmu Missing!
Benu Rani Das Missing!
Suravi Rani Das Missing!
Sushanto Das Dead.
Brazeshwar Das Missing!
Nishikanta Das Missing!

May 3, 2013.

Nine days after the collapse of Rana Plaza, Pramila Rani Das’s (22) body was recovered from the rubble. Her body was crushed. Like many other, she was holding the ID card tight to her chest.

New Bottoms Wave Ltd. Card: 3341. Sewing Assistant. Line A. Date of Birth: 01-Jan-1990. Joining Date: 17-March-2013.

On the back side of her card, she had a photo of her one year old daughter, Papia Rani Das.

Her husband, Shomlal Das quietly preparing for her cremation. They forgot to bring sindhoor. She is a married dead. She must wear sindhoor, someone from the small crowd whispered. They opened the bodybag. Part of her face was smashed, there was barely any hairline. Shomlal sprinkled sindhoor on her face. Silently, her father-in-law took the Kafaner Kapor away that came with the coffin. Rony Chandra Talukdar tells us, ideally, a married hindu woman should go to shmoshan as a beautiful bride wearing colors, not white. He pauses and sighs, “the sarkari officer just treat every dead as muslim.”

Later that evening, Rony leaves us with Leela at Adhar Chandra School premise. Her husband Suvendu Chandra Das is still missing. Rony is trying to prepare a list of all missing hindu workers from Hobyganj and Sunamganj. Some journalist promised to take the list to Suranjit Sengupta, Minister without Portfolio, and a parliament member from Sylhet. Leela has seen all the dead-bodies laying on the floor twice already. She wanted to see them again. In case, she has missed something.

She shows us Suvendu’s picture one more time, so we could memorize his face, and describes the shirt he was wearing that ill-fated morning. Sky blue shirt with small black polka dot. We walk from one body-bag to another. Unidentified: ready for DNA testing. Shireen: identified, brother went home to bring elderly guardian. Shamoly Rani Das (20): unclaimed.

As we walk pass Shamoly, the loud recital of Q’uraan become unsettling for us. To show their sympathy, Dhaka Metropolitan Police has arranged Q’uraan Teloat for the grieving family in loud speaker. Leela moves on, asked volunteer Noman to open the next body bag.

The faint sound of Hari-bol from the near-by temple and shmoshan ghat gets lost in the predominantly muslim soundscape of mourning.

Even when they mourn, they mourn from the margin.

Nischintapure Nribiggani is a collective of radical anthropologists.

Missing: Pramila Das. Husband: Shomlal Das

© Jasper Reitman/ New York Times

Nearly every rich country has gone through a “T-shirt phase” — an economic period in which there are a significant number of poor farmers who, rather than toil on unproductive land, accept harsh work conditions and low wages in textile and apparel factories.

Economic Recovery, Made in Bangladesh?
By ADAM DAVIDSON/ New York Times, May 14, 2013

A couple of years ago, I was in an industrial park in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, as a textiles executive pitched me on becoming a rich T-shirt manufacturer. It was easy, he said, to teach basic sewing to even the most poorly educated farmers. If I could spend $500,000 on used sewing machines (he knew a guy), rent a concrete building with no air-conditioning and hire a few dozen peyizan (Creole for “peasants”) for around $3 per day, I could recoup my investment within two years. And if it didn’t work out, he noted, I could sell the equipment to an entrepreneur in another poor nation.

Nearly every rich country has gone through a “T-shirt phase” — an economic period in which there are a significant number of poor farmers who, rather than toil on unproductive land, accept harsh work conditions and low wages in textile and apparel factories. Britain started its T-shirt phase in the late 18th century; the United States had two — New England in the 19th century, then the South in the 20th. During the last 80 or so years, many Asian countries — first Japan, then Korea, Taiwan and China — progressed from the T-shirt phase into broader economic development. Cambodia, Vietnam, parts of India and Sri Lanka are passing through this now. But Bangladesh, where an eight-story apparel factory tragically collapsed last month, killing hundreds of workers and devastating the country, is in the midst of a particularly confusing T-shirt phase. The question is whether it will emerge into a more developed economy, like its many predecessors, or remain stuck, like Haiti.

According to the comprehensive “Ashgate Companion to the History of Textile Workers,” a study of 21 countries over 350 years, nearly every nation suffered through its T-shirt phase differently. Argentina’s brutal encomienda system literally worked indigenous laborers to death. The Hapsburg monarchy’s T-shirt phase coincided with its own collapse. Japan’s progress was slowed by a world war; Germany’s was all but destroyed by two. New England’s textile workers had it relatively good; if conditions didn’t improve, they could threaten to leave for the frontier.

All these countries, however, experienced the same broad phenomenon. Lex Heerma van Voss, an editor of the “Ashgate Companion,” told me that the T-shirt phase lasts only as long as there are large populations of farmers with few options. This is known as a “race to the bottom.” Factory owners compete by offering low prices, which are accomplished by paying workers tiny wages. Cutting costs by a few pennies per shirt may sound trivial, but mass-market brands find that even a slight increase in price destroys demand. And those pennies at wholesale become dollars at retail.

But once the factories have absorbed all these desperate farmers, they need to find a new competitive advantage. That usually involves making better products. When the T-shirt phase ends, a “race to the top” usually begins. Factories often shift to finer clothes, like dress shirts, which require skilled workers. This phase often involves the growth of unions and rising wages. It’s typically followed by one in which factory owners, forced to pay more, seek out ever more profitable lines of business. That can mean the move to low-end electronics assembly, then auto plants and maybe even airplane manufacturing. At the high end of the spectrum, you begin to see what the U.S. manufacturing economy is going through now — expensive products, like medical devices, which are often made by machines that are operated by highly skilled workers.

Bangladesh is in that moment when the race to the bottom coincides with the beginning of a race to the top. Munir Quddus, dean of the business school at Prairie View A&M University in Texas, remembers living as a teenager in Bangladesh, in the ’70s, when it was one of the poorest countries on earth. Since the arrival of textile manufacturing, in the late 1970s, the country’s poverty rate has fallen to less than 40 percent from 70. The average Bangladeshi went from living on about $1 a day to more than $5. But while there have been modest improvements in some factories (“They have air-conditioning,” Quddus says), there are still thousands of decrepit ones with minimal oversight. Quddus also points out that roughly 10 percent of Parliament seats are occupied by factory owners, and others have strong political ties. This includes Sohel Rana, the owner of the factory building that recently collapsed.

Bangladesh has become the world’s second-largest apparel exporter, growing from next to nothing to $18 billion a year. “It could be a $40 or $50 billion superpower,” Quddus told me. That will require a coordinated race to the top. The government would have to support factory inspections and safer conditions, which would inevitably raise prices — and could send wholesalers elsewhere. Cambodia responded to angry worker strikes by raising its minimum wage to $78 a month, about double of that in Bangladesh. The average Cambodian T-shirt now costs an American wholesaler around $2.50, which is 82 cents more than one coming from Bangladesh — a huge differential in the apparel trade. Mike Flanagan, a retail-sourcing consultant, told me that if Bangladesh raised its prices even 50 cents, the results would be devastating. “There won’t be four million garment-making jobs in Bangladesh,” he wrote in an e-mail. “There probably won’t be 4,000.”

Many in Bangladesh fear that if the country becomes too expensive a place to make clothes, countless sewing machines will be sent to new factories in Nigeria, Kenya or Ghana. But Vijaya Ramachandran, an economist at the Center for Global Development, who recently studied the industrial prospects of sub-Saharan nations, says this outcome is unlikely. African countries may have a steady supply of unskilled labor, but a higher cost of living should keep them from competing with Bangladesh.

Ramachandran and I tried to figure out what countries might inherit Bangladesh’s T-shirt phase. Other than Burma, a long shot, Ramachandran couldn’t think of any. For now, Bangladesh might be where this centuries-long T-shirt journey ends, which means that their race to the bottom may be rooted in a misunderstanding. The country’s manufacturers can afford to take a step or two up the value chain. Not only can they pay their workers more, treat them better and house them in safe and clean factories, but there is also a significant economic incentive to do so.

Adam Davidson is co-founder of NPR’s “Planet Money,” a podcast and blog.

© Taslima Akhter / TIME Magazine

Do you remember that Savar “accident”?
by Ali Riaz, translated by Unnashic for AlalODulal.org

Rana Plaza in Savar collapsed on 24 April, today is 13 May. The rescue operation has also finished, after 20 days. 1127 corpses have been found, over 1000 injured and none of us know how many are missing. 

Those who have lost their family members know how painful this is. Those who are still waiting for the dead bodies of their loved ones understand the depth of the darkness between hope and despair.

The collective efforts of the general public rescued thousands of people; people came to rescue forgetting the difference between day and night, ignoring all their duties.

While participating in rescue efforts Izazuddin uddin Chowdhury Kaykobad was burnt to death; Omar Faruk Babu after loosing his mental equilibrium died under suspicious circumstances.

Incessant news reports flooded world media. Many around the world, even those with no connection to Bangladesh, have come forward to put pressure on different buyer-companies so that urgent actions are taken to ensure a just wage for the workers.

Yet, still now the BGMEA has not been able to produce a complete list of workers who were working on that day in the five factories. So far, in two attempts what is given is not a list but mere numbers. Why cannot the peak-body of owners of the industry be sued for its failure to produce a list, when everyone else can work day and night for the good of our country, for a fair wage for the workers and to establish a union for them?

Although it did not take long for cunning leaders to close the factories. There is no urgency in paying the wages due, but the workers were easily told ‘you won’t be paid if you don’t work’.

Already 20 days have passed, we were busy with other issues, many incidents will take place in future – maybe one day we would say – ” do you remember that Savar ‘accident’”?

সাভারের রানা প্লাজা ধ্বসে পড়ার ঘটনা ঘটেছে ২৪ এপ্রিল, আজ ১৩ মে।

কুড়ি দিন উদ্ধার অভিযান চালানোর পর সেই অভিযানও শেষ হয়েছে। মৃতদেহ উদ্ধার হয়েছে ১১২৭টি, আহত হয়েছেন হাজারের বেশি। নিখোঁজের সংখ্যা আমরা কেউ জানিনা।

যারা পরিবার পরিজন হারিয়েছেন তাঁরা জানেন এর বেদনা কি। যারা এখনও তাঁদের প্রিয়জনের লাশের আশায় বসে আছেন তাঁরা জানেন আশা-নিরাশার মাঝখানের অন্ধকার কত গাঢ়।

সাধারণ মানুষের সম্মিলিত উদযোগের ফলে উদ্ধার হয়েছেন হাজারো মানুষ; দিন-রাতের পার্থক্য ভুলে, নিজেদের জীবনের সব কাজকে ঠেলে দিয়ে মানুষ এগিয়ে এসেছিলেন।

উদ্ধার অভিযানে অংশ নিয়ে অগ্নিদগ্ধ হয়ে প্রাণ হারিয়েছেন ইজাজ উদ্দিন চৌধুরী কায়কোবাদ, মানসিক ভারসাম্য হারিয়ে ওমর ফারুক বাবু রহস্যজনকভাবে মৃত্যু বরণ করেছেন।

সারা পৃথিবীর গণমাধ্যমে খবরের পর খবর। পৃথিবীর বিভিন্ন মানুষ, যাঁদের সঙ্গে বাংলাদেশের কোনো যোগাযোগ নেই তারাও, এগিয়ে এসেছেন বিভিন্ন ক্রেতা কোম্পানির ওপর চাপ সৃষ্টি করতে যেন শ্রমিকদের ন্যায্য মজুরির নিশ্চয়তা বিধান করার জন্যে দ্রুত ব্যবস্থা নেয়া হয়।

অথচ বিজিএমইএ এখন পর্যন্ত একটা পূর্নাঙ্গ তালিকা দিতে পারেনি যে ঐদিন এই পাঁচটি কারখানায় কতজন মানুষ কাজ করছিলেন। এই পর্যন্ত দু’দফায় যা বলা হয়েছে তা যে কেবল ভুল তাই নয়, সেগুলোও কেবল সংখ্যা, তালিকা নয়। দেশের প্রয়োজনে, শ্রমিকদের ন্যায্য মজুরি পাওয়ার প্রশ্নে, তাঁদের ইউনিয়ন করার অধিকারের প্রশ্নে সবাই যখন দিনরাত কাজ করতে পারেন তখন এই শিল্পের মালিকদের সংগঠন কেন একটা তালিকা প্রকাশ করতে ব্যর্থ হওয়া সত্ত্বেও তাঁদের ব্যাপারে কোনো আইনগত ব্যবস্থার সুযোগ নেই?

অথচ ত্বরিৎকর্মা নেতারা ফ্যাক্টরি বন্ধের সিদ্ধান্ত নিতে দেরি করেন নি মোটেই। শ্রমিকদের পাওনা বেতন দেয়ার কাজে ব্যস্ততা নেই, কিন্ত ‘কাজ না করলে বেতন নেই’ শ্রমিকদের সে কথা সহজেই জানিয়ে দেয়া হয়েছে। আহতদের চিকিৎসা ও সাহায্যের ব্যাপারে জাতীয় পর্যায়ে যে উদযোগ তাকে অপ্রতুল বললেও বেশি বলা হবে।

ইতিমধ্যে কুড়ি দিন গেছে, অন্য বিষয় নিয়ে আমাদের ব্যস্ততা ছিল, আগামীতে আরো অনেক ঘটনা ঘটবে – এক সময় হয়তো আমরা বলবো- “মনে পড়ে সাভারের সেই ‘দুর্ঘটনার’ কথা?”

Ali Riaz is Professor and the Chair of the Department of Politics and Government at Illinois State University.