The Spectrum collapse on 11 April 2005, which killed 64 workers and injured 80, drew the world’s attention to the abysmal safety situation in Bangladesh’s garment factories. The collapse was certainly not the first major factory incident in the country, but the outrage this time led to an increase in corporate social audits focused on building safety and the setting up of a government task force to look into safety. From the outset labour groups raised concerns that this response was not systematic enough and that implementation was wanting. In 2006, after these measures were introduced, dozens more workers were killed in a number of safety incidents including 63 at KTS Textile Industries. 

A fire at H&M, Teddy and LC Waikiki supplier Garib & Garib Sweater Factory in Dhaka in February 2010 cost the lives of 21 workers. In the wake of the fire, international labour rights organisations developed Health and Safety Action Points for Buyers, released in April, on the 5th anniversary of the Spectrum Factory collapse. The presentation of the Action Points was followed by a proposal to organise a meeting of government, buyers, industry and trade unions. This meeting finally took place in December 2010 but yielded no real results. Shortly afterwards a new fire, in the That’s it Sportswear/Hameem factory, which supplied to Gap, PVH Target and others, killed 29 workers.

In the wake a continuous string of factory incidents, labour rights activists developed a proposal for a binding Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) that brands would be able to sign with unions to commit to an enforceable safety programme for their factories in Bangladesh with independent building inspections, worker rights training, public disclosure and a long-overdue review of safety standards. The first company to sign it was PVH, owner of Tommy Hilfiger and Calvin Klein. On 14 September 2012, German brand Tchibo was the second retailer to sign the MoU. Read more about the developments that led to this ground-breaking MoU.

A fire in the Tazreen Fashions factory, which supplied major brands including C&A, Dickies, Disney, Edinburgh Woollen Mill, El Corte Ingles, Enyce (Sean John), Karl Rieker, KiK, Piazza Italia, Sears/Kmart, Teddy Smith, Walmart, killed 112 workers and injured many more. Workers were trapped behind closed exits and barred windows.  This horrific fire once more showed how brands’ lack of action in a demonstrably unsafe garment industry continued to cost workers’ lives.

Immediately after the collapse, campaigning that had been ongoing escalated further. Unions, like UNI Global Union and IndustriALL, and other organisations in and outside the Clean Clothes Campaign network protested at storefronts and collected over 1 million signatures urging brands like H&M and Gap to sign on to a legally binding safety agreement (in line with the earlier MoU) by 15 May: a date agreed by brands during a meeting about factory safety shortly after the collapse.

Over 30 brands, including the previous signatories PVH and Tchibo and new major sign ons like H&M, Inditex, C&A, Primark, and Benetton, signed what was now called the Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh. This groundbreaking binding agreement, in which unions have 50% of the say and can hold brands legally accountable if they don’t live up to their promises, went into effect immediately. Eventually, over 220 brands would sign on to this initial 5-year programme which would be renewed in 2018, making more than 1600 factories in Bangladesh safer for over 2.5 million workers. Read more about the history of how the Accord came about.

Gap and Walmart, two famous hold outs on the work towards a legally binding safety programme in Bangladesh, announced their own programme: the Alliance for Bangladesh Worker Safety. 15 other North American brands which failed to join the Accord became part of this initiative. The Accord’s witness signatories rejected this corporate driven scheme from the outset for its failure to include unions and lack of accountability. The witness signatories would continue to monitor the Alliance over the years and concluded that the programme lacked transparency and that many safety remediations were dangerously delayed, whereas others were too easily declared fulfilled. After 5, unconvincingly and contrary to the Accord, the Alliance declared its work “done.”

Taking their role as witness signatory seriously, the NGOs that signed the Accord as witnesses next to brands and unions continued to monitor the Accord’s work and whether brands were meeting their obligations under the Accord. In a range of public reports (1, 2, 3), they urged brands to make haste with the mandated life-saving repairs and renovations that were behind deadline and to ensure that factories had enough funds available to implement these corrective actions in a timely manner.

In one example of the effectiveness of the interventions of the Accord, on 6 April 2017, the fact that workers could appeal to the Accord complaint mechanism prevented a likely factory collapse. Workers who noted cracks in the walls of their factory appealed to the Accord when the factory owner failed to act. The Accord ordered immediate evacuation of the building and ensured that workers only returned after completion of full remediation.

After four years of work under the Accord, it was clear to brands and unions that safety is an ongoing operation and that even the work to remediate all safety hazards found on first inspection was not entirely done yet even though the Accord was making progress. Therefore they negotiated and announced a new three year programme, due to run from June 2018 to June 2021. This new agreement contained an expanded training programme and offered the option for signatories to voluntarily add their home textiles and fabric and knit accessories suppliers to the Accord programme, which enabled companies that sell textiles, but not garments, to also sign up.

A boiler explosion at the Multifabs Ltd. factory killed 13 people, injured dozens more and led to a partial collapse of the factory. In response labour organisations called for inclusion of boiler inspections into the Accord, which were one of the main safety issues still under the purview of the government of Bangladesh. The Accord started a boiler inspection pilot in 2018 and the Accord stakeholders eventually agreed to include boiler inspections under the Accord’s purview. Still however the implementation of the boiler programme remains problematically slow. This incident also once more showed the urgent need for an employment injury insurance scheme for all garment workers.

By the time the five year mandate of the first Bangladesh Accord ended, a lot had been achieved. Over 1600 factories had been inspected and 84% of the safety hazards found upon first inspection had been fixed. The Accord had trained 2.2 million workers on how to identify safety hazards, utilise the Accord’s complaint mechanism, and safely evacuate the factory in case of a fire. At the same time, factory owners had not yet completed some of the most costly repairs and renovations. When the new Accord started in June 2018, some brands refused to sign the new agreement, prioritising profits over safety. Brands like Abercrombie & Fitch and Sean John did not join again. Nevertheless, over 190 brands would stay loyal to the Accord, or joined the programme for the first time because of its expanded mandate that now also included home textiles.

Not everyone in Bangladesh was happy that the Accord programme was continuing. Government concerns that the Accord would permanently replace national inspectorates were addressed already in 2017 through an agreement about capacity building and transitioning the work to national authorities. In April 2018 factory owners and the government used a court case by a disgruntled factory owner, who was barred from doing business for Accord signatories following falsification of engineer reports, to expel the Accord from Bangladesh as per 30 November 2018. The proceedings dragged on for months after that date during which witness signatories showed that the Accord’s work was direly needed until governmental agencies would be ready to take over the work.

21 companies which had chosen the corporate-led Alliance over the Accord and which saw their safety credentials at risk after the conclusion of the Alliance in 2018, launched the platform Nirapon. Nirapon describes itself as a “self-regulating” entity for safety in Bangladesh – this amounts to the same kind of failed voluntary model under which hundreds of garment workers died prior to the Accord’s formation. According to its website, Nirapon will not publicly identify factories that do not meet the standards and will have no authority to require remediation in factories where imminent life-threatening conditions have been identified or to suspend factories that fail to remediate those safety hazards. Nirapon claims that factory assessments will be carried out by a list of “qualified assessment firms,” but the list of such firms is kept confidential and there is no mechanism to ensure that these firms are equipped to carry out in-depth fire, building and electrical safety inspections. Nirapon’s website acknowledges that it will not work with factories to drive remediation and offers no clear mechanism through which safety violations will be addressed. The Centre for Policy Dialogue in Bangladesh came to similar conclusions in its 2021 report.

In May 2019, Global Unions and brands representing the Accord reached an agreement with the factory owners’ association in Bangladesh agreeing that in 2020 the Accord work on the ground would be taken over by a new entity, the RMG Sustainability Council (RSC). The witness signatories raised strong concerns that in this body workers’ interest would be outnumbered by corporate votes.

After years of civil society campaigning around the world, the ILO adopted a convention concerning the elimination of violence and harassment in the world of work (Convention 190), which has been ratified by 26 countries in the years since. Bangladesh has not done so, even though gender-based violence and harassment are a significant problem in Bangladeshi garment factories. Currently, workers in Accord covered factories can raise issues of violence and harassment in the workplace to its complaint mechanism, but workers elsewhere remain without access to remedy.

As agreed in May 2019, the RMG Sustainability Council (RSC) took over the work on the ground from the Accord’s Bangladesh liaison office. Concerns about worker representatives being outnumbered by companies within the RSC’s governance remained. Because of the pandemic, brands and unions postponed the start of negotiations about a new Accord. This meant that the RSC started without clarity about what binding programme would hold brands accountable for the work the RSC was monitoring beyond May 2021. Union representatives in the RSC stressed the importance of such a binding agreement for the success of the safety work, as the RSC itself has no means to hold brands accountable. The Centre for Policy Dialogue in April 2023 released a monitoring report about the work of the RSC.

Negotiations between unions and brands started late because of the pandemic. Soon it became apparent that, under the guise of the same pandemic and the developments in Bangladesh, some brands believed they could weaken the Accord. As the end date of the Accord approached and no agreement had yet been reached, the negotiating brands and unions decided to let the Accord continue work under very uncertain circumstances for three more months. Unions stressed that they would leave the RSC if brands did not sign a new Accord agreement. The Clean Clothes Campaign network campaigned hard, urging brands to #ProtectProgress and emphasising that only a similarly strong binding agreement could keep workers in Bangladesh (and preferably also in other countries) safe.

After many months of negotiations and campaigning, in late August 2021 unions and brands announced the creation of the International Accord for Health and Safety in the Textile and Garment Industry. By 1 September, 77 brands indicated their commitment, with over a dozen more joining on the day itself. Since then the signatory list has grown to over 190 brands. The programme contains the same 50/50 governance structure between unions and brands and maintains the same level of enforceability. The major difference with the previous programme is the international element. While the International Accord’s Bangladesh country programme was carried out by the RSC, the new 26-month agreement opens up the opportunity for the creation of additional country programmes, with the explicit commitment to expand to at least one country before the end of the programme’s term in October 2023. After extensive feasibility studies, consultations, and research and campaigning by Pakistani unions and the Clean Clothes Campaign network, on 14 December 2022 the Pakistan Accord was announced as the first additional country programme, which the witness signatories applauded.

At the ILO International Labour Conference, Member States agreed to add the principles of a safe and healthy working environment to the Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work (also known as the ILO fundamental Conventions) which previously consisted of four categories: freedom of association and the effective recognition of the right to collective bargaining; the elimination of all forms of forced or compulsory labour; the effective abolition of child labour; and the elimination of discrimination in respect of employment and occupation. The fifth category has now become Occupational Safety and Health. The new fundamental Conventions will be the Occupational Safety and Health Convention, 1981 (No.155), and the Promotional Framework for Occupational Safety and Health Convention, 2006 (No. 187) .