Rana Plaza Disaster, fashion, consumerism and action

Joan Smith in the Independent on Sunday writes:

The roots of this scandal lie in a globalised economy where western shopping habits – for food and clothes alike – are disconnected from the manner of production. The fashion-conscious young have been persuaded by clever marketing to think that clothes should be cheap and disposable, just as poor families came to believe that eight nutritious burgers could be made for £1. It remains to be seen whether the horsemeat scare will change consumer behaviour in the long term, but there’s no comparable outcry about the plight of Asian garment workers.

With four million workers in the garment industry in Bangladesh, (http://www.bgmea.com.bd ) the implications of the horrendous incident at Rana Plaza where hundreds were killed and injured highlights the need for consumer awareness,  fairtrade and corporate responsibility.

“The deaths as a result of the collapsed building in Bangladesh were a tragedy but not an accident,” says Murray Worthy from the charity War on Want. He argues that the level of neglect and lack of regulation in the industry led to the disaster at the factory.

It happened just five months after a fire at the Bangladeshi firm Tazreen Fashions in which more than 100 people were killed.

Campaigners say that the rapid expansion of the industry over the past few years played a large role in this incident.

It is a common occurrence for buildings to see illegal floors added, according to Sam Mahers from Labour Behind the Label. In this case, one minister alleged that the whole building was illegally constructed.

“Many of these buildings are a death trap, often with no proper escape routes. So while this incident is shocking it is not surprising,” Ms Mahers says.

Labour Behind the Label is part of a campaign pushing for retailers to sign up to the Bangladesh Fire and Building Safety Agreement.

It argues for action that includes independent building inspections, training in workers’ rights and “a long-overdue review of safety standards”. So far, Germany’s Tchibo and America’s PVH Corp (owner of Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger) have signed it.

Employees in Bangladeshi factories are mainly women and conditions can be harsh, unions say. Although they are contracted to work eight hours a day, if an important order comes in workers are often forced to work up to 18 hours in a day, or on their day off, to finish the job. ” (BBC coverage, article -  http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-22296645 )

The Clean Clothes Campaign (CCC)  has continuously pressured for improved conditions since 1989; in a recent statement they urged brands to sign Safety Agreement following the Rana Plaza disaster:

“The total compensation figure is likely to be over US$30 million in addition to the cost of emergency treatment. The death toll, already over 300, seems likely to increase dramatically as media reports indicate that 1000 people are still unaccounted for. Our local partners have expressed concern that mismanagement and incorrect accounting by the authorities means that some deaths are not being recorded on the list of deceased.

The CCC is contacting all brands whose names are linked to one of the five factories that were producing in the building  to verify details of their production.

Five brands have confirmed current or recent production: Bon Marche (UK), El Corte Ingles (Spain), Primark (UK/Ireland), Mango (Spain) and Joe Fresh (clothing line at Loblaw’s, Canada’s largest supermarket chain).

A number of other brands are linked to the factory through import data, labels  and other documentation found at the site by local activists of other brands producing in one of the factories, including Benetton (Italy), Cato Fashions (USA), Children’s Place (USA), Carrefour (France).  So far all deny production or failed to respond.

The CCC calls on all buyers to step forward immediately and to make sure that every effort is taken to minimise the pain and suffering of the people involved and prevent further deaths.

Ineke Zeldenrust from Clean Clothes Campaign says: “Brands can no longer justify any further delay in signing the Bangladesh Fire and Building Safety Agreement.  Since Tazreen, where 112 people died, brands have come up with insufficient proposals such as safety videos (H&M) or a safety academy (WalMart). How much safety does a video provide, when floors collapse or emergency exits do not exist? Workers need a structural solution, not a quick-fix. The lack of action demonstrated by brands amounts to criminal negligence.”

Letter to the Observer 28 April 2013

The factory collapse in Bangladesh will have pricked the conscience of many a business that relies on cheap labour in developing countries to keep down the costs of production. We hope the tragedy brings about a sharper focus on occupational health and safety, in which organisations recognise their moral duty to protect workers from harm no matter where they are in the supply chain.
Jane White
Institution of Occupational Safety & Health

Moving forward and changing the industry - it’s up to you:

Labour behind the label (http://www.labourbehindthelabel.org) fifth annual ‘Let’s Clean Up Fashion’ report produced in 2011 emphasizes some key principles for improvement in the industry:

1 Taking a collaborative approach

A large number of brands and retailers in the UK are members of the Ethical Trading Initiative (ETI), a collaborative body of companies, trade unions and civil society organisations (referred to here as NGOs). Membership of a multi-stakeholder initiative (MSI) such as the ETI, however, is not necessarily a clear indicator of good collaboration or effective projects. Burberry, Gap, Tesco, Sainsbury and Fat Face are all members of the ETI, but made disappointing submissions. Another ETI brand, Debenhams, refused to provide any information for this report. It is notable, though, that those brands with the most in-depth projects were all ETI members (Monsoon, Next, M&S).

2 Worker organising and freedom of association

3 Examining commercial factors: paying the cost

It is widely acknowledged that there is a huge gap between prevailing wages for garment workers and even the lowest estimates of a living wage. Therefore, any attempt to ensure all workers receive a living wage will impact on production costs and could mean suppliers have to charge more for their goods. Any serious living wage programme needs to identify how these cost increases will be covered and by whom.

4 Rolling it out: developing a route-map for sustaining a living wage.

Any route map for change must include benchmarks that identify what constitutes success. It is vital for brands and retailers to provide clear targets for what they believe a living wage level should be in each country they buy from. Such benchmarks are controversial and continue to be a source of debate. However, unless brands tell consumers and workers what wage levels they are aiming to implement, their work will not deliver a living wage for all workers. To date only M&S claims to have identified living wage benchmarks for its primary production countries: Sri Lanka, India and Bangladesh. Yet a year after making a commitment to pay a ‘fair living wage’ to workers in these countries by 2015, the company has not published these figures 

Download the full Labour behind the label report with summaries of UK retailers level of commitment . 

Are shoppers willing to pay?

The BBC interviewed shoppers following the disaster (video)

Sign the petition - Demand safety for Bangladeshi workers

http://www.cleanclothes.org/action/current-actions/rana-plaza

“It’s unbelievable that brands still refuse to sign a binding agreement with unions and labour groups to stop these unsafe working conditions from existing. Tragedy after tragedy shows that corporate-controlled monitoring is completely inadequate,”  says Tessel Pauli from Clean Clothes Campaign.

She adds: “Right now the families of the victims are grieving and the community is in shock. But  they, and the hundreds injured in the collapse, are without income and without support. Immediate relief and longterm compensation must be provided by the brands who were sourcing from these factories, and responsibility taken for their lack of action to prevent this happening.” 

To stop these collapses from happening, the Clean Clothes Campaign calls upon brands sourcing from Bangladesh to sign on to the Bangladesh Fire and Building Safety Agreement immediately. The CCC, together with local and global unions and labour rights organisations has developed a sector-wide program for action that includes independent building inspections, worker rights training, public disclosure and a long-overdue review of safety standards. It is transparent as well as practical, and unique in being supported by all key labour stakeholders in Bangladesh and internationally.

The agreement was already signed last year by the US company PVH Corp (owner of Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger) and the German retailer Tchibo. The labour signatories are now calling on all major brands sourcing in the industry to sign on to the initiative in order to ensure its rapid implementation. The programme has the potential to save the lives of hundreds of thousands of workers currently at risk in unsafe and illegally built factories.

CCC has been campaigning on safety issues in Bangladesh since the collapse of the Spectrum factory in 2005, which left 64 people dead and involved high street brand Zara.

Call on Retailers to compensate

A petition drawn up by the National Garment Workers’ Federation, which called on Primark, Matalan and Mango to pay compensation to victims’ families and to sign up to the Bangladesh fire and building safety agreement to prevent future deaths of garment workers.

The UK high street retailer Primark and Canadian counterpart Loblaws have announced they will compensate the victims of last week’s collapse of a Bangladeshi factory complex where suppliers of some of their clothing lines were located.

Avaaz have a petition 

To the CEOs of H&M, GAP, and other fashion brands:

As citizens and consumers, we urge you to immediately sign an enforceable Bangladesh fire and building safety agreement, or risk fatal damage to your brand image. The agreement must commit you to pay for routine, independent inspections and safety upgrades for your supplier factories. Your companies and other multinationals profit from cheap labour, and can do much more to reduce the dangers of the places where your products are made.

http://www.avaaz.org/en/crushed_to_make_our_clothes_loc/?slideshow

Let's stop hiding behind recycling and be honest about consumption - George Monbiot

At a reception in London recently I met an extremely rich woman, who lives, as most people with similar levels of wealth do, in an almost comically unsustainable fashion: jetting between various homes and resorts in one long turbo-charged holiday. When I told her what I did, she responded: “Oh I agree, the environment is so important. I’m crazy about recycling.” But the real problem, she explained, was “people breeding too much”.

I agreed that population is an element of the problem, but argued that consumption is rising much faster and – unlike the growth in the number of people – is showing no signs of levelling off. She found this notion deeply offensive: I mean the notion that human population growth is slowing. When I told her that birth rates are dropping almost everywhere, and that the world is undergoing a slow demographic transition, she disagreed violently: she has seen, on her endless travels, how many children “all those people have”.

As so many in her position do, she was using population as a means of disavowing her own impacts. The issue allowed her to transfer responsibility to others: people at the opposite end of the economic spectrum. It allowed her to pretend that her shopping and flying and endless refurbishments of multiple homes are not a problem. Recycling and population: these are the amulets people clasp in order not to see the clash between protecting the environment and rising consumption.

In a similar way, we have managed, with the help of a misleading global accounting system, to overlook one of the gravest impacts of our consumption. This too has allowed us to blame foreigners – particularly poorer foreigners – for the problem.

Read the full article in the Ecologist

Global Warming Slows Down - coverage and alternate views

OVER the past 15 years air temperatures at the Earth’s surface have been flat while greenhouse-gas emissions have continued to soar. The world added roughly 100 billion tonnes of carbon to the atmosphere between 2000 and 2010. That is about a quarter of all the CO₂ put there by humanity since 1750. And yet, as James Hansen, the head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, observes, “the five-year mean global temperature has been flat for a decade.”

Temperatures fluctuate over short periods, but this lack of new warming is a surprise. Ed Hawkins, of the University of Reading, in Britain, points out that surface temperatures since 2005 are already at the low end of the range of projections derived from 20 climate models (see chart 1). If they remain flat, they will fall outside the models’ range within a few years.

The mismatch between rising greenhouse-gas emissions and not-rising temperatures is among the biggest puzzles in climate science just now. It does not mean global warming is a delusion. Flat though they are, temperatures in the first decade of the 21st century remain almost 1°C above their level in the first decade of the 20th. But the puzzle does need explaining.

Economist March 2013

Full article here: http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21574461-climate-may-be-heating-up-less-response-greenhouse-gas-emissions

A new scientific model has revised previous figures for the next five years downwards by around a fifth.

The forecast compares how much higher average world temperatures are likely to be than the “long-term average” from 1971-2000.

It had been thought that this would be 0.54C during the period 2012 -2016 but new data puts the figure for the 2013-2017 period at 0.43C.

This figure is little higher than the 0.40C recorded in 1998, the warmest year in the Met Office Hadley Centre’s 160-year record – suggesting global warming will have stalled in the intervening two-decade period.

However, it is thought that factors such as ocean current patterns may be behind the slowdown and scientists say the “variability” in climate change does not alter the long-term trend of rising temperatures.

- Telegraph, 8 Janury 2013

Alternatively this slow down is rebutted here, with the Skeptical Science blog stating:

A new study of ocean warming has just been published in Geophysical Research Letters by Balmaseda, Trenberth, and Källén (2013).  There are several important conclusions which can be drawn from this paper.

• Completely contrary to the popular contrarian myth, global warming has accelerated, with more overall global warming in the past 15 years than the prior 15 years.  This is because about 90% of overall global warming goes into heating the oceans, and the oceans have been warming dramatically.
• As suspected, much of the ‘missing heat’ Kevin Trenberth previously talked about has been found in the deep oceans.  Consistent with the results of Nuccitelli et al. (2012), this study finds that 30% of the ocean warming over the past decade has occurred in the deeper oceans below 700 meters, which they note is unprecedented over at least the past half century.
• Some recent studies have concluded based on the slowed global surface warming over the past decade that the sensitivity of the climate to the increased greenhouse effect is somewhat lower than the IPCC best estimate.  Those studies are fundamentally flawed because they do not account for the warming of the deep oceans.
• The slowed surface air warming over the past decade has lulled many people into a false and unwarranted sense of security.

Full article at the Skeptical Science blog

What’s the outlook?
Scary. If oceanic cycles do what the Met Office and others expect, then global average air temperatures will stay fairly stable – though still hotter than they have been in the past – until later this decade. The cycles will then flip into a new phase and the oceans will probably start releasing heat instead of soaking it up. Combined with continued accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, that could mean that sometime round 2020, warming will start to race away again as the atmosphere makes up for lost time.

New Scientist 9 January 2013 full article

Climate change key data: http://climate.nasa.gov/key_indicators/

 

Cold spring link to melting Arctic sea ice

Climate scientists have linked the massive snowstorms and bitter spring weather now being experienced across Britain and large parts of Europe and North America to the dramatic loss of Arctic sea ice.

Both the extent and the volume of the sea ice that forms and melts each year in the Arctic Ocean fell to an historic low last autumn, and satellite records published on Monday by the National Snow and Ice Data Centre (NSIDC) in Boulder, Colorado, show the ice extent is close to the minimum recorded for this time of year.

“The sea ice is going rapidly. It’s 80% less than it was just 30 years ago. There has been a dramatic loss. This is a symptom of global warming and it contributes to enhanced warming of the Arctic,” said Jennifer Francis, research professor with the Rutgers Institute of Coastal and Marine Science.

Full article at the Ecologist

The heavy snowfall and freezing temperatures which have marked March 2013 across the northern hemisphere are in stark contrast to March 2012 when many countries experienced their warmest ever springs. The hypothesis that wind patterns are being changed because melting Arctic sea ice has exposed huge swaths of normally frozen ocean to the atmosphere would explain both the extremes of heat and cold, say the scientists.

Full article at the Guardian

Further reading:

Arctic sea ice reports and daily news 

Sustainable Wales Response to the Consultation on the Sustainable Development Bill March 2013

Sustainable Wales welcomes the introduction of a strong/firm Sustainable Development Duty into the legislative responsibilities of the Welsh Government and 16 Public Service organisations in Wales. Time is not on our side. Climate change and loss of a rich biodiversity pose a profound threat to people around the world and those most affected will be those that are already the most vulnerable in all societies. This is not just an environmental issue. The agenda must broaden and reflect these social and economic outcomes across all governance structures…

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