Dhaka – Eminent economist Prof Rehman Sobhan Sunday said that the foreign ready-made garments (RMG) buyers are conducting unethical business with the RMG products made by the Bangladeshi workers.
After the Rana Plaza tragedy four years ago, the foreign buyers had been providing moral and virtual advices to the Bangladeshi garment owners for improving worker’s condition but they didn’t want to buy the products in higher prices, said Sobhan.“The international community is somehow getting away scot-free. They have put in few hundred million dollars. They put Alliances and Accord in places but none of them have applied their minds on how to solve the actual problem,” he said.
Sobhan was speaking at a dialogue on “Catalyzing Social Dialogue in Bangladesh: RMG Sector” jointly organized by the think tank Center for Policy Dialogue (CPD) and International Labor Organization (ILO) at Gardenia Hall in Gulshan area of the capital.
Prof Sobhan said the whole RMG operation is being operated in a deeply unjust global value chain where the $5 shirt bought from Bangladesh will be marketed at Walmart with $25.
“We are concerned about $5 but we don’t actually ask where does that $20 go? Is this the natural working of the market mechanism or is this a manifestation of unjust global order of unequal relationships?” he asked.
Rehman Sobhan said the tragedy of Rana Plaza would have never happened if the workers were under an institutionalized protection of union with which they could have collectively resisted the foreman who insisted the workers to work even though they didn’t spotting the crack in the building.
“Unless the right to form individual union in individual enterprises is given, the core issue of the problem will not be addressed,” he said adding that the unequal relationship between the entrepreneurs and workers are the main evil in the RMG industry.
He said that the right to form unions in one form or the other will address the problem because through ensuring that the bargaining power of the workers become equitable in the relationship.
“You have to make workers fundamental stakeholders of the enterprises where they work.”
Prof Sobhan said that one of the main factors of the Rana Plaza tragedy was the weakness in the whole governance system. The weak administration and accountability mechanism in the system made that tragedy to take place, he added. – Staff Reporter
