A woman mourning as relatives of Rana Plaza victims staged a demonstration in Savar, on the outskirts of Dhaka, yesterday. Survivors and their loved ones marked the 10-month anniversary of Bangladesh’s worst-ever industrial tragedy, while many expressed anger due to lack of proper compensation.

Reuters/Berlin

Campaigners are urging all 27 clothing brands linked to a collapsed Bangladeshi factory that killed more than 1,100 people to pay into a compensation fund by the anniversary of the disaster in April.

The disaster has galvanised most of the clothing industry’s big names to work together to improve safety standards but many brands have shunned a fund that is trying to raise $40mn for families of the dead and over 2,000 injured.

The Clean Clothes Campaign (CCC), an Amsterdam-based group lobbying for better conditions in the garment industry, yesterday demanded that all 27 brands linked to factories in the Rana Plaza complex should contribute by the first
anniversary of the collapse.

“Compensation efforts to date have been completely haphazard, unequal, unpredictable and non-transparent, and have left large groups of victims with nothing,” Ineke Zeldenrust of the CCC said in a statement.

Discount fashion retailer Primark, owned by Associated British Foods, and Canadian grocer Loblaw have already paid short-term support to Rana Plaza workers, but have expressed frustration at slow progress in
setting up a fund.

The CCC said the only brands to have committed to pay into the fund so far are Loblaw, Mascot of Denmark and Spanish chains El Corte Ingles, Mango and Zara-owner Inditex.

About 3.6mn of Bangladesh’s 155mn people work in the clothing industry, making it the world’s second-largest garments exporter behind China. Around 60% of garment exports go to Europe and 23% to the United States.

Some of the brands supplied from Rana Plaza have said they will not contribute as their production was outsourced to the factory without their knowledge, or ended some time ago, while others say they prefer to pursue their own compensation plans.

IndustriALL, a global trade union that has helped co-ordinate the compensation fund to be run by the International Labour Organisation (ILO), called on consumers to bombard their favourite brands with messages to get more to pay up.

“It is time to name, shame and campaign. On April 24, one year will have passed since the horror of Rana Plaza. No more excuses,” IndustriALL assistant general secretary Monika Kemperle said in a statement.

Syed Sultan Uddin Ahmed, director of the Bangladesh Institute of Labour Studies, a signatory to the agreement, said the committee was yet to work out how much each retailer would contribute. But he said the families of dead workers would each receive around $25,000.

Ahmed said the compensation plan takes into account loss of earnings, pain and suffering, as well as medical and funeral costs and other family expenses. It is based on a plan developed after the Spectrum Sweater factory collapsed near Dhaka in 2005, killing 64 people.