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| Mohd Raisul Islam Khan |
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| Christa Wichterich |
In April 2013, the collapse of the Rana Plaza building in Bangladesh that killed 1,129 garment workers and left more than 2,500 seriously wounded generated a huge public outcry at the national and international level. The tragedy broadened earlier demands from trade unions and rights-based campaigns for regulation of labour relations in transnational apparel production chains and for improvement of workplace safety in the Readymade Garment (RMG) industry in Bangladesh. Public pressure led to the adoption of a range of action plans and agreements. The most notable is The Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh (Accord), the first legally binding multi-stakeholder agreement signed by over 180 apparel corporations, two global union federations IndustriALL and UNI Global Union, labor rights campaign groups and Bangladeshi trade unions. The Accord stipulates comprehensive inspection of the fire and building safety status of the factories, which should result in Corrective Action Plans (CAPs) to ensure remediation of safety hazards, a fire and building safety training and empowerment measures for workers. Thus the agreement acknowledges that workers’ participation has to play a significant role in improving workplace safety.
In parallel, the Government of Bangladesh has adopted the National Tripartite Plan of Action on Fire Safety and Structural Integrity (NTPA) which stipulates to accomplish 23 activities related to legislation and policies, administrative and institutional upgrading, as well as practical activities along with factory level safety inspections. The adoption of these regulatory tools was welcomed as a “breakthrough” for the RMG sector in Bangladesh.
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| Andreas Bieler |
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| Jacklyn Cock |
The multiple global economic, financial, food and ecological crises are deepening. And yet, neo-liberal capitalism continues to reign supreme. Every crisis is responded to by further marketisation and commodification. ‘Free’ trade is deepened in negotiations of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) and the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA), emission trading systems are one of the main strategies for mitigating climate-change. We suggest that the links between the concepts of ‘food sovereignty’ and ‘fair trade’ could promote connections between labour and community struggles and foster labour solidarity at both the transnational and local levels. Both concepts present challenges to the neo-liberal food regime.
The expanded free trade regime and tensions in the global labour movement
Since the completion of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) Uruguay Round in 1994, the expansion of the ‘free trade’ agenda into areas of trade in services, public procurement, trade related investment measures, intellectual property rights and agriculture as well as the highly controversial investor-state dispute settlement mechanisms has led to tensions within the global labour movement. Trade unions in the north especially in export sectors have tended to support free trade agreements, assuming that new markets will secure jobs for their members. By contrast, labour movements in the global south have generally voiced opposition since expanded free trade often means deindustrialisation and job losses for their countries (Bieler, Ciccaglione, Hilary and Lindberg, 2014).
