Shawna Bader-Blau, executive director of the Solidarity Center, said, “Every time there is new initiative to regulate corporate behavior through supply chains, it is incumbent on all of us to insist freedom of association and the right to collective bargaining be included… It just doesn’t happen. Most of the time, multi-stakeholder initiatives … center on every other form of rights but human rights in the supply chain.”

“Markets and corporations don’t magically conjure up shared prosperity,” said executive director of the Solidarity Center Shawna Bader-Blau. “It’s the agency of individual citizens coming together collectively… that push governments and corporations to make changes to the way our economies and democracies work that make them more fair.”​

“Over the past three years, the Bangladesh government has approved fewer and fewer union registration applications. Through their unions, workers are able to speak out freely about safety and health concerns at their worksites and prevent horrible tragedies like Rana Plaza. Limiting workers from forming unions puts workers’ safety at risk,” said Tim Ryan, Solidarity Center director of Asia programs.

While local factory owners and foreign buyers engage in disputes, workers suffer, said Alonzo Suson, director of Solidarity Center programs in Bangladesh. “A lot remains to be done. We need the political will of the government.”

According to research by the Solidarity Center, less than 1 percent of women in garment factories participate in worker associations in Bangladesh’s export zones.

We need to hold every new deal we see in supply chains up to the now gold standard of the Accord,” says Shawna Bader-Blau, executive director of the Solidarity Center. “No more Rana Plazas. We need something better and it is up to us to make it happen, and freedom of association is key…”

The impetus for the Bangladesh Sustainability Compact was the Rana Plaza industrial disaster, which took the lives of roughly 1,200 garment workers. The compact required the fulfillment of several time-bound commitments by the Bangladesh government—labor law reform, protection of the right to freedom of association and ensuring fire and building safety. Jeffrey Vogt argues the compact has not been effective for much of its four years. [READ MORE]

Solidarity Center’s director of Bangladesh programs, Alonzo Suson, comments on union organizing efforts following the Rana Plaza collapse.

In discussing the anniversary of the collapse of the Rana Plaza garment factory complex, Global Envision pulls information from a New York Times op-ed by David Welsh, Solidarity Center country director for Indonesia and former country director for Cambodia: “To counteract the brands’ habit of playing one producing country off another, governments from sourcing countries should act together. Rather than be driven by the fear of losing out to one another, they should form a bloc and insist that the big brands set uniform standards for wages, union rights and workplace safety.”