Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century. John Smith
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and building collapses had provoked intense discussions between NGOs, international union federations IndustriAll and UNI Global Union, and representatives of Western clothing giants. Within two weeks of the building collapse the parties announced the “Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh,” whose centerpiece is the formation of a new factory inspectorate overseen by a Steering Committee, chaired by the International Labor Organization, made up of three representatives from international unions and three from international companies.30 Several months of lobbying of U.S. and European retail giants resulted in the endorsement of the Accord by over forty leading brands, with GAP and Walmart being notable exceptions. The parties to the Accord agreed to make “all reasonable efforts to ensure that an initial inspection of each factory covered by this Agreement shall be carried out within the first two years”, and promised the publication of safety reports, remediation, and safety training. Supplier companies are required to form health and safety committees made up of managers and workers, the latter to be selected by unions or by “democratic election” where no union is present. Touted as “legally binding,” the Accord only envisages penalties—that is, loss of orders—against supplier companies. The whole program is to be financed by the Western “brands,” through a subscription related to the size of their business in the country.
As we have seen, the fundamental driving force of the race to the bottom and its attendant ills—starvation wages, rickety buildings, atrocious living conditions—is price-gouging by leading firms. How does the Accord address this? Section 22 responds to complaints by factory owners that relentless pressure from international retailers to cut production costs forces them to cut corners: “In order to induce factories to comply with upgrade and remediation requirements of the program, participating brands and retailers will negotiate commercial terms with their suppliers which ensure that it is financially feasible for the factories to maintain safe workplaces and comply with upgrade and remediation requirements instituted by the Safety Inspector.” Nobody and no administrative body is tasked with implementing or monitoring this clause. It can only be activated by a factory owner who believes s/he is not receiving “commercial terms” from a global buyer and decides to arraign the global buyer before the Accord’s Steering Committee. Should either party disagree with the Steering Committee’s ruling, they may submit the dispute to legally binding arbitration. To protect the factory owner from the threat of cancellation of orders, the Accord obliges buying firms to maintain existing contracts for two years. But legal safeguards do not change the extreme power asymmetry—fear of reprisals from their own buyers and blacklisting by others mean factory owners will hesitate to take this path. And the Accord’s mechanisms involve international union representatives in giving their assent to “commercial terms” that do not provide for garment workers to be paid a living wage.
SUSCEPTIBILITY TO FIRE AND COLLAPSE are far from the only building safety issues in Bangladesh. Most deaths and injuries in the year following the Rana Plaza disaster resulted from stampedes sparked by the outbreak of small fires, revealing the lack of exits and stairwells.31 Despite Bangladesh’s sweltering climate, where temperatures often reach into the mid-90s and humidity is high year-round, lack of ventilation, often compounded by chemical vapors from dyes and other inputs, are among the unhealthy and unsafe working conditions not covered by the “Accord on Fire and Building Safety.” Nor is there any mention in the Accord of excessive and forced overtime, a key health and safety issue; nor are supplier factories required to allow trade unions to organize—despite shop-floor union organization being the most important line of defense against dangerous working practices. Nevertheless, Jyrki Raina described the Accord as “historic”; Philip Jennings, General Secretary of UNI, defined it as a “turning point” that marked “the end of the race to the bottom in the global supply chain”; and a joint press release from IndustriALL and UNI generously described their multinational partners as “the most progressive global fashion brands.”32
After Rana Plaza, Jyrki Raina pledged to “use the global muscle of IndustriALL to create sustainable conditions for garment workers, with the right to join a union, with living wages, and safe and healthy working conditions.” Yet unions in Western Europe and North America outsourced the organization of protests to anti-sweatshop activists and campaigning charities and did nothing to mobilize their members in solidarity. Unions in North America added their names to an “international day of action to end deathtraps” in June 2013, but there is no evidence of any serious effort to build this action. Instead, their reflex has been to act in partnership with imperialist governments and international brands. The UK trade union Unite and North America’s United Steelworkers, both of which are affiliated to IndustriALL, issued a joint statement a few days after the Rana Plaza disaster urging the U.S. and European governments “to immediately suspend Bangladesh’s market access under the Generalized System of Preferences” and “to enact laws … that would ban the importation of goods produced under sweatshop conditions.”33 The Generalized System of Preferences (GSP) allows tariff-free imports into North America and Europe from the “Least Developed Countries.” In the United States, union officials successfully petitioned the U.S. government to rescind Bangladesh’s tariff-free access to the U.S. market, inducing President Barack Obama to piously declare to the U.S. Congress on June 27, 2013, that Bangladesh “is now taking steps to afford internationally recognized worker rights.” Richard Trumka, president of the AFL-CIO, welcomed the decision, declaring, “The decision to suspend trade benefits sends an important message to our trading partners…. Countries that tolerate dangerous—and even deadly—working conditions and deny basic workers’ rights, especially the right to freedom of association, will risk losing preferential access to the U.S. market.”34
This move was largely symbolic—because of protectionist pressure from U.S. employers and union officials, less than 1 percent of imports from Bangladesh enter the United States free of tariffs. Until Obama rescinded even this, the biggest beneficiary was tobacco, followed by plastic bags, golf equipment, and hotel crockery. In 2013, the U.S. government received $809.5 million in customs duties on $4.9 billion of garment exports from Bangladesh, an average tariff of 16.5 percent.35 The average wage of the 4 million workers in Bangladesh’s RMG industry in the year of the Rana Plaza disaster, before the November 2013 increase, was $780 per year, for a total wage bill of $3.1bn.36 The United States imports 22 percent of Bangladesh’s apparel exports, so it can be estimated that 22 percent of $3.1bn, or $690m, was paid in wages to the workers who produced goods destined for the United States. In other words, the tariffs charged in 2013 by the U.S. government on its apparel imports from Bangladesh alone exceeded the total wages received by the workers who made these goods. And this punitive protectionist policy is carried out at the behest of union officials who claim to be concerned about the plight of Bangladeshi workers!
The protectionist policies supported by union officials in imperialist countries are roundly opposed by Bangladeshi trade unions and labor activists and for this reason are not promoted by IndustriALL or UNI, which include Bangladeshi trade union affiliates. Dr. Supachai Panitchpakdi, Secretary-General of UNCTAD (United Nations Conference on Trade and Development), denounced calls for punitive tariffs as a “a serious threat to the rule-based global trading system,” adding that, instead of penalizing Bangladeshi employers and workers in the name of “labor rights,” importing countries “must look at the business practices of their retail and wholesale industry because the problem with global value chains is the way they are exploiting the sweatshops in poor countries which are providing cheap labor.”37
These issues are not new. Union officials and social-democratic politicians in imperialist countries have long sought to protect their workers from “unfair competition” from workers in poor countries, hiding behind feigned concern for human rights in oppressed nations. Their hypocrisy was exposed by Palash Baral, a representative of UBINIG (Policy Research for Development Alternatives), a Bangladeshi NGO, in remarks to a seminar in London organized by the UK campaigning charity War on Want in the mid-1990s:
The issues of “labor standards” and “workers rights” have been raised out of no concern for our workers, neither do they constitute any concern for human rights. They are neo-protectionist slogans and reflect attempts by the ruling class of the North to smokescreen the real cause of the economic crisis the North is going through…. The World Bank and IMF create