Feeling pressure from consumer and labor groups for not doing more to ensure factory safety in Bangladesh, Walmart, Gap, and numerous other retailers along with the nation’s main retail federations are seeking to forge a new plan to promote safety in that country’s apparel industry.
This effort, to be spearheaded by the Bipartisan Policy Center, a nonprofit group based in Washington, was announced on Thursday, 2½ weeks after dozens of retailers and apparel companies, almost all of them European, announced a far-reaching plan aimed at ensuring factory safety in Bangladesh.
As part of the new effort, the National Retail Federation and the American Apparel and Footwear Association, as well as Gap, JCPenney, Sears, Target, Walmart, and other retailers, will seek to “develop and implement a new program to improve fire and safety regulations in the garment factories of Bangladesh,” according to the Bipartisan Policy Center.
This effort will be led by two prominent members of that group, former Senators George J. Mitchell, a Democrat, and Olympia J. Snowe, a Republican, both from Maine.
But some labor advocates called the effort divisive and a sham.
After a factory building collapsed in Bangladesh on April 24, killing at least 1,127 workers, Western retailers faced more pressure than ever to take action to ensure factory safety in that country, the world’s second-largest apparel exporter after China.
In response, H&M, Carrefour, Marks & Spencer, and more than two dozen other European companies backed a binding plan in which they agreed to rigorous independent inspections of the factories they use in Bangladesh and to help finance improvements for fire and building safety.
But only a few US retailers signed on. On Thursday, Sean John, the fashion company run by Sean Combs, announced that it would become the third US company to join, following PVH, the parent company of Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger, and Abercrombie & Fitch.
With about 40 companies signed on to that plan, Gap, the Children’s Place, and several other US retailers have faced protests and a flood of Facebook posts, urging them to join.
In assessing the new plan by US retailers, Richard M. Locke, a specialist on overseas manufacturing at the Sloan School of Management at MIT, said, “I think they must be feeling the heat because people are asking them, ‘Why don’t you join this other initiative?’ ”
Locke added: “The idea that you would bring all these people together in this new effort is a good first step. But I don’t think it’s good to have competing initiatives.”
Philip J. Jennings, general secretary of Uni Global Union, a worldwide federation of 20 million retail and service workers that helped develop the initial Bangladesh factory safety plan, criticized the new effort.
“It’s a sham,” he said. “There is no valid reason why they can’t join the initiative we have launched. It has been well received,” he said, adding, “Now they seem to want to paddle their own canoe on their own terms.”
Officials from several US retailers have voiced concern that their companies would face large legal liability if they were to join the European-dominated plan. But several backers of that accord say the Americans are shying away because they dislike the binding obligations and potential costs of the plan.
Scott Nova, executive director of the Worker Rights Consortium, a factory monitoring group, said the new effort would “contain no real obligation on the part of brands and retailers to pay for the building renovations necessary to convert deathtraps in Bangladesh into safe factories.”