The garment industry in Bangladesh under COVID-19: Lessons from the Rana Plaza Disaster on how we understand worker safety

The COVID-19 pandemic shook the global economy and supply chains worldwide. 

The ready-made garment (RMG) sector in Bangladesh was been especially hard hit as consumer demand for apparel plummeted, leading to global retailers cancelling orders and revising their sourcing strategies. To situate what happened to the industry under this global pandemic, I would like to draw some lessons from an earlier crisis in Bangladesh - from one of the worst industrial disasters in history, the collapse of the Rana Plaza building in 2013. 

In this presentation, I will focus specifically on the distorted notions of what constitutes safety for workers, primarily for women workers, which continue to perpetuate the cycle of labor violations for those at the very bottom of the global supply chain. 

I argue that the lack of progress in many key areas created a situation that was ripe for suffering under an unanticipated and unprecedented global pandemic. My talk will draw on evidence from a survey with BRAC University, Bangladesh where we interviewed 1,057 garment workers to understand how the pandemic had impacted their lives (Rabbani, A, Saxena, SB & Islam, MF, 2020).

About the speaker

Dr. Sanchita Banerjee Saxena holds a PhD in political science from the University of California, Los Angeles and has close to 20 years of experience working on issues related to labor rights in global supply chains, with a special focus on the garment industry in Asia. 

She is a professional faculty member at the Haas School of Business, the Energy and Resources Group, and the Legal Studies department at UC Berkeley at UC Berkeley and a Faculty Fellow at the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment (IRLE) at UC Berkeley. She is also a Senior Advisor to Article One. 

Chair

• Alessandra Mezzadri, Reader in Global Development and Political Economy

Image by Kevin Limbri via Unsplash