The Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET) will start examining across Bangladesh the buildings of the clothing factories that have not signed the ‘Accord on Fire and Building Safety’ on Friday.
The decision was taken at a national tri-partite committee meeting chaired by the labour secretary Mikhail Shipar.
File Photo
They will assess both “structural integrity and fire and electrical safety”, according to the International Labour Organisaion that supports the government, owners, and workers’ joint effort in improving working conditions in the factories.
The BUET team will follow ‘a minimum standard’ for building safety endorsed by the garment owners and workers who comprise the national committee.
The move comes after the worst-ever building collapse in April in Savar that killed more than 1,100 people, mostly workers.
It triggered global outrage and the major buyers –US and EU – of the Bangladesh’s main export item set a roadmap to improve workers safety and security conditions.
Only 1,600 factories signed the five-year legally binding Accord following threats of losing markets.
The national committee has been formed to implement the plan of actions of the Accord to prevent any further workplace disasters.
Bangladesh is the world’s second biggest supplier of garments. The sector earns around 80 percent of the country’s total export earnings and employs more than 3.5 million people, mostly women.
But safety issue remains a challenge with frequent fire incidents. A BUET team earlier surveyed 100 factory building and found 60 percent of them ‘vulnerable’.
There are more than 3,000 active factories housed in around 600 buildings. Licenses have been given to over 5,000 factories.
Many, particularly those located in the centre of Dhaka, have been converted into factories from residences or offices.
Source: Bd news24
Instead of going through all these Nonsense of appointing BUET & other Organizations to do the Survey of these Factories, the Govt. and the Garment factory owners should take a bold step to remove all these factories from every Metropolitan City areas, throughout the country.
The new factories will be built with all the new stringent Rules and Regulations required to be built for all types of safety. Once and for all, all the problems can be taken care of from the very beginning. Problems like air/water pollution, traffic jams in the city, and most importantly, Safety of the workers. No Garment oriented factory should be allowed to be built more than 2 story high. If Textile and Jute mills could have been built in one story buildings then why should the Garment factories be in High Rise buildings and why should they be in the middle of the cities? Once and for all, this situations should be looked into very seriously. I think the International garment Buyers and ILO should be more stringent on this in the coming days. And to avoid air/water pollution, all factories should come with their individual Water Treatment Plants, whether its in the city or outside, whether its garment or Tannery. Doesn’t matter.
The Garment Sector Owners are making billions. why can’t they just sacrifice their earnings for a while and spend that earnings to improve the situation?
I also believe that all industrial units that presently exists in the Tejgaon Industrial Area of Metropolitan Dhaka should be relocated out from the middle of the City. That entire area can be utilized to be built into an Education Village, instead of having thousands of so-called Schools all over town. These so called Schools are also a business, where money is made by unscrupulous people with no end results at all.
Anyways, there are a lot of things that can be done in this beautiful country, for whom we really fought. But the saddest thing is, nothing really happened so far. Is time running out? You be the judge.