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Front Burner Transcript for February 21, 2024

Host: Daemon Fairless

DAEMON FAIRLESS: Hi, I'm Daemon Fairless.

DAEMON FAIRLESS: The Savar district, just north of Bangladesh's capital city, Dhaka, is home to hundreds of garment factories and around half a million garment workers. It also used to be home to Rana Plaza, an eight story garment factory that collapsed in 2013, killing over 1100 people, mostly women, making it the most deadly garment factory accident in modern history.

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REPORTER: It was pure chaos, a giant plaza with a market and several clothing factories inside. During morning rush hour, it simply collapsed.

MARK KELLEY: For days, rescuers, some using their bare hands, tried to dig survivors out of the rubble.

DAEMON FAIRLESS: It's a tragedy that led to a lot of public anger towards the brands that made their clothes there, brands like Zara, Walmart and Joe Fresh, which is owned by Loblaw. At the time, Loblaw promised safer working conditions, fair wages. But 10 years later, has it followed through on those promises? The Fifth Estate’s Mark Kelley went to find out, and he's going to tell us about his investigation.

DAEMON FAIRLESS: Mark, it's good to have you back in the studio.

MARK KELLEY: Thanks for having me back.

DAEMON FAIRLESS: Let's go back in time. You were in Bangladesh 10 years ago after the Rana Plaza collapse. And then, of course, you went back now or, you know, went back recently.

MARK KELLEY: Well, one of the first stops we made when we arrived in Bangladesh was to go back to Rana Plaza, back to the scene of the tragedy that had captured the world's attention. And when I was there, I was there a couple of months after the tragedy itself. It was heartbreaking in a way because there were parents of some of the victims who came to me like holding their children's id badges and pressing them up to me because they were unable to find their bodies in the rubble. And they thought, you know, a Canadian journalist there with a TV camera, somehow, we could uncover the answers that they had been unable to get for all that period of time. Now, fast forward 10 years later, we go back, and I was stunned to see what had become of it. It's an empty lot. It's used as an open toilet by people when we were there filming. And, you know, their mounds of scraps of garments from neighbouring garment factories had been dumped there. And were it not for a tiny little tired monument, you would not know that this was the site of one of the worst industrial accidents of our time. It became… my concern was that it was a metaphor for the lessons we were supposed to have learned. Were they forgotten with time? Have we just moved on, forgotten about the incident and gone back to business?

DAEMON FAIRLESS: And then you were able to reconnect with someone that you spoke with 10 years ago initially, a woman named Shumi Akter. Can you tell me about her? What was it like to see her again? What was that reunion like for you guys?

MARK KELLEY: Well, it was a tough one to make happen because it was just tough to find her. It was tough to find her 10 years ago, and we'd seen her in some news reports at the time. She'd been trapped in the rubble for days.

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MARK KELLEY: What do you remember about the moment the building collapsed?

In translation: When it collapsed, I thought I wouldn't survive. Two dead bodies fell on my leg and my leg was stuck there. The roof fell on top of the bodies. I didn't know then that I would actually come out alive.

MARK KELLEY: Her mother was trapped in the rubble and died. She would get out. She was rescued, but she lost her lower leg. And when we met her years ago, she was at the time 17 years old. She made Joe Fresh shorts. She used to sew 150 pocket seams an hour, and that was her job. But she told us then that after her injury, she was just too slow to work in fast fashion anymore. So we wanted to know how was she getting by. So when we finally tracked her down, we had this reunion, and it was sad.

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In translation: I'm in a lot of pain now. I lost a leg, so it's very difficult to walk with a child. This has been going on for 10 years.

MARK KELLEY: There was somebody who told me immediately that her life was a struggle. And in the years since then, there was just no hope. There was no optimism. For her, there was just very little future.

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In translation: They promised us to do many things that will last throughout our lives, like health care, treatment and family expenses. We alone are feeling the pain.

DAEMON FAIRLESS: So what kind of compensation did Shumi receive initially after the collapse, after she lost her leg?

MARK KELLEY: From what we were told, she was given $12,000 as an initial payment. And since then, she receives about $100 a month from the government for lost wages. But just to put that into perspective, she has this prosthetic leg. And she says every, you know, between every eight to 12 months, she needs to replace that leg. And that leg alone costs about $1,200 a year. That's money that she says she simply doesn't have. And to put that in perspective, $1,200 a year is about the annual salary of a garment worker, and she is now unemployable. So again, this is just money she does not have.

DAEMON FAIRLESS: The premise here is to go back 10 years after this disaster. So one of the things you did on this most recent visit is you checked out the garment district there, a district called Savar, just north of the capital city, Dhaka. And as I understand, there's hundreds of garment factories there. So I guess I'm curious, what's life like there for the people living there and specifically for the people working in these factories?

MARK KELLEY: You’d think that's a basic question where we could get an easy answer.

DAEMON FAIRLESS: Yeah.

MARK KELLEY: What is life like in an area where you've got as many as 500,000 garment factory workers?

DAEMON FAIRLESS: It wasn't that easy?

MARK KELLEY: It wasn't that easy because people were too afraid to talk to us. There was fear of being fired. There was fear of a backlash. There was a fear of being put on a blacklist that would make you unemployable. You know, and these are people, the vast majority of the women who were working there, or the majority of the people working there are women. So many of them have come from the countryside to come in and get work, and the garment sector has given them that. But it's just so important for them. And it wasn't until we were on the ground and working with one of our colleagues who's a Bangladeshi journalist, he was able to finally arrange us to be able to talk to one brave woman who said, yes, I'll talk and I'll talk to you on camera.

DAEMON FAIRLESS: You saw her where she's living, right? Tell me about that.

MARK KELLEY: She was like living in a workers compound in Savar. We park our truck, and we start unloading our equipment and walking down these alleys that are strewn with garbage, you know, with smells I don't want to even describe. And then as we go through this labyrinth, we finally find this woman, 24-year-old Lazina Akter. She makes pants for Joe Fresh. She's been working in the factory for about a year and a half. She works up to 70 hours a week, six days a week. And her life too has been very difficult. Even with working that much, she finds it very, very difficult to make ends meet.

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LAZINA AKTER: I am not happy.

MARK KELLEY: You're not happy.

DAEMON FAIRLESS: You said she's working something like 60 hours a week. What’s she getting paid? And I guess how does that compare?

MARK KELLEY: At the time when we were there, it was the lowest definitely in the region. She was making about 100 to $120 Canadian dollars a month. Not that much. And again, this is six days a week that she's working.

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In translation: We get a very small salary, around 100 to $120 a month. Not that much.

MARK KELLEY: And she was getting some support to get through by her family to make ends meet.

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In translation: Since my parents are still alive and they don't want their children to suffer, so they help.

MARK KELLEY: Now, after we left, in November, the government would actually increase the minimum wage to its current level, and that's about $150 a month. If you start comparing it to Vietnam, for example, where the minimum wage, lowest minimum wage is $178. China or Cambodia, it's $274, according to the Clean Clothes Campaign. But if you look at what's considered a livable wage in Bangladesh, that's considered to be somewhere around the $600 wage. These workers are now making, at the lowest level, $150 a month. That is their reality, and that's why life is so unaffordable for so many of these workers.

DAEMON FAIRLESS: So these two women you spoke with, Shumi and Lazina, they both made clothes for Joe Fresh, which is owned by Loblaw. Loblaw is just one of a number of companies that used Rana Plaza to make its clothing. So I want to talk more about the current safety conditions, but just in a bit. I want to go back right now to 2013. What happened after the collapse? How did Loblaw respond at the time?

MARK KELLEY: Well, Loblaw reacted with shock and surprise. And looking back, I think what it revealed is they didn't know exactly what the working conditions were like for many of the people who were making their clothes in Bangladesh. 10 years ago, I was able to get inside a prison to interview a man who owned the factory who was making $6 million a year making clothes for Joe Fresh.

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UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: Joe Fresh was my biggest client, about $6 million a year. That's why I was going bigger. Everybody is doing this. They all squeezed me, but Joe Fresh was a very good customer. Their policy was just ship it on time.

MARK KELLEY: I asked him to name one Loblaw employee who had ever been inside his factory to inspect it. He couldn't do that. So I think when Loblaw was saying that they were shocked and surprised by what happened there, it revealed the fact that they were using third party inspectors who had that distance from the company. And I think that what time would reveal as well, those third party inspectors were really going in there to make sure that the production process was working, as opposed to what were the working conditions like, what was fire inspection safety like, what was structural safety like? That was the problem, and that was what really came to light of so many international brands, including Loblaw Joe Fresh.

DAEMON FAIRLESS: So after that collapse, Loblaw CEO, Galen Weston, responded. Remind me what he said.

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GALEN WESTON: I'm troubled that despite a clear commitment to the highest standards of ethical sourcing, our company can still be part of such an unspeakable tragedy.

MARK KELLEY: Well, he wanted to make a series of commitments, including manufacturing clothing only in factories that meet all the local safety codes, talking about fire safety, structural safety codes. He also wanted to pay long term compensation for the victims of the collapse and paying fair wages for all the workers in its supply chain.

DAEMON FAIRLESS: So after this happened, there was an accord that came about that Loblaw signed, that brands like H&M, American Eagle signed. That's called the Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh, which is fairly self-explanatory. The idea is that it would force companies in Bangladesh to fix these problems or they'd lose business. So tell me about that accord. What kind of impact did it have at the time?

MARK KELLEY: It was immediate and it was lifesaving.

DAEMON FAIRLESS: How so?

MARK KELLEY: It was the game changer because it allowed independent inspectors to go inside and do that structural safety inspection, the fire safety inspection. And it was eye opening. And this is why I think companies like Loblaw were so surprised, because when the independent inspectors got in there, they realized the task they had ahead of them. You know, one of the inspectors that we met, he's a Canadian and he was leading the inspection. His name is Brad Loewen. He says when he first got there with his teams, that they found 50 factories, 50 buildings that needed to be shut down right away because in their estimation, they were potentially the next Rana Plaza because of structural safety issues. They were ordering these buildings to be evacuated and shut down. And this revealed the lack of safety inspection that had plagued the industry for so long until Rana Plaza collapsed.

DAEMON FAIRLESS: And was that effective? Like the people implementing this accord, they had the power to do that?

MARK KELLEY: They had the power to dry up business and put business on hold until these factories, you know, in essence, cleaned up their act.

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BRAD LOEWEN: I would get calls from the sourcing people and saying, well, no, we're happy to pull out of that factory if you're saying it's unsafe. Our order should be done in two weeks and then we will pull out. And I said, no, no, no, no. But they also had to learn quite quickly that, yes, in fact, if these factories were that immediately dangerous, that they weren't going to finish their two week run of jeans or what have you, that it was right now.

MARK KELLEY: And it was fire safety issues as well. I mean, they were going into places where they found that the fire safety exits were padlocked, where you had, you know, mounds of boxes blocking fire safety exits. I mean, it's so many things. Brad Loewen was given a list of 1700 factories and one year. They said, go out there and do what you need to do. And they did that.

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BRAD LOEWEN: So we would send in three teams of engineers. Over half of these factories had locks on their exit doors, and we made them cut them off.

MARK KELLEY: And that was the game changer that happened because finally, there was this independent, you know, policing agency, if you will, that was allowed to go in there. But with the way that it worked is you had the brands working with the independent inspectors and the unions. So they all worked together and it was very effective. But there was one key player left out of that. Those were the factory owners themselves. So needless to say, they didn't like it.

DAEMON FAIRLESS: Yeah. So tell me about that. This accord comes in, it's effective, and then there's pushback.

MARK KELLEY: And it ends up being a victim of its own success. Because it was so successful in cleaning up the act, or forcing the factory owners to clean up their act, the factory owners didn't like it. One factory owner would eventually go to court. The case there was that they didn't really have the jurisdiction to be coming in and telling the factory owners, in essence, how to run their business. The court agreed, and the accord was essentially kicked out of the country.

DAEMON FAIRLESS: And one of the interesting things I found from your documentary too is that the ties between the factory owners and the government are pretty tight.

MARK KELLEY: Yeah. 10 years ago, I mean, when a lot of this was happening, about one in 10, about 30 of the 300 MPs actually owned factories, garment factories. So and to this day, I mean, some of their top cabinet ministers owned factories. So that relationship between the factory owners and the government, the people who are really calling the shots at the end of the day was really inextricably linked. And that still has an impact on wages and on working conditions in that country.

DAEMON FAIRLESS: We had this period after the Rana Plaza collapse where there was this infrastructure in place to basically look after worker safety, worker needs. Then it gets pushback. You and your team at The Fifth decide you're going to check in 10 years later to see what things are like on the ground there. You wanted to see what things are like at the factories where Joe Fresh clothes are made. What did you find?

MARK KELLEY: You know, there's a new… instead of the accord, now there's a new audit agency called the RSC. And so it's the new sheriff in town and it's there. And it seems to have a different attitude. For one, the factory owners are now on the steering committee, so they're part of it. And it seems to have had, from what we are being told, an impact on the way that the inspectors are doing their business. There seems to be far more patience. So if you're finding some serious fire safety issues, for example, they’ll say, we'll give you a little time.

DAEMON FAIRLESS: You can fix it tomorrow.

MARK KELLEY: We’ll give you two years, we'll give you three years to be able to fix these things. So we wanted to know just exactly, you know, specifically when it came to the factories that are used by Loblaw. So we analyzed the safety records. And the RSC, I give them credit that they publish these safety records online. They're open there, so they were accessible for us. The safety records for 21 factories used by Loblaw between 2019 and 2023, we looked at them. During that time, inspectors noted a total of 176 building violations, including a missing sprinkler system in one factory, an antiquated fire alarm system in another. And a factory currently used by Loblaw called Meditex Industries, inspectors noted 31 fire related violations between 2014 and 2023, including their fire escape stairs don't exit outside of the building. They exit inside the building. We took our findings back to Brad Loewen. He's the Canadian who was part of the accord, and so we sent it to him. We said, Brad, what do you think about these? And he was deeply concerned. He was deeply concerned on two levels. A, that these were what he considered life threatening issues, violations that were existing in these factories, and b, that it had taken, in some cases, seven years that they had been warned, seven years of being told to do something and it hadn't happened yet.

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BRAD LOEWEN: To not have them done that many years later is shocking. I mean, you can build and rebuild buildings from scratch, obviously in a lot less than eight years.

DAEMON FAIRLESS: So what did you do to better understand the significance of what you found on the safety records?

MARK KELLEY: We wanted to go to Meditex. Before we left for Bangladesh, we asked Loblaw if they could help give us access and they said they can't do that. I said, well, okay, could you at least help make an introduction? And they said, no, we can't do that. So we just decided to show up ourselves.

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UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: Now, factories fully comply.

MARK KELLEY: And that's what we wanted to talk to you about. And this is from the RSC and these are the inspection reports.

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: Yeah.

MARK KELLEY: And you've had ongoing fire safety issues.

MARK KELLEY: And we explained to them that we're Canadians. You're making clothes for Canadians. There are some, a long list of fire safety issues that have been pointed out by the RSC, and we'd like to see if these issues have been addressed. And the factory manager came down. He says, oh yeah, don't worry, things have been addressed. I said, well, that's not what these reports say, so we'd like to take a look for ourselves.

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UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: That one is already closed. Fire safety issue is already closed. It’s already closed.

MARK KELLEY: Can you show us that these are…

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: No. Actually, today, you have no appointment here. So we could not…

MARK KELLEY: And we were not given access to the factory. In fact, we were shown the door. And once we got outside, things got tense. We had a drone that was shooting the building. They attempted unsuccessfully to confiscate our drone. A crowd was gathering. It got a little uncomfortable. So we said, you know what we're going to do? And we could see the workers looking through the barred windows. And it was coming up to lunch, so we said, well, we'll stick around for lunch. And when they leave, we'll talk about the workers. We wanted to know from the workers themselves, do you feel safe making clothes for Canadians?

DAEMON FAIRLESS: And were you able to talk to them?

MARK KELLEY: We never got the chance because we were then told by somebody that after we had gone in there and spoken to the factory manager, he addressed all the workers in the factory and said, whatever you do, don't stop to talk to the Canadians.

DAEMON FAIRLESS: So I mean, you didn't. You weren't able to. you were prevented from looking at what you wanted to look at.

MARK KELLEY: Correct.

DAEMON FAIRLESS: Now, I guess I'm curious what Loblaw had to say about your findings.

MARK KELLEY: Well, we asked Loblaw about the findings that we had, and they said… they sent us a statement. First of all, they wouldn't give us an on-camera interview, but they said that they had since stopped using two of the factories that we had noted that were problems in their supply chain. And they added that, and I'm quoting here, the work to ensure safe factories is an active and dynamic process and one that we take extremely seriously. Now, they say, and this is different from what it was 10 years ago, that they now have seven employees on the ground who can conduct their audits at each factory. And they went on to, in their statement, say they've provided more than $5 million in compensation. They say they remain committed to transparency and accountability in their global supply chain, continue to collaborate with stakeholders, factory partners and industry organizations to drive positive change and protect the rights and well-being of workers where our products are made. End quote. That from Loblaw.

DAEMON FAIRLESS: So Mark, it's been 10 years since the Rana Plaza collapse. And since then, Bangladesh has doubled the amount of clothes they export. And despite that growth, the concerns that the tragedy raised haven't gone away. So garment workers and their advocates are out on the street. They're calling for higher wages. And you saw some of that when you were there reporting. So what message do they have for Canadian companies who have factories in Bangladesh, and I guess also for Canadian consumers who buy the clothes that are made there?

MARK KELLEY: Put it this way. When we were in Bangladesh 10 years ago, Joe Fresh was running ads that say, well, we're selling t-shirts for eight bucks. Right before we went to air 10 years later, we went into a local Joe Fresh store here in Toronto. They were selling t-shirts there for $8.94.

DAEMON FAIRLESS: That much that much later.

MARK KELLEY: 10 years later.

DAEMON FAIRLESS: Wow.

MARK KELLEY: Think about our lives right now and how inflation is now the story. You know, everything around us has increased in price. How can it be that the price of a t-shirt has moved so little? In fact, if you adjust it for inflation, it's actually less than $8. So how could that be that it’s in fact going down? Well, the issue there is that if it's that cheap, it’s that cheap for a reason. And that's what we just need to know as consumers that there's a story with every garment that we buy. It's stitched into it itself. And if it's that cheap, it's that cheap for a reason. And when it comes to the price squeeze, it's actually the workers who are at the bottom of that food chain, of that price chain.

DAEMON FAIRLESS: Right.

MARK KELLEY: They're the one who gets squeezed the most. Yes, the factory owners are complaining about getting squeezed. In fact, the factory owners say that international brands like Loblaw Joe Fresh are not paying what they call ethical wages. I mean, the factory owners themselves are saying this, let alone what the workers are dealing with. And that's the story. That's the subtext. And there's this concern that people have on the ground there that there are a lot of, you know, statements about we want to do better. We care about the workers. We care about the people who make our clothes. But in the end, they're really just… it’s part of what some people told us over there. It's really just part of a PR campaign more than really caring about the people who make our clothes.

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UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: I think the brands really need to stop the double standard. You know, I think they talk about commitment to workers’ rights only as a PR strategy, you know, because they don't want their consumers to have to deal with the guilt of buying from sweatshops in Bangladesh.

DAEMON FAIRLESS: I think the thing that struck me is that before I came into the studio, I took the shirt off that I'm wearing. I looked at the tag. I got this thing on sale for 25 bucks. Guess where it was made? Bangladesh. So your question, right, like 10 years later, have we forgotten? I mean, I have to say, I had. I knew this story.

MARK KELLEY: Yeah. And of course, we do. We cared at the time and it was the priority for consumers. It was the priority for brands. It was the priority, you know, internationally, globally, we've got to do better. And then we move on with our busy lives. And in this day and age, we're all looking for a great deal. And the important thing about Bangladesh is it's employing more than four million people. I mean, it is the backbone of their economy, and the majority of those employees are women. There have been huge, huge gains from the garment industry there, but that's not necessarily good enough.

DAEMON FAIRLESS: Mark, thanks so much for coming in and telling me about this. It's great reporting, and I really appreciate it.

MARK KELLEY: Thank you.

DAEMON FAIRLESS: Thanks.

DAEMON FAIRLESS: All right, that's it for today. I'm Daemon Fairless. Thanks for listening to Front Burner.

Why fast-fashion garment workers' lives are still at risk - Transcript

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