NGO signatories to Bangladesh Accord welcome historic new binding worker safety agreement

Today, apparel brands and labour unions announced agreement on a new International Accord for Health and Safety in the Textile and Garment Industry, thereby preserving, extending, and expanding the model pioneered by the Bangladesh Accord for protecting worker safety. The non-governmental organization signatories (known as witness signatories) to the Bangladesh Accord – Clean Clothes Campaign, Worker Rights Consortium, Maquila Solidarity Network, and Global Labor Justice-International Labor Rights Forum – issued the following statement:

We welcome, and look forward to signing, this new international safety agreement, which maintains the vital elements of the ground-breaking model established by the Bangladesh Accord: legal enforceability of brands’ commitments, independent oversight of brand compliance, the obligation to pay prices to suppliers sufficient to support safe workplaces, and the obligation to cease doing business with any factory that refuses to operate safely. The successful outcome of negotiations this summer will ensure that the sweeping safety gains the Accord has delivered in Bangladesh will be maintained and extended.

This model, which has saved countless lives in Bangladesh, will also now be expanded to other countries where workers’ lives remain daily at risk. Eight years since the inception of the original Accord, the new International Accord takes the important and overdue step to expand its coverage beyond Bangladesh. It is vital that this process will be taken on swiftly and unreservedly for the benefit of textile and garment workers who have called for better safety measures for many years.

Under the new agreement, the continuation of the progress on fire and building safety achieved in Bangladesh over the past eight years, and the expansion of the programme beyond Bangladesh, will be ensured through the work of the Accord Secretariat, a fully independent oversight body with the authority to verify and enforce brand compliance. Importantly, only brands that are willing to sign the new enforceable agreement will be able to avail themselves of inspections and other services in Bangladesh, ensuring a level playing field without double standards.

Every responsible apparel and textile brand – every brand that places any value on the lives of the workers who sew its clothes – will sign this new agreement. It is especially important that brands and retailers that failed to sign the original Accord sign this one. These brands have consciously chosen to risk the lives of the workers in their contract factories; their recklessness must now end.

We congratulate the hundreds of trade unions, civil society organizations, parliamentarians, and governments around the world that have advocated this year for the continuation of the Accord. Their efforts were instrumental in getting this good outcome. We must now turn our attention to ensuring that every brand that sources clothing from high-risk countries, in South Asia and beyond, signs the new International Safety Accord. A list of companies that have signed on to the agreement, that started to work on 1 September 2021, can be found here. All of the brands that have not yet signed the Accord continue to put workers' lives at risk and we urge them to sign on as soon as possible.

"In several factories where a major disaster happened in the past 10 years, the factory had just been inspected by a private audit company. Audits can be a (small) part of the solution, but they have been used for too long as a miracle solution. And they are certainly no alternative to public inspections and laws."  Sara Ceustermans from the Flemish Clean Clothes Campaign. 

More from her in this interview in De Knack here (in Dutch).