Bangladesh can look to this unlikely place to fix its garment sector

Detroit is a long way from Dhaka, but the American city’s efforts to address blight offer lessons for cleaning up the garment sector in Bangladesh. Released in May, the Detroit’s Blight Removal Task Force’s plan (pdf) offers a practical vision for addressing the more than 78,000 dilapidated buildings that are the primary obstacle to the city’s growth and vitality. In the year since the factory collapse in Dhaka, which killed more than 1,100 garment workers, brands and policymakers have focused on improving inspection in a subset of factories producing for the export market. Companies like the Gap $GPS, Wal-mart, H&M, Target $TGT, Zara, and Mango are wrestling with how to solve the problem of poor workplace safety in a country where the government doesn’t provide basic protections for workers in its number one export industry. The next important step for Bangladesh—and the brands and retailers that depend on the country’s apparel sector—is developing a comprehensive plan for relocating, closing, and fixing factories. Here’s where Detroit can help:

1. Define the standard. The Blight Task Force defined blight according to a variety of factors, including structural soundness, fire damage, and health and safety. In Bangladesh, two private initiatives, the Alliance for Bangladesh Worker Safety and the Bangladesh Accord on Fire and Building Safety, have defined a common standard for factory safety. But this standard only applies to about 1,800 factories the brands and retailers acknowledge are part of their supply chains. It doesn’t apply broadly to the total universe of 5,000 to 6,000 factories and facilities likely producing for the export market. More work needs to be done to define safety standards that apply across the sector, including small facilities that operate in rented or mixed-use buildings and that often are not transparent to brands.
2. Assess the universe. In Detroit, hundreds of workers spent months photographing and recording 380,000 parcels of land. Despite the fact that garments represent 80% of Bangladesh’s export economy, no one is certain how many factories are actually producing for the export market, much less the conditions in these factories. A similar effort is needed to build an authoritative database of garment facilities, including both registered and unregistered units.

1. Establish a task force. President Obama established the Blight Removal Task Force in September 2013. The task force includes the private sector, public officials, and nonprofit and philanthropic organizations. It has a clear mandate to develop straightforward and detailed recommendations to remove blight. A similar effort is needed in Bangladesh to bring together the Bangladeshi government, international brands and retailers, garment manufacturers from Bangladesh, foreign governments, unions, civil society groups, and development and donor organizations.
2. Make practical recommendations. Like the Blight Task Force, a task force for the garment sector in Bangladesh would need a clear mandate to develop ambitious and concrete approaches to upgrade the sector as a whole. This will require a combination of strategies to develop new purpose-built areas for garment production, relocate factories and workers to these areas, make improvements to existing factories, and close factories that do not meet basic standards. Any recommendations should recognize the continued importance of subcontracting and the role of small, flexible producers in the supply chain.