In April 2013 a building outside Dhaka came down with several thousand people inside it. More than eleven hundred died and around two and a half thousand were injured. I was thirteen years into this industry then, working with mills and factories, and like everyone else I spent that week studying the labels visible in the photographs of the rubble and hoping not to recognise one.
The anniversary passed again in April this year, quietly, while the agreement that came out of that collapse was heading into another renegotiation. The International Accord now covers roughly two and a half million workers in Bangladesh and has been extended to Pakistan. Its continuation depends on companies choosing to sign it again.
What made the Accord different from a promise
Before 2013 the industry's answer to factory safety was the supplier code of conduct. The Accord did three things a code does not. Inspections are carried out by engineers who do not work for the brands, and the reports are published. Signatory companies are required to help finance the remediation they demand, rather than instructing a supplier to pay for it out of a margin the same company negotiated down. And it is legally binding through arbitration, which means a union can take a signatory to a tribunal instead of to a press release. There is also a complaints mechanism that a worker can use without going through the person who supervises them.
I was wrong about codes of conduct
For a long stretch of my career I treated a signed supplier code as a form of evidence. It was on file, the factory had signed it, and there was an audit report with a date on it. I was wrong, and I would rather say so plainly. A code is a statement of what the buyer would like to be true. An announced audit is an inspection of a building that knew the date. Neither one pays for a second staircase.
What changed my mind was standing in a stairwell in a factory where the fire door had been fitted properly, wide enough, opening outward, unobstructed, and realising that somebody had funded that. Remediation is capital expenditure. If the mechanism does not say who pays, the answer defaults to the party with the least room to pay, which is the supplier, which usually means it does not happen.
The people in the building
The work being done in these factories is skilled. Setting a sleeve into an armhole so that it hangs straight is a genuinely difficult operation, and a good operator does it in under a minute, several hundred times a day, for years. I say this because the writing around this subject tends to flatten the people involved into a category to be felt sorry for. They are technicians with a trade, and what they have been asking for is not sympathy. It is enforceable inspection and a wage that reflects the work.
Why a school is exactly the buyer that can ask
An individual buying one blazer has no leverage and should not be made to feel responsible for the whole chain. An institution is a different proposition. A school places a recurring order, every year, in a forecastable volume, under a named contract, and it can decline to renew. That is the profile a supplier reorganises for. The same is true of a hospital, a municipality, a police force or any organisation clothing several hundred people.
So the questions are worth putting in writing at tender stage. Which factories will produce our order, by name and address. Are they covered by the International Accord or an equivalent binding programme. When was the last inspection and can we see the report. And when the answer is no, or partial, ask what the plan is and by when. A supplier who has thought about it will answer in specifics. A supplier who has not will answer with a paragraph about values.
Thirteen years is long enough for an anniversary to become a formality. The reason conditions in those buildings improved is not that consumers felt terrible in 2013. It is that a group of buyers signed something that could be enforced against them, and kept signing it. That is still the mechanism, and it still runs on whether the people placing large repeat orders decide to ask.