Binding Agreements Bring Change. So Why Aren’t US Brands Signing Them?

There’s a kinship among garment workers that transcends space—and time, for that matter.

Nazma Akter, founder and executive director of Bangladesh’s Awaj Foundation, as well as a former garment worker, feels this acutely.

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On Wednesday, Akter was in downtown Manhattan attending the unveiling of a new memorial for the victims of the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, one of the worst disasters in New York City history and a galvanizing moment for the American labor rights movement.

More than 140 workers, most of them young immigrant women, died in the March 25 blaze, which spread quickly after an unextinguished match or cigarette ignited a bin of cutting-table scraps on the eighth floor of the 10-story building.

There were no overhead sprinklers and the doors to the stairwells and exits were locked. Those who were trapped died from the flames, from smoke inhalation or after leaping from the upper floors to their death. The youngest victims—Kate Leone and Rosaria “Sara” Maltese—were just 14.

“We are all the same family; their struggle is our struggle,” Akter said at an intimate breakfast gathering at Cornell University ILR School’s New York City conference center on Friday, nearly 50 blocks north of what is now New York University’s Brown Building, where a pair of stainless steel plates are etched with the victims’ names and ages. This winter, a giant silver ribbon will wind up to the ninth floor, where more than 50 of the workers decided to jump.

After the deadly inferno, New York began demanding better building access, the availability of fire extinguishers, the installation of automatic sprinklers and limits on the number of hours that women and children could work. By the following year, the Empire State had enacted 25 additional laws that made its labor protections among the most progressive in the country. When the New Deal rolled around two decades later, it absorbed many of them into federal law.

At the same time, Akter sees many chilling similarities between the tragedy and conditions in the global South today. More than 100 years on, garment workers, young women especially, are still dying for clothing. America has only “exported” the problem offshore and out of sight.

Survivors of the September 2012 inferno at Pakistan’s Ali Enterprises, which killed more than 250 workers and injured another 60, for instance, recall locked emergency doors and windows with metal grilles that prevented workers from reaching safety. Two months later, another 117 people would perish in the Tazreen Fashion fire in Bangladesh, again because the lack of adequate exits made escape difficult if not impossible. Things would come to a head the following April, when 1,134 workers would die in the collapse of Rana Plaza, mere miles away, unleashing a wave of global outrage that would lead to the formation of the historic agreement known as the Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh. For the first time, some of the world’s biggest brands and retailers would be held legally liable for conditions at their suppliers. And in the span of a decade, Bangladesh would become one of the most dangerous countries to produce garments to among the safest.

“Change cannot just happen in America—or Europe or Australia,” Akter said. “This kind of inequality [is] imperialism. The global North is getting profit and we are getting aid.”

Akter isn’t in the United States just to point out the parallels between the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Ali Enterprises, Tazreen Fashion and Rana Plaza. Neither is she here only to draw attention to the fact that Bangladesh’s minimum wage hasn’t budged since 2018, that gender-based violence and harassment in the country are on the rise, and that the quality of life for its workers is deteriorating because of spiraling inflation. They are all part of a larger Gordian knot, one that various parties have picked at over the years with middling success at best.

What the situation calls for is a sword, and campaigners say they have one. Until Wednesday, Akter, Athit Kong of the Coalition of Cambodian Apparel Workers Democratic Union, Rafi Ay and Fulya Pinar Özcan of Turkey’s Öz İplik İş trade union, and Christina Hajagos-Clausen of IndustriALL Global Union, are on a whistle-stop tour to convince brands and retailers that the industry’s prevailing voluntary, private auditing schemes must cede to a newer model of what IndustriALL calls “global company-trade union agreements” with collective bargaining at their heart and workers as part of the governance.

These include the International Accord for Health and Safety in the Textile and Garment Industry, which succeeded the Bangladesh Accord with an expansion into Pakistan, as well as the ACT—that is, Action, Collaboration Transformation—Memorandum of Understanding on living wages, freedom of association and collective bargaining, which IndustriALL has signed so far with 19 names, including H&M Group, Calvin Klein owner PVH Corp. and Zara operator Inditex.

American companies have been more reticent about tying themselves up legally. Of the 200 brands and retailers that have signed the International Accord, less than a handful—American Eagle Outfitters, Fanatics and PVH Corp. among them—are headquartered in the United States. PVH Corp., meanwhile, is the only U.S. firm to back the ACT MOU.

“We’ve met with New York global brands here,” Hajagos-Clausen, IndustriALL’s director for the textile, garment, shoe and leather sector, told Sourcing Journal. “We’re really here to highlight the need for North American brands to become signatories of binding agreements, particularly the International Accord and ACT.”

From New York City, the delegation will be heading to Washington, D.C., where it’ll be lobbying with lawmakers and attending a meeting with the Fair Labor Association, a multistakeholder organization to which many of fashion’s nameplates belong.

“I think the commemoration of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire really hit home to why we’re here,” she said. “And it was really to make the connection on how [it] changed the American labor movement, set up the modern-day firefighting system safety system, and then to connect it to the global supply chain and what happened in Rana Plaza, the signing of the Bangladesh Accord, where many people said, ‘This is an anomaly; this is only happening because there was such a tragedy; this won’t change the garment industry.’”

But the work that the global labor movement has done around occupational health and safety has shown that Rana Plaza wasn’t a “blip because it was a horrific tragedy, but it was something that had a sustainable way to make change for the industry,” Hajagos-Clausen added. Inspections aside, workers need to be able to advocate for their own health and safety issues, she said.

Still, Hajagos-Clausen said that engaging with brands and retailers, which she avoided naming, is one thing. Getting their signature is quite another. What’s clear to her, however, especially as negotiations for the International Accord’s renewal are poised to conclude at the end of the month, is that it’s time for American companies to get off the sidelines, stop being “free riders” around the International Accord and put their corporate social responsibility policies into practice by signing ACT.

What binding agreements do, she said, is offer a framework for holding businesses accountable. And in the absence of a collective bargaining system in many garment-producing countries, IndustriALL wants to make sure that brands and retailers are being held responsible for remedying breaches of fundamental principles and rights at work, not just factory by factory but sector-wide.

“The power of the worker in the country is shrinking,” said Kong of Cambodia, where civic suppression is rife and there’s no viable opposition to the ruling party. The entrenched autocracy was made even more acute in August when Hun Sen transferred the premiership to his son after close to four decades as prime minister.

“We can’t do a big strike like [we did] 10 years ago anymore,” Kong said. “This puts more pressure on organizing. That’s why ACT is important, the global binding agreement is important. The agreements mean higher wages, more protection for the unions, more protection for the workers.”

International Labour Organization conventions and national laws are well and good, but “we have an issue of practice,” he said. “Social dialogue,” too, is only a nice turn of phrase if it isn’t being conducted in earnest.

“This is a very complicated world,” Kong said. “And yet we expect the law or the CSR or the codes of conduct to work like magic.” That might work in a country with more freedom to organize but in a repressive state, “it’s very difficult,” he added. “We have very big brands always claiming [that they] are promoting human rights, all these things. Let’s see you using that.”

There’s an argument for taking a more proactive stance on worker wellbeing issues, not just responding to tragedy, said Ay through Özcan, who served as his translator. When a pair of earthquakes rocked central and southern Turkey and northern Syria in February, killing more than 50,000 people from both countries and leaving more than a million homeless, many of the textile and garment factories in the affected regions held strong. Several even housed and fed survivors.

“After Rana Plaza, many of our buildings were strengthened or made with better construction,” Ay said. “The factories [became] safe spaces.”

Özcan later told Sourcing Journal that the victims of Rana Plaza deserve a large memorial beyond the humble sculpture of an arm and sickle that stands at a now-overgrown site. People must remember what happened, she said. Already, International Women’s Day, which is celebrated on May 8, has become a day of “fun and putting [on] music and dance.” What most people don’t realize is that the modern observance of the event emerged out of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire.

“​It’s not the day to celebrate, but it is a day to commemorate these people who lost their lives,” she said.

At the breakfast meeting, Edgar Romney, secretary-treasurer at Workers United, a founding member of the Remember the Triangle Fire Coalition, said that he was embarrassed that organizers haven’t been more successful in getting American brands to sign the Accord.

“We have worked hard, but we have not been more successful,” he said, noting that most American companies—Gap, Walmart and Target, included—rallied around a different, less restrictive agreement known as the Alliance for Bangladesh Worker Safety instead. The Alliance has since ceded its work to an organization known as Nirapon, which is now down to two full-time employees and is, by its own admission, focusing on education over enforcement.

“We have done a lot of work in demonstrations against a number of brands—Levi’s, which is actually a union company, is one of them, The Children’s Place is another, but yet we’ve been unable to turn the corner in getting those companies to sign to the Accord,” Romney said.

Brands, he said, didn’t want to be the first in line. Now, it’s their lawyers that are waving them off.

Hajagos-Clausen surmises that it’s easier for brands that have strong relationships with trade unions in their home countries—think H&M in Sweden and Inditex in Spain—to sign binding agreements.

“But still, I don’t think that gives other brands a pass, right?” she said. “Because we really want to make a systemic change in the industry. U.S. brands want to stay in the voluntary…third-party auditing model. They don’t want to move to this other model that we’re saying is a better model.”

Workers, Hajagos-Clausen said, want a seat at the table that makes decisions about their safety and well-being, not be beholden to the private, non-transparent programs holdout companies tout. Plus, brands sign binding agreements all the time, so “why wouldn’t they do it for their supply chain for the people who are actually making their clothes?” she asked.

She’s hopeful, however. “I think we’re really at a crossroads right now to make real systemic change in the industry,” she said.

Transnational organizing is important, Akter said later, because garment production is a globe-trotting business. Without unity and solidarity among the different countries, change will remain elusive. More important, global rights must be respected all over the world, not just where the enabling circumstances make them easier to promote and protect.

“You can’t pick and choose,” said Petra Brännmark, communications director at IndustriALL. “It’s not pie.”

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