" Bangladeshi Factory Safety Monitor Admits Work is ‘Not Without Its Challenges’", 23 April 2025

The collapse, which killed more than 1,130 garment workers and injured and maimed thousands more, took place in mere minutes, but its impact has continued to reverberate over the past 12 years through the industry-wide reckoning that became the Accord for Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh, the binding agreement between brands and trade unions that later evolved into the International Accord on Health and Safety in the Textile and Garment Industry, now extended into Pakistan.

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But labor organizations that were witness signatories to the Accord, including the Clean Clothes Campaign, Maquila Solidarity Network and Worker Rights Consortium, warned in February that conditions could “backslide into disaster.” The vast safety improvements that the Accord has driven in the ensuing years, they said, are “under threat” from factory owner intervention through the the RMG Sustainability Council, or RSC, which has managed the Accord’s inspection and monitoring duties since 2020 under a tripartite system that allows seats for the Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association. It’s this “partial control,” the organization said, that was weakening the RSC’s effectiveness.

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Despite resistance from the government and factory owners—including legal opposition that led the Accord Secretariat to cede its Dhaka-based office and staff to the RSC and move to the Netherlands—the agreement had over the course of a decade facilitated some 56,000 fire, electrical, and building safety inspections and resolved over 140,000 safety issues at more than 2,400 garment factories. Among the keys to its success, labor groups said, is the Accord’s ability to blacklist factories that refuse to remediate safety violations and prevent them from selling goods to signatory brands.

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the RSC has “consistently failed” to enforce the withdrawal of export permissions known as utilization declarations from standards-violating factories, allowing them to continue to ship goods globally, including, allegedly, to Accord brands.

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non-Accord brands, such as Edinburgh Woollen Mill, Ardene and New Yorker, which have been contacted for comment, were also sourcing from these unsafe factories.

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the organizations defended the decreasing number of terminations—which the labor groups claimed is the result of “weakened” escalation processes—by saying this was due to the additional resources the RSC has invested into “intensifying factories’ capacities to remediate, thereby reducing the number of escalations” across the protocol’s three stages.