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'Alliance for Bangladesh Workers' safety will meet the July deadline for completing factory inspections'

• By  Reena Mital
• March 01, 2014

The Alliance for Bangladesh Workers' Safety is putting in place the necessary infrastructure to begin factory inspections. Even as majority of the industry feels that the Alliance could miss the July deadline of completing inspections of 700 factories, M. Rabin, Managing Director of the Alliance, in an interview with Reena Mital, stresses that work is progressing as scheduled.

What has been the progress of Alliance for Bangladesh Workers' Safety in factory inspections?

The Alliance per se, has not begun the inspections yet. We are in the process of harmonising the standards, and are recruiting suitable third party inspectors. This is taking some time, as we have received a lot of applications from third party agencies. We are also in the process of developing training modules for workers' safety. This follows a survey we had conducted, where we found that workers are not very aware about safety standards, and what needs to be done in case of a fire. 

When will the Alliance begin inspections?

By early March, we should be able to start with full-fledged inspections, which we will complete by July 2014, which was the deadline we set for this task. We would be conducting some pilot inspections even before March. In the meantime, some of the Alliance members such as Walmart and some others have already completed inspecting some of their suppliers' factories - around 200 odd factories have been inspected by the retailers as per their own standards.  We will scrutinise the results of these inspections to see if these conform with Alliance standards. If so, these 200 factories will not be re-inspected. 

While the big factories can invest in restructuring, many may need financial assistance. Does the Alliance have provision for that?

If my door is found to be faulty, it is my responsibility to change it. Having said that, we realise the ground reality, and for this, on February 23-24, we are organising an expo, where we will bring in financial institutions and provide a platform for factories and financial institutions to interact and work out low cost loan negotiations for making factories safe.

All stakeholders are talking about common standards. How far has work on this moved?

The standards of the Alliance, Accord and the government are very similar. We all follow the norms set under the National Building Code. What we have found is that 74 percent of the factories were built before the building codes were instituted.  So, we are looking at that reality. These buildings do not have structural designs, so we try to look at live loads. The 200 inspections that have happened, show that there is no imminent threat of collapse of the buildings. It is unfortunate that Rana Plaza happened before we started looking at this aspect of compliance. 

Suppliers complain of too many inspections...

This is not really true. There have been other audits for environmental and social compliances. Structural integrity of buildings and fire safety norms have started only now. Moreover, I think suppliers also realise that they need to comply with these norms, not just because the brands are insisting on this, but also because they need to portray a positive image of their industry, after the tragic accidents. Compliances cannot be looked upon as a financial burden, this is a necessity.  

The Alliance is looking only at structural and fire safety of buildings, and not a more comprehensive approach to compliances. Why?

Social and environmental audits are already happening. The Alliance was formed to take up factory inspections, and that is what we are focussing on.              

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