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Paradigm shift or business as usual? Workers' views on multi-stakeholder initiatives in Bangladesh

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  • Kabeer, Naila
  • Huq, Lopita
  • Sulaiman, Munshi

Abstract

The scale of the tragedy at Rana Plaza in Bangladesh, in which more than 1,000 garment factory workers died when the building collapsed in April 2013, galvanized a range of stakeholders to take action to prevent future disasters and to acknowledge that business as usual was not an option. Prominent in these efforts were the Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh (hereafter the Accord) and the Alliance for Bangladesh Workers’ Safety (hereafter the Alliance), two multi‐stakeholder agreements that brought global buyers together in a coordinated effort to improve health and safety conditions in the ready‐made garment industry. These agreements represented a move away from the buyer‐driven, compliance‐based model, which hitherto dominated corporate social responsibility initiatives, to a new cooperation‐based approach. The Accord in particular, which included global union federations and their local union partners as signatories and held global firms legally accountable, was described as a ‘paradigm shift’ with the potential to improve industrial democracy in Bangladesh. This article is concerned with the experiences and perceptions of workers in the Bangladesh garment industry regarding these new initiatives. It uses a purposively designed survey to explore the extent to which these initiatives brought about improvements in wages and working conditions in the garment industry, to identify where change was slowest or absent and to ask whether the initiatives did indeed represent a paradigm shift in efforts to enforce the rights of workers.

Suggested Citation

  • Kabeer, Naila & Huq, Lopita & Sulaiman, Munshi, 2020. "Paradigm shift or business as usual? Workers' views on multi-stakeholder initiatives in Bangladesh," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 102722, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
  • Handle: RePEc:ehl:lserod:102722
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    File URL: http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/102722/
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    1. Farole, Thomas & Cho, Yoonyoung & Bossavie, Laurent Loic Yves & Aterido,Reyes, 2017. "Bangladesh Jobs Diagnostic," Jobs Group Papers, Notes, and Guides 28032673, The World Bank.
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    3. Falck, Oliver & Heblich, Stephan, 2007. "Corporate social responsibility: Doing well by doing good," Business Horizons, Elsevier, vol. 50(3), pages 247-254.
    4. Jimmy Donaghey & Juliane Reinecke, 2018. "When Industrial Democracy Meets Corporate Social Responsibility — A Comparison of the Bangladesh Accord and Alliance as Responses to the Rana Plaza Disaster," British Journal of Industrial Relations, London School of Economics, vol. 56(1), pages 14-42, March.
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    6. Khan, Mohd Raisul Islam. & Wichterich, Christa,, 2015. "Safety and labour conditions : the accord and the national tripartite plan of action for the garment industry of Bangladesh," ILO Working Papers 994888773402676, International Labour Organization.
    7. Peter Lund-Thomsen & Khalid Nadvi & Anita Chan & Navjote Khara & Hong Xue, 2012. "Labour in Global Value Chains: Work Conditions in Football Manufacturing in China, India and Pakistan," Development and Change, International Institute of Social Studies, vol. 43(6), pages 1211-1237, November.
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    Cited by:

    1. Oya, Carlos & Schaefer, Florian, 2021. "The politics of labour relations in global production networks: Collective action, industrial parks, and local conflict in the Ethiopian apparel sector," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 146(C).

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    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • R14 - Urban, Rural, Regional, Real Estate, and Transportation Economics - - General Regional Economics - - - Land Use Patterns
    • J01 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - General - - - Labor Economics: General

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