On 23 March 2021, The UNU World Institute for Development Economics Research (UNU-WIDER) hosted a webinar “The Garment Industry in Bangladesh under COVID-19: Lessons from the Rana Plaza Disaster on How We Understand Worker Safety”. Maheen Sultan, Senior Fellow of Practice and one of the founders of the Centre for Gender and Social Transformation at the BRAC Institute of Governance and Development (BIGD) joined as a discussant. She is a development practitioner with over 25 years experience working for NGOs, donors, the UN, Grameen Bank and the Bangladesh Government in a range of capacities, from direct programme management to policy formulation. She shared insights on the role of labour unions in the context of state-business-labour relations in the RMG sector and how the various COVID-19 related stimulus packages for the sector were designed, managed, and followed through by the government agencies. She mentioned that through her research work, she found that the trade unions weren’t strong enough, with most benefits going to owners rather than the workers.
Dr Sanchita Banerjee Saxena,Executive Director of the Institute for South Asia Studies (Institute) at UC Berkeley and the Director of the Subir and Malini Chowdhury Center for Bangladesh Studies under the Institute drew some lessons from an earlier crisis in Bangladesh — the collapse of the Rana Plaza building in 2013, one of the worst industrial disasters in history. This presentation focused specifically on the distorted notions of what constitutes safety for workers (primarily for women workers), which continue to perpetuate the cycle of labor violations for those at the very bottom of global supply chain. Dr Sanchita Banerjee Saxena argued that the lack of progress in many key areas created a situation that was ripe for suffering under an unanticipated and unprecedented global pandemic. The event was chaired by Kunal Sen, Director, UNU-WIDER.
On 23 March 2021, The UNU World Institute for Development Economics Research (UNU-WIDER) hosted a webinar “The Garment Industry in Bangladesh under COVID-19: Lessons from the Rana Plaza Disaster on How We Understand Worker Safety”. Maheen Sultan, Senior Fellow of Practice and one of the founders of the Centre for Gender and Social Transformation at the BRAC Institute of Governance and Development (BIGD) joined as a discussant. She is a development practitioner with over 25 years experience working for NGOs, donors, the UN, Grameen Bank and the Bangladesh Government in a range of capacities, from direct programme management to policy formulation. She shared insights on the role of labour unions in the context of state-business-labour relations in the RMG sector and how the various COVID-19 related stimulus packages for the sector were designed, managed, and followed through by the government agencies. She mentioned that through her research work, she found that the trade unions weren’t strong enough, with most benefits going to owners rather than the workers.
Dr Sanchita Banerjee Saxena,Executive Director of the Institute for South Asia Studies (Institute) at UC Berkeley and the Director of the Subir and Malini Chowdhury Center for Bangladesh Studies under the Institute drew some lessons from an earlier crisis in Bangladesh — the collapse of the Rana Plaza building in 2013, one of the worst industrial disasters in history. This presentation focused specifically on the distorted notions of what constitutes safety for workers (primarily for women workers), which continue to perpetuate the cycle of labor violations for those at the very bottom of global supply chain. Dr Sanchita Banerjee Saxena argued that the lack of progress in many key areas created a situation that was ripe for suffering under an unanticipated and unprecedented global pandemic. The event was chaired by Kunal Sen, Director, UNU-WIDER.