Rana Plaza, disaster politics, and the empowerment of women garment workers in Bangladesh

ABSTRACT

Bangladesh’s garments workers have served as both an emblem of that country’s rapid social and economic progress, and of the precarities of labour in global value chains. Based on an understanding of how disaster politics have played out in Bangladesh’s history, this article explores whether and how the Rana Plaza disaster has been a critical juncture in the politics of the sector, resulting in a shift in power relations that empowers workers to demand and secure their rights. Drawing on a framework developed by Mark Pelling and Kathleen Dill for the analysis of the politics of natural disasters, the article explores the aftermath of the 2013 factory collapse in which 1,134 factory workers were killed. The article examines changes in workers’ own agency and resources, and in their relationships to the state and transnational actors. The article concludes that while the disaster was a turning point in key respects, it has not – unlike previous major disasters in Bangladesh – generated an elite consensus over the priority of workers’ rights and in particular of trade unions. Workers are more empowered than in the past but have yet to fully reverse their historical associational and structural disempowerment.

KEYWORDS:

• Bangladesh
• garments workers
• trade unions
• labour rights
• women workers
• empowerment
• disaster politics

Acknowledgements

This paper is based on research undertaken as part of the Effective States and Inclusive Development research programme at the University of Manchester, funded by the UK Department for International Development. The author is very grateful to Zabir Hossain for excellent research support in Dhaka, to interviewees for their time and insights, and to two anonymous reviewers for helpful feedback on an earlier draft. All errors of fact or interpretation remain mine alone.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Naomi Hossain is a political sociologist at the Accountability Research Center at American University and the Institute of Development Studies based at the University of Sussex.

ORCID

Naomi Hossain http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3244-2319

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 The UN Gender Inequality Index (GII) for 2017 ranked Bangladesh 134 out of 188 countries, compared to Sri Lanka at 80, Nepal at 118, India at 127, and Pakistan, just above Bangladesh, at 133. This ranking, apparently at odds with other composite indices, appears to relate to the very high proportion of adolescent mothers in Bangladesh (between one-third and two-thirds higher than elsewhere in South Asia), which is one of five indicators measured. GII data are from http://hdr.undp.org/en/composite/GII (Accessed April 15, 2019).

2 Taslima Akhter’s award-winning photographs can be viewed here. Ismail Ferdous’ archive can be viewed here. See Holert (2019) for an analysis of the politics of Rana Plaza photography.

3 Viewed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YdrfSz36e28 (Accessed March 2, 2019).

4 From the USTR website: https://ustr.gov/countries-regions/south-central-asia/bangladesh (accessed March 8, 2019).

5 This draws on a number of sources, in particular (CPD 2013; Evans 2014; Khan and Wichterich 2015; Kabeer, Huq, and Sulaiman 2019)

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Department for International Development.