It was almost five years ago when on 24 April 2013 the 8-storey Rana Plaza building in Bangladesh collapsed resulting in 1,134 fatalities and 2,000 injured. At the time the disaster caused a great deal of furore and several European and American contractors felt duty bound to intervene whereupon a five-year plan was devised and put in place. The plan is approaching its end date (May 2018)* and it is now time to take stock. Have the objectives been achieved? Is it time for those involved to leave? Are there still tasks requiring completion? Such are the questions that were debated at the New York Ford foundation and focused on during an exhibition called ‘The price of our clothes’ at the Perlman museum in Northfield Minnesota.
Two organizations were established following the Rana Plaza disaster. The Alliance for Bangladesh Worker Safety was set up with funds from the big US names including Gap, WalMart and Target, inter alia. The Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh (see our article 130323) received the backing of 220 European companies, trade unions and some US entities. French names such as Auchan, Carrefour and Casino were among the Europeans and US-based Abercrombie and Fitch, American Eagle Outfitter
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