A new brief, published by labor rights groups ahead of Inditex’s shareholder meeting of 13 July, shows that the company urgently needs to sign a new binding agreement on factory safety in Bangladesh before the current program runs out on August 31, 2021.

Inditex—one of the world’s largest fashion retailers and owner of eight brands including Zara—was an early signatory to the Accord in 2013. As a member of the Accord’s Steering Committee, Inditex knows first-hand how effective the Accord has been at making factories safer for more than two million garment workers over the past eight years. Inditex has spent the last few months negotiating with unions, but it has as yet failed to conclude and sign a new binding agreement, and time is running out.

This brief, based on a review of the Accord’s publicly available factory-by-factory data on safety progress, shows that, thanks to the Accord, 92 per cent of identified safety hazards in Inditex supplier factories in Bangladesh have been corrected. At the same time, however, life-threatening safety hazards remain. At the 54 Bangladesh Inditex supplier factories that the witness signatories to the Bangladesh Accord identified, a staggering 40 still have no verified fire alarms, 38 do not have verified fire suppression systems such as sprinklers, and in 35 factories workers could get trapped in case of a fire.

This brief argues that the Accord’s work must be safeguarded and expanded to other countries, and calls for Inditex to take the lead in signing a new, legally binding safety agreement. Shareholders, such as Fundacion Finanzas Etica on behalf of Shareholders for Change, an European network for shareholder engagement representing approximately €30 billion assets under management, have been engaging with Inditex to urge adoption of a new binding safety agreement.