Following a recent reports by Clean Clothes Campaign on H&M's failure to meet its commitments under the Bangladesh Accord, Clean Clothes Campaign, International Labor Rights Forum, Maquila Solidarity Network, and Worker Rights Consortium have issued a joint memo analyzing H&M's false and misleading claims in reaction to the said report.
The memo states that H&M's response is replete with false and misleading statements, demonstrating that the company remains unwilling to address the issue in a serious and forthright manner. While H&M claims that it only sources clothes from factories approved by the Accord, according to the Accord's published reports, there is not a single H&M supplier factory in Bangladesh that meets the building safety standards of the Accord.
H&M also states, “All of our factories have emergency exits that is a requirement from our side. What has failed is that some factories have old doors that have not been changed to new fireproof doors that meet all requirements..." However, memo says that H&M's claim is an outright falsehood. “Should a major fire occur in an H&M supplier factory, requiring emergency evacuation, the lack of proper fire doors would lead to stairwells becoming inundated with smoke and thereby possibly rendered impassable for workers trying to escape the fire,” it states.
H&M says that factories where H&M is lead-brand, almost 60 per cent of the remediation work is completed and it sees good progress. However, memo says that it is crucial to bear in mind that most of these factories were inspected more than a year ago, which means that most of the required renovations had deadlines for completion that have long since expired. “By now, close to 100 per cent of hazards should have been corrected - not 50 per cent, or 60 per cent, or 70 per cent since any one of these uncorrected hazards could cause injury or death.
” Finally the memo concludes saying, given the number of lives that are at stake, it is appalling that H&M, two and a half years after the Rana Plaza collapse, and five years after 21 workers died in an H&M supplier factory, is blaming the absence of life-saving fire safety equipment in its supplier factories on logistical problems that could have been resolved in a matter of months.
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