Five years after Rana Plaza disaster, are Asia’s sweatshops a thing of the past?

Asian garment factories are struggling to keep up with the relentless global appetite for cheap clothes, but Tuomo Poutiainen is convinced that sweatshops will soon be a thing of the past. “In 10 years, the time of sweatshops will be over,” says Poutiainen, a United Nations expert on the industry. “There is so much attention and visibility on this subject. Transparency means there’s no space for sweatshops and substandard conditions, there’s plenty of eyes to report them. Twenty years ago it was easy to hide in these situations.”

The Asian garment factory industry is worth more than US$600 billion a year, with the likes of Bangladesh and Cambodia relying on it for more than 75 per cent of their exports. Many of the 60 million who work in the garment industry are still poorly paid, earning US$100 a month or less in the newly emerging cheap labour nations of Ethiopia and Myanmar.

It is an industrial juggernaut that has frequently broken trading laws and safety standards – something that has often proved fatal for workers. On April 24, 2013, a five-storey building called the Rana Plaza in Dhaka, Bangladesh, collapsed, killing 1,134 and injuring more than 2,500 people working in the factories and shops within it. It was one of the worst industrial accidents ever, and the wake-up call the industry needed.

“It was a major shock to Bangladesh as a country, as it is so reliant on the garment industry, it provoked soul searching within government, suppliers and buyers. It was the birth of the reform agenda in the country’s garment industry,” says Poutiainen, who is head of quality and factory services for the International Labour Organisation’s [ILO] Better Work Campaign, which is funded by the UN.