“Don’t reduce garment workers to victims—recognise their struggles”
Dr Rebecca Prentice, Associate Professor of Anthropology and International Development at the University of Sussex, has studied garment workers' health and labour rights for over two decades. Her journey began with fieldwork in Trinidad in 2003, and most recently brought her to Bangladesh in April, in collaboration with the Ethical Trading Initiative. She spoke to The Daily Star about the current state of labour conditions and workplace safety in Bangladesh, and the evolving challenges garment workers face in the post-Rana Plaza era.
The Daily Star (TDS): How do you view the current situation of Bangladeshi garment workers?
Rebecca Prentice (RP): When I was doing fieldwork in Trinidad in the 2000s, the garment industry there was falling apart. With China and Bangladesh rising as export giants, small Caribbean countries found it hard to compete for lucrative North American markets.
What I saw in Trinidad was how workers who had devoted their lives to the garment industry suddenly found themselves with fewer and worse job prospects. Though my book emphasises workers' creative agency to build livelihoods and get by, they felt abandoned by an industry to which they had given the best years of their lives.
This sense of disposability is exactly what Lamia Karim writes about in her book on Bangladeshi garment workers, Castoffs of Capital. She tells us how workers in Bangladesh see their work opportunities vanish around the age of 35. Despite working in the industry for 20 years by that point, these aged-out workers rarely have savings.
TDS: Could you tell us about your collaboration with the Ethical Trading Initiative (ETI), and how its work has the potential to improve conditions for garment workers in Bangladesh?
RP: The approach to improving labour standards that ETI favours is called social dialogue. It involves bringing together worker representatives and managers in a structured way to talk about issues of concern on a regular basis and create joint action plans. Social dialogue within a workplace can be used to address a range of problems, but it requires commitment from employers to give workers a voice and influence over their working conditions.
Not enough factories engage in social dialogue; I believe it is fewer than 100 garment factories in the whole country. According to Bangladesh's labour law, the practice should be widespread. ETI also promotes the formation of workplace trade unions, which significantly improves labour conditions.
TDS: As the garment sector in Bangladesh embraces environmental sustainability, how do these initiatives relate to workers' rights, wellbeing, and job security?
RP: The Bangladesh garment industry deserves recognition for its efforts toward environmental sustainability—improving energy efficiency, reducing water usage, and managing waste responsibly. Certifications like LEED reflect these achievements, but they do not account for workers' rights or conditions, offering only a partial view.
As climate change intensifies, workers face new hardships: rising temperatures on factory floors, increased flooding that disrupts commutes, and higher home cooling costs that impact rest and recovery. While factories race to meet global brands' sustainability targets, the wellbeing of workers is often overlooked. Simultaneously, automation is displacing jobs, with machines housed in air-conditioned rooms while garment workers endure stifling heat with only fans—insufficient during extreme weather.
To address this gap, the Ethical Trading Initiative (ETI) is piloting 'green social dialogue'—an approach that involves educating workers on environmental issues and giving them a platform to express how climate change is affecting their lives and workplaces.
TDS: What is your response to the concern that stronger labour rights could make Bangladesh less attractive to global brands?
RP: If raising wages and improving labour standards harms Bangladesh's attractiveness to multinational brands, that is an unjust situation indeed. But there is much that can be done about it.
One legacy of the Rana Plaza disaster is that there is greater awareness of the responsibility of global brands to engage in ethical sourcing practices. These obligations need to be legally enforced, not voluntary.
New legislation in the European Union (EU) will demand that multinational corporations identify and prevent environmental and human rights risks across their supply chains. These regulatory changes should prevent brands that import into the EU from profiting from a race to the bottom in labour standards.
TDS: How do global media narratives around tragedies like Rana Plaza shape perceptions of garment workers, and do they risk overshadowing workers' own agency and activism?
RP: Images of the suffering of Rana Plaza workers and families played an important role in raising public awareness of labour conditions in the global garment industry. However, what these images of suffering fail to convey is the huge role that garment workers themselves play in improving their labour conditions—through strikes, street protests, and demands for fair wages.
A spectacle of suffering falsely portrays workers as passive, as though they are waiting to be rescued by the very institutions and actors that have harmed them in the first place. It is important for people to understand that despite all their hardships, Bangladeshi garment workers are not passive; they are an active political force doing their best to improve their situation.
The interview was taken by Shormila Akter.
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