Rana Plaza

On the morning of April 24, 2013, the eight-story Rana Plaza building in Savar, outside Dhaka, Bangladesh, collapsed onto the garment workers inside. The International Labour Organization counts 1,134 dead; more than 2,500 were injured. The disaster happened far from any American mill, but it belongs in an American textile history, because it showed where American clothing had gone after the mills of the Carolinas closed. Labor advocates documented labels of Western brands in the rubble, among them the American retailers The Children's Place, Walmart, and JCPenney. The companies variously said that none of their goods were in production there or that they had no authorized orders, a response that itself revealed how little many brands knew about their own subcontracted production. Within three weeks, a group of mostly European brands signed the legally binding Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh, negotiated with global unions. Nearly all major American chains declined, citing exposure to litigation, and instead formed the Alliance for Bangladesh Worker Safety, led by Walmart, Gap, and Target, which carried no comparable legal enforceability. Compensation came slowly, through an arrangement chaired by the ILO that by October 2015 had paid about $30 million to more than five thousand injured workers and dependents of the dead. Rana Plaza turned 'supply chain transparency' from a marketing phrase into a political demand.