In the wake of the Rana Plaza building collapse that claimed 1,129 lives, the Bangladeshi government announced earlier this month that it had made dozens of amendments to national labor law in an effort to better protect workers. While those changes have been hailed in the media as pro-worker and stronger than earlier law, in reality those amendments barely improve safeguards for impoverished garment-sector workers, and in some cases they undermine existing ones.
Legal experts and labor rights activists in Bangladesh explained to The Huffington Post how a number of the amendments will ultimately benefit business interests, rather than the employees they were intended to serve.
“The greed for profit has pushed Bangladesh’s garment industry into its present, disastrous condition,” said Salim Ahsan Khan, legal counselor at The Solidarity Center, a global labor rights group. “And it’s for the same greed that we miss this opportunity to strengthen laws needed for a growing garment industry.”
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