The downfall of an eight-story clothing factory in Rana Plaza on the peripheries of Dhaka on April 24th slew at least 400 persons and wounded much more. It was perhaps the nastiest manufacturing accident in South Asia since the Bhopal tragedy in 1984, and the vilest ever in the vestment business. Resident police and a trade association had cautioned that the construction was hazardous.
The proprietors supposedly replied by intimidating the employees who did not continue working routinely. Much of the responsibility lies with Bangladeshi management of all kinds, which have made only basic efforts to carry out the national construction code, specifically contrary to the governmentally well-connected landowners. With a blessing, the decrees will now be applied, but no one assumes much. The transnational corporations are now in the limelight, whose commands from the native factory possessors have led to the recent quick progress of the clothing industry in Bangladesh, which takes second place after China among the countries that export clothing.
Most of the brands that are known worldwide now are suspected of taking advantage of unwell salaried employees with a heartless indifference to their protection. Two concerns whose goods were found in the ruins of Rana Plaza have hastily sworn to recompense the losses to the sufferers and their relatives. But the issue is a lot more serious than that. Clothing corporations, in spite of everything, have faced corporate social responsibility. Driven by the prior scandals over working environments in wide-ranging sweatshops, multinationals like Nike have struggled to cope with the complications like child labor. Here and now, the catastrophe in Dhaka demonstrates how much of a problem it is to state that your goods are properly sourced in every sense of those words.
The accident at Rana Plaza proves that nowadays the CSR is more controversial than ever. Lots of limits in the governmental mechanisms and globalization cost lots of money to the industry. It is pretty obvious that the administration did not pay attention to their workers’ requests as they needed to get the work done. But no one surely knows where the limits of the corporate social responsibility really are.
To recognize whether the CSR is modestly trying to impose the ethical standards applied within the company on its customers or just trying to vigorously fool its customer base to profit massively has become a complicated task lately. The CSR might have been a winning strategy on the management’s playbook, but they have never been seen to play on the same team with their employees and abused them, which, in turn, is a direct violation of the general corporate social responsibility norms.
Unfortunately, most of the situations that are noteworthy to the issue, are mostly slept on, and the companies’ administration usually turns a deaf ear to the employees and do whatever it takes to stay afloat in the business. Though CSR has a tendency to be perceived as an ethical matter, it comes down to the rigid realities of the firms’ reputes and risk records. The situation in Rana Plaza was a prime example of how an abuse of the CSR leads to miserable consequences. Such a tragedy has left a deep wound not only on the company’s reputation but also on the lives of the people who worked on it for good.