48 global retailers to meet in Dhaka

Forty-eight international clothing retailers and brands will hold meetings in Dhaka next month to fix compensation packages for the victims of Rana Plaza collapse and Tazreen fire incident.
Sixteen retailers and brands will fix such packages for the Tazreen victims on August 11, and 32 will sit for Rana Plaza victims on the following day.
Initiated by IndustriALL Global Union, the meetings will take place in the city's Sonargaon Hotel.
As per the charter of demand, every victim of the two tragedies will receive Tk 5 lakh, Roy Ramesh Chandra, general secretary of IndustriALL Bangladesh Council, told The Daily Star yesterday.
According to Section 121 of the International Labour Organisation, relatives of a dead worker will receive 50 percent of the salaries, which the worker was drawing at the time of his/her death, for the next 25 years with an annual inflation of 7 percent, Chandra said.
The relatives will also receive 10 percent of the dead worker's salaries for their children's education cost, he said.
Brands and retailers, who used to outsource clothing items from the factories housed in the two buildings, will bear 45 percent of the compensation packages, factory owners will bear 28 percent, BGMEA 18 percent and the government 9 percent.
“This is the set rule now for paying compensation. The permanent disabled workers will receive a little bit higher compensation than the injured ones,” he said.
In the packages, loss of earnings, pain and suffering, medical costs, funeral costs and other important family expenses were taken into account, IndustriALL said in a statement.
The estimated long-term compensation for Rana Plaza will be more than 54 million euros ($71 million) and for Tazreen this is 4.3 million euros ($5.7 million), according to the statement.
IndustriALL Global Union General Secretary Jyrki Raina urged all the related outsourcing firms to take part in the discussions.
“IndustriALL looks forward to working with the committed companies to bring some justice to the dead and injured and their families. Those brands ignoring this opportunity will face criticism in the strongest terms,” Raina said.
“The work around the compensation issue is not part of the Bangladesh Accord on Fire and Building Safety, but the strong spirit of cooperation built by the accord feeds into the process,” he said.
“It is a clear priority for IndustriALL that international standards are respected on this important issue of compensation in the case of Rana Plaza and Tazreen.”
“We should together concretise the precedent of this formula which has already been used in Bangladesh and Cambodia.”
“What we all want is to make the mechanisms agreed in the Bangladesh Accord quickly a reality so that compensating dead and injured garment workers in Bangladesh becomes a thing of the past,” said Raina.