Please note the original article published by Just Style can be found here: Rana Plaza 12 years on: Impact of tariffs, weak anti-slavery laws
In 2024, the UK’s House of Lords Committee on Modern Slavery sought a public inquiry into the impact of the Modern Slavery Act 2015. The Committee Report shows evidence that modern slavery statements from companies are inconsistent due to a lack of mandated content requirements, hindering accountability despite a voluntary public registry.
The Committee Report also highlights an inconsistency that may stem from insufficient guidance and the absence of mandated topics for these statements. Accordingly, the Committee recommends the UK government create an online dashboard summarising total statements, sector-specific data, and examples of reporting by companies.
In response to the Committee’s report, the UK government emphasises the modern slavery statement registry as a vital transparency tool with over 16,200statements and approximately 22,500 monthly searches, while the Home Office collaborates with stakeholders to update Section 54 statutory guidance to assist businesses in producing high-quality statements and tackling modern slavery in the supply chain.
Modern slavery legislation lacks substance to tackle forced labour
The UK Modern Slavery Act has no sanctions provision for non-compliant companies. The Committee recommends implementing penalties for those not meeting supply chain requirements. The government responds that it is reviewing ways to strengthen enforcement, which will require legislative changes.
With great disappointment, one can closely observe that both the Committee’s recommendations and the UK Government’s response lack the necessary substance to effectively reduce modern slavery and forced labour at the factories in the Global South from which UK retailers source their products.
As part of the written submission, I submitted our research findings to the Committee, highlighting the precarious working conditions of some factories in Bangladesh that supply garments to major UK retailers. There was no acknowledgement of supply chain workers’ conditions within the Committee Report, nor in the Government’s response.
Two years ago I wrote a piece to commemorate Rana Plaza’s 10th anniversary, which discussed our research findings on how UK retailers’ unfair purchasing practices — such as sudden order cancellations, delayed payments, reduced payment offers, and refusal to pay for completed goods — lead to forced labour and exploitation in Bangladesh garment factories. The report from the House of Lords Committee and the UK government’s response have neither highlighted nor acknowledged these unfair purchasing practices and the conditions in the factories. Without addressing these practices, modern slavery within global supply chains cannot be effectively tackled, as they have a direct impact on the prevalence of slavery.
The UK Modern Slavery Act currently does not require companies to have third-party auditors for factory audits in supply chains and it lacks provisions for disclosing factory locations and working conditions.
In my submission I recommended the introduction of mandatory third-party audits and traceability measures to ensure transparency and confirm whether production is slavery-free for all levels of suppliers. The Committee’s report does not take into account a potential requirement for a third-party audit. Importantly, the report also disregards recognising precarious factory conditions and the workers on the ground in factories for British retailers, mostly located in the global south. This raises a serious question: Is the Modern Slavery Act really designed to tackle slavery in the global supply chains?
Modern slavery regulations have corporate interests
In our recent study we conducted a linguistic analysis of three modern slavery disclosure regulations:
- California Transparency in the Supply Chains Act(CTSCA) 2010
- Section 54 of the UK Modern Slavery Act 2015
- Australian Modern Slavery Act 2018
We found the texts and discourses around the regulations are not neutral and allow social wrongs to continue in global supply chains. This study, along with my earlier work on the UK Modern Slavery Act, found the modern slavery disclosure regulations were drafted and enacted in a way that is more likely to serve corporate interests rather than bring social justice for workers globally.
The existing modern slavery Acts remain deeply silent in holding corporations accountable for any misconduct related to forced labour and slavery in overseas factories.
What are the shortcomings 12 years after the RanaPlaza disaster?
This year, we are observing the 12th anniversary of the Rana Plaza collapse — a tragic disaster in modern industrial history that left at least 1,132 garment workers dead and injured several thousand more in Bangladesh. The collapse of the eight-storey building on 24 April 2013 housed five factories making clothes for western high street brands, such as Accessorize, Primark, and Walmart, among others.
My 20 years of research shows that even after the Rana Plaza Collapse and despite various voluntary tools like retailers’ codes of conduct, CSR disclosures, and audits were in place, forced labour conditions in some parts of Bangladesh have not improved, while some factory owners have become wealthier and retailers’ profits have surged.
The shortcomings of the Modern Slavery Act in the UK and elsewhere contribute significantly to the ongoing issues of forced labour and slavery in factories in the global south.
Currently, the UK Modern Slavery Act lacks robust mechanisms to hold retailers accountable for these practices. To address this, the legislation should incorporate provisions that ensure fair purchasing practices, mandates independent third-party audits, and establishes clear penalty measures for non-compliance.
With the inadequacies of existing anti-slavery regulations, emerging challenges such as the US ‘populist ‘Make America Great Again’ movement casts a shadow over the fight against modern slavery.
In particular, US president Donald Trump’s tariffs threaten to disrupt global trade and supply chains, putting countries like Bangladesh — which is heavily reliant on garment manufacturing — at significant risk.
For every $1 a Bangladeshi clothing factory makes, someone in the US makes $9, $14 or $19. Who is extracting the most surplus value? Before imposing tariffs, why not acknowledge the massive global exploitation already ingrained in the retailers’ surplus values and profit maximisation?
Tariffs will only squeeze prices further, leading to even greater exploitation of workers. Since the US can’t make a T-shirt for $1, they somehow still need to keep trading with Bangladesh. So the ultimate victims of the tariffs game are the workers.
On the anniversary of the Rana Plaza building collapse in Bangladesh on 24 April, Just Style shares a timeline of the changes that have been made to improve worker and building safety within the country’s ready-made garment (RMG) industry.
