A Year After the Deadly Bangladesh Factory Disaster, How Much Has Changed?

A delegation visits Congress, where things go sour

Rescue workers and volunteers search by hand for victims among the debris of the collapsed Rana Plaza building in Dhaka, Bangladesh, on April 26, 2013Photograph by Jeff Holt/Bloomberg

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By Josh Eidelson

July 28, 2014 at 9:15 PM UTC

This article is for subscribers only.

This article is part of the August 4, 2014 issue of businessweek.

One year after a deadly factory disaster cost Bangladesh certain U.S. trade privileges, its government and business leaders are pushing to get them back. But the officials’ behavior prompts questions about how much has really changed in Bangladesh.

Last month, a delegation including Bangladesh Commerce Minister Tofail Ahmed and leaders of the Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association (BGMEA) came to Washington to detail the progress they had made on worker safety in Bangladesh, the second-largest garment exporter in the world. The Bangladeshi government and the BGMEA argue it’s time for the White House to restore the Generalized System of Preferences (GSP) tariff breaks it suspended following the April 2013 Rana Plaza factory building collapse, in which more than 1,100 people died. The Bangladeshi delegation included representatives of the Alliance for Bangladesh Worker Safety, a business-backed group whose board is chaired by former Democratic Representative Ellen O’Kane Tauscher and includes officials from Gap, Wal-Mart, and Target as well as the BGMEA (the alliance itself says it has no stance on GSP, but took part in the delegation in order to promote safety efforts; Tauscher condemned comments made by Ahmed and the BGMEA after they returned to Bangladesh).