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Walmart Refused to Pay for Safety Upgrades at Bangladesh Garment Factory in 2011
During a 2011 meeting, Walmart refused to pay suppliers to help them upgrade safety conditions at their Bangladesh garment factories.
A fire at a Bangladesh garment factory, which made clothes for Walmart and Sears, killed more than 100 people last month, reports Bloomberg News.
According to the International Labor Rights Forum, a Washington-based advocacy group, more than 700 Bangladesh garment workers have died since 2005.
At the April 2011 meeting in Dhaka, Bangladesh, retailers (including Walmart) discussed a memorandum that would require them to pay Bangladesh factories enough money to cover costs of safety improvements.
However, Sridevi Kalavakolanu, a Walmart director of ethical sourcing, said that Walmart wouldn’t share the cost, in a report of the meeting minutes obtained by Bloomberg News.
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Comments
Walmart has a director of
Walmart has a director of ethical sourcing? That's like a complete contradiction in terms.
I think it's deplorable that Bangladesh doesn't have any kind of occupational health and safety administration to protect their citizens/workers from unscrupulous corporations and factory owners. Then again, the lack of safety equipment and conditions is exactly why the prices on the merchandise could be low enough to get Wal-Mart to buy their goods in the first place.
Is Wal-Mart any worse than companies like Hanes and Levi Strauss - companies that got the US government to put pressure on the government of Haiti (where Hanes and Levi Strauss have large factories) to prevent raising the minimum wage there to the equivalent of US $0.21/hour
Corporations do not have ethics or morals beyond the profit motive, and they remove executives and employees that allow such things to become obstacles to profit.
Throw the entire WalMart
Throw the entire WalMart Board in jail until the issue is settled. In jail no bail, how fast will the facts come out now?
Why doesn't this surprise me
Why doesn't this surprise me about the level of integrity of Walmart Management. Clearly ISO14001 on safety in developing markets is not a corporate priority in terms of giving back to the society and supplier they are exploiting. If this is how they handle suppliers in Bangladesh, it wouldn't surprise me that they are equally negligent about safety at their own US facilities and at US suppliers as well. This is regrettable that corporate responsibility and worker safety is something Walmart pays lipservice to, but it is not a core value of this corporation.