Walmart & Other American Retailers: Ensure basic safety & human rights for workers in Bangladesh

Sumi Abedin
Campaign created by
Sumi Abedin
of 75,000 signatures

To: Walmart, Sears, JC Penney and other American retailers

Take immediate steps to deploy safety improvements in your supplier factories by joining the legally binding Bangladesh Fire and Building Safety Agreement and pay the compensation owed to injured workers and the families of workers killed while sewing your clothing in Bangladesh. Furthermore, work with Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina Wajed’s government in Bangladesh to allow workers to form unions and improve safety and health inspections in your supply chain.

Why is this important?

My name is Sumi Abedin. I sewed clothing for American retailers at Tazreen garment factory in Bangladesh for a year and half. On November 24th we were working overtime at 6:30pm, when one worker came back from the restroom and shouted, “there’s a fire in the factory!” We started to smell smoke and we panicked. But when I ran towards the exit stairs, my supervisor told me it was a false alarm and ordered me to go back to work. Five minutes later it became really clear that there was a fire but we couldn’t get out through the main stairs because the supervisor had locked the collapsible metal gate.

Eventually, I saw a coworker break a window on the third floor and jump. I jumped right after him. My decision to jump was not so that I could save my life – I doubted that I could survive a jump from a third story window. I jumped to save my body so that my parents could find me; if I had stayed in that factory my body would have been burned to ash. Unlike 112 of my coworkers, I survived.


Over 380 people have been killed in Bangladesh since last week after the collapse of an eight-story factory building where clothes were being manufactured for American and European consumers. Although workers had their doubts about entering the building since cracks had developed on the facade, managers forced the workers to enter the building and work as usual.


As noted in a poignant New York Editorial, “the severity and frequency of these disasters are an indictment of global clothing brands and retailers like Walmart, H&M and the Gap, which buy billions of dollars of clothes from Bangladesh but have so far refused to demand and pay for adequate safeguards at the factories that fill their orders.”

This is unacceptable. We can't allow US corporations to gain hundreds of millions of dollars in profits while continuing to offer woefully inadequate responses concerning the safety of workers in countries like Bangladesh. We must pressure them today to lean on their suppliers in Bangladesh and lobby the government of Bangladesh to enact and enforce meaningful labor laws and safety standards which on paper should provide basic protections to workers.

Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina Wajed’s government in Bangladesh should also make a commitment to allow workers to form unions and ensures their rights to bargain with management on wages and working conditions. It is up to the American companies that produce their clothing in Bangladesh to ensure that Hasina’s government does not ignore these rights despite making repeated promises to do so to international agencies.

Enough is enough. We cannot let American companies like Walmart, Sears and JC Penney get away with ignoring the human rights of the workers who sew their clothes.

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Reasons for signing

  • Rick C. 2013-07-14 16:55:22 -0700
    Lack of basic safety provisions are part of what attract corporations to offshore jobs.
  • Katherine R. 2013-06-09 15:17:31 -0700
    Cheap is not better.
  • Oliver T. 2013-06-02 16:24:57 -0700
    American retailers who profit from this low paid labor need to be held responsible for the safety of these workers.