Bangladesh owner is at nexus of politics, business

Bangladesh: When the cracks in the building appeared early Tuesday afternoon, a stocky man in his early 30s, a feared political operative who a neighbor says dropped out of school in seventh grade, quickly arrived at the scene in this crowdedindustrial suburb of the capital.

By then, fear had spread through the 3,200 people who worked in the five clothing factories that jammed the upper floors of Rana Plaza, and the handful of shops on the lower ones. Most of the workers had gathered in the street out front. Few wanted to go back in. Inspectors said the eight-story building should be closed until it could be inspected.

But Mohammed Sohel Rana scoffed.

“The building has minor damages,” Rana, the building’s owner, told gathering reporters. “There is nothing serious.”

The next morning, many of the building’s shops and a first-floor bank remained closed. But the factories’ 8 a.m. shift began as usual. About 45 minutes into the shift, the building suddenly collapsed, killing at least 362 people in a fury of falling concrete. It was the worst industrial accident in the history of Bangladesh. More than three days later, rescuers are still crawling through the wreckage, hoping to find anyone who has managed to survive so long. By Saturday, nearly all the people being carried out were dead.

By that point, though, Rana had disappeared. Local media reports said he left his basement office inRana Plaza just before the collapse, drove away and dropped from sight. He was arrested Sunday as he tried to cross the border into India.

For years, though, Rana had sat at the nexus of party politics and the powerful $20 billion garment industry that drives the economy of this deeply impoverished nation. This intersection of politics and business, combined with a minimum wage of $9.50 a week that has made Bangladesh the go-to nation for many of the world’s largest clothing brands, has made dangerous factory conditions almost normal, experts say.

Government officials, labor activists, manufacturers and retailers all called for improved safety standards after a November garment factory fire in the same suburb, when locked emergency exits trapped hundreds of workers inside and 112 people died. But almost nothing has changed.

“Successive Bangladeshi governments have paid lip service to worker safety but in reality it is only the factory owners who have the ear of policymakers,” Brad Adams, the Asia director for Human Rights Watch, said in a statement. “How many factory tragedies will it take before the Bangladeshi government ends its cozy relationship with powerful company owners and prioritizes worker safety?”

Before the collapse, Rana was little known outside of the few blocks of his tiny empire, a grid of poorly paved streets in the crowded industrial suburb of Savar, built up over the past decade or so around hundreds of garment factories.

The son of a local businessman with political connections, Rana became a neighborhood force by working as an organizer for the two political parties that have competed for power for decades in Bangladesh, according to local politicians, as well as someone who grew up near Rana and still lives in the area.