Bangladesh should introduce an employment injury insurance scheme to cover workers injured in workplace accidents in the last five years. Global pro-worker rights group Clean Clothes Campaign has called upon the Bangladesh Government for the same.
In a press release issued on October 8, 2018, the rights group suggested this scheme can offer a cover for workers injured at workplace; which can be introduced as a pilot scheme and be launched as a fully functioning system within a year.
While factory safety has greatly improved in Bangladesh over the last five years, since Rana Plaza disaster, factory incidents still happen. The workers and families affected by these incidents face similar debt and grief as those affected by the Rana Plaza collapse, but lack an international campaign coming to their aid, CCC said.
Such situations can only be solved by a national employment injury insurance scheme that covers all workers with a fund which is contributed to by all the employers, it says.
Bangladeshi labour rights activist Kalpona Akter says, “All these disasters we have seen, with difficult compensation process and only limited options for compensation in Bangladesh labour law show how much we need a national employment injury insurance scheme.”
Ben Vanpeperstraete, Lobby and Advocacy Coordinator at Clean Clothes Campaign, says, “We believe that the establishment of a national employment injury insurance scheme and a bridging solution would be the realisation of one of the major lessons learned after the Rana Plaza collapse and end the insecurity and dire poverty of the workers that were killed and injured at the workplace in the five years since the collapse.”
