What is the Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh?

It's the legally binding agreement that global apparel brands and trade unions signed in May 2013, weeks after the Rana Plaza collapse, to fund and submit to independent fire, electrical, and structural inspections of Bangladeshi garment factories. Unlike a corporate pledge, a brand that ignored the findings could be taken to binding arbitration by the signatory unions, and in at least one 2016 round that led to over $2 million in settlements paid toward safety remediation.

Is the Rana Plaza Accord still active?

The original Bangladesh Accord ended in 2021. Its work continues under the International Accord for Health and Safety in the Textile and Garment Industry, which renewed its agreement in November 2023 for an initial three years with an automatic three-year extension, and under the RMG Sustainability Council, which has run day-to-day inspections in Bangladesh since June 2020. Status checked August 2026.

How many people died in the Rana Plaza collapse?

1,134 people were confirmed dead after an eight-story building housing five garment factories collapsed in Dhaka on April 24, 2013. Roughly 2,500 more were pulled from the rubble alive during a 19-day search that ended May 13, 2013.

Did the Rana Plaza Accord fix the garment industry?

No. It fixed building and fire safety at the roughly 1,700 to 2,000 factories in Bangladesh (and, later, Pakistan) whose brand customers signed a binding agreement. Wages, hours, and the vast majority of garment-producing countries fall outside its scope entirely, and a brand that never signed owes nothing to the agreement's arbitration clause.

Rana Plaza and what actually changed

On the evening of April 23, 2013, cracks opened in the walls of Rana Plaza, an eight-story commercial building on the outskirts of Dhaka. The shops and the bank branch on the lower floors closed immediately and stayed closed. The five garment factories on the upper floors, which supplied brands sold across Europe and North America, sent roughly 3,000 workers back in the next morning. The building came down at 8:57 a.m. on April 24, 2013. The search for survivors and bodies ran nineteen days and ended on May 13 with a confirmed death toll of 1,134 and roughly 2,500 people pulled out alive, many with crush injuries that ended their working lives along with the building.

It was not the first fire or collapse in a Bangladeshi garment factory, and voluntary safety pledges from Western brands had already failed to prevent the previous ones. What made Rana Plaza different was what came after it: within weeks, a document with actual enforcement behind it existed, and this piece is about what that document did, what it left standing, and where it is as of today.

The Accord was a contract, not a promise

In May 2013, global apparel brands and two international trade union federations, IndustriALL and UNI Global Union, signed the Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh. The distinction that mattered was legal form. Earlier industry safety codes were corporate social responsibility commitments: a brand wrote them, a brand could stop honoring them without saying so, and no outside party had standing to do anything about it. The Accord was a legally binding agreement between two parties with equal governance power, brands and unions sitting on the same steering committee, and it carried an arbitration clause. A signatory brand that failed to fund remediation at its factories could be taken to binding arbitration by the union signatories. In 2016, a round of arbitration cases produced settlements of more than two million dollars paid toward safety remediation, according to Clean Clothes Campaign’s account of the Accord’s enforcement record. That is the mechanism a voluntary pledge does not have: a way to make a brand pay after it says no.

The Accord covered exactly what its name says: fire, electrical, and structural safety. Inspectors went into signatory factories, found hazards such as unsupported upper floors, blocked exits, and faulty wiring, and required the factory’s brand customers to fund and schedule the fix on a public timeline. A factory that stalled risked losing its buyers entirely, since continuing to source from a non-compliant factory would put a brand in breach of its own signature.

The model that had no teeth

The Accord was not the only response. On July 10, 2013, a separate group of 28 mostly North American retailers, including Walmart, Gap, and Target, formed the Alliance for Bangladesh Worker Safety, brokered through the Bipartisan Policy Center with former senators George Mitchell and Olympia Snowe involved in the talks. The Alliance described its own five-year commitment as binding, and it funded real inspections at its own member factories. What it did not include was a mechanism that let an outside party, a union or otherwise, take a non-complying brand to arbitration. Its board sat entirely on the brand side. A retailer that fell short answered to the Alliance’s own board, made up of its fellow retailers, not to the workers whose factories were being inspected. That single structural difference, who gets to enforce the agreement against a brand that balks, is the whole reason the Accord’s record includes actual arbitration settlements and the Alliance’s does not.

What the record since actually shows

The original Bangladesh Accord ran until 2018, was extended as a Transition Accord through 2021, and its on-the-ground inspection and remediation work in Bangladesh passed to a new, Bangladesh-based body, the RMG Sustainability Council, on June 1, 2020. The RSC is a tripartite organization of brands, manufacturers, and unions, and per Clean Clothes Campaign’s account, it does the inspecting but has no arbitration mechanism of its own; that accountability function stayed with the international Accord structure, which now backs the RSC’s findings with the same binding-agreement teeth.

The global umbrella that both grew out of and continues to enforce brand commitments is the International Accord for Health and Safety in the Textile and Garment Industry, which took effect September 1, 2021, and renewed its agreement in November 2023 for a three-year term with an automatic three-year extension, the longest commitment period in the Accord’s history. As of this writing, the International Accord’s own site reports more than 56,000 factory inspections conducted, more than 450 factories that have completed their initial remediation, more than 12,000 safety committee members trained, and 280 or more signatory brands and retailers. Checked August 2026.

In Bangladesh specifically, the RSC’s most recent quarterly report, dated June 30, 2026, covers 1,773 factories and roughly 2.9 million workers at an average remediation progress rate of 81 percent, a figure that varies enormously by factory: individual completion rates on the RSC’s public factory list range from 0 percent at some facilities to 100 percent at others. The Accord expanded its binding model to Pakistan as well, extending the Pakistan Accord in early 2026 for continued inspection and remediation work there. Outside Bangladesh and Pakistan, no equivalent binding structure exists. A brand sourcing from Vietnam, Cambodia, or India owes nothing to any Accord arbitration clause, because it never signed one that covers those factories.

What the Accord never touched

The Accord’s scope was deliberately narrow, and that narrowness is the honest qualifier on every number above. It covers fire, electrical, structural, and boiler safety at factories whose brand customers signed. It has never covered wages, forced overtime, freedom of association outside the safety-complaint mechanism, or any labor condition that isn’t a fire or collapse risk. A factory can pass every structural inspection on the RSC’s list and still pay workers a wage that doesn’t cover rent. The Accord was built to stop the building from falling down, and inside that narrow mandate, with a binding contract and an arbitration clause behind it, it has done more than a decade of voluntary pledges managed to do. It was never built to do anything else, and reading it as a complete fix for how garments get made is the error the industry would prefer readers make.

Every DRESS garment is cut and sewn in the United States under a union contract, which is a different labor claim entirely: it answers who made the clothes and under what terms, not whether the building they made them in might collapse. Both questions are worth asking about any shirt in a closet, including this one.