Opinion REMEDY
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Sabine Benoit, Professor of Marketing at Surrey Business School, discusses the lessons fashion retailers need to learn five years on from the Rana Plaza disaster.
This year marks the fifth anniversary of a tragic event: the deaths of 1,134 garment workers in the building collapse of Rana Plaza in Bangladesh with 2,500 injured. It is one of the world’s worst industrial accidents.
Despite cracks being found in the walls the day before the disaster, the building owners ignored safety warnings and told people to return to work.
The thousands of people in this building produced garments for Western fashion brands like Benetton and J.C. Penney, which owns department stores across America. Some brands had direct links to producers in the building, some had indirect links meaning that their suppliers or sub-suppliers sourced from companies located in the building.
Supply chain management accepts businesses like the above Western brands, called focal firms, only have control over their direct suppliers, which they have a contract with, but limited control over their various sub-suppliers in what is called a multi-tier supply chain. As a result, focal firms often ‘greenwash’ (using green and ethical marketing) by denying responsibility for behaviour of suppliers they do not have a direct contractual relationship with.
However, reaction to incidents like Rana Plaza indicate that consumers have a very different view on responsibilities in supply chains. This has been investigated by myself and Julia Hartmann, Professor of Sustainability from EBS Business School in Germany. Our study generated insights on which factors diminish the number of
consumers attributing blame to focal firms for supplier behaviour. This is relevant since ‘responsibility attribution’ leads to consumer punishment such as boycotting a company and its products.
We found that consumers attribute less responsibility to the focal firm when the incident:
• Results from force majeure, eg an earthquake (rather than regular supplier behaviour)
• Results from a decision of an individual employee (rather than from a company decision/policy)
• Is less severe
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Forever Surrey 2018
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