This mountain of rubble is a monument
to the 1100 lives lost here last April,
when this garment factory
collapsed in Bangladesh,
unleashing the stories that
has long been locked inside.
A thousand people died and
no one said a thing.
Do you recognize these shorts?
We meet the people who make your clothes,
and find out where those cloths were made.
This your address.
This is where this came from.
The truth that retailers don't
want you to know.
You've been hit. You've been hit.
Do any of you worry that one day
you may die in your factory?
Of course. Of course.
Dangerous factories.
And dark secrets.
Hi, I'm Mark Kelly and welcome
to "The Fifth Estate."
I'm standing by the rubble
of what was once Rana Plaza.
When the 8-story factory
collapsed in April,
a frantic search for survivors began.
So too did the search for answers.
How, the world wondered, could a
disaster like this happen?
We'll join that search when
we learned many of the victims
died here making cloths for
Canadian consumers.
Along the way, we uncovered this ledger
pulled from the rubble
and using the information inside here
we spent months piecing together clues
that would reveal how and where
your cloths are being made.
And what we would also discover is that
the disaster that happened here
was no accident.
Fashion is built on an image
of beauty, glamour and style.
Creations that not only make you
look good, but feel good.
Cloths without a conscience.
The reality of the fashion
industry is far less glamorous.
A reality Canadian retailers
don't want you to know about.
It's known as the race to the bottom,
where the cheapest prices win.
A race that created fast fashion.
And that's why today, many of your cloths
bear the label made in Bangladesh.
It was that glamour
of the fashion industry
that spoke to Sujeet Sennik.
Even as a teenager Growing up in
the suburb in Toronto.
I'm from a South Asian family.
My father is a doctor.
And they wanted me to sort of
follow that path.
I was super creative,
so it was a way for me to say,
hey listen, there's a job for me.
It's an actual commercial career.
He went to a couture school and
turned a dream into a dream job:
designing for Christian Dior and
Balenciaga in Paris.
It was like a fish finding a pond.
It gave me a way out,
a way to, you know, lead my own life.
It gave me my freedom,
and it gave me everything.
But the growing popularity and
increasing demand for fast fashion
led him back to Toronto to design
$20 blouses for Walmart.
Instead of Paris, his fashion
focus was Bangladesh.
There was a natural flow
towards Bangladesh
because of fast fashion
in the last ten years.
And trying to get clothes
cheaper and cheaper.
But I think when the recession
hit people ran for the price,
you know, it was Mecca.
It was Mecca.
But the road to Mecca decimated
Canada's garment industry.
From 2001 to 2010, 75,000 jobs
were lost here.
Many deep-rooted manufacturers
had a stark choice...
Move or close.
My great-grandfather was a rag dealer.
He used to go from Sherbrooke to
Montreal in a horse and buggy,
buying rags from the farmers.
Barry Laxer's family has been
in the garments business
in Montreal and Toronto
for 3 generations
but he was forced to
pack it all up for price.
My single largest customer
that at the time in Canada
accounted for over 50% of our volume
told us that to continue doing business
we need to find a lower cost
manufacturing base somewhere else.
And that was Bangladesh.
It turned out to be Bangladesh.
Companies around the world were
now beating a path to Bangladesh.
From H&M to Walmart, Nike and the GAP.
Barry Laxer joined that garment Gold Rush.
Today, his company Radical Designs
runs two factories outside Dhaka,
the capital of Bangladesh.
At least half the machines in
this factory all came from Canada.
We had like 80 containers of
machinery that came here.
You just rushed it over
here to do business.
We just, it wasn't doing
anything in Toronto.
Now he employed more than 1000 people
and he pays them 3 times the minimum wage.
When you own a factory,
nothing is better than walking
through and seeing it full.
And busy.
And busy, yeah.
You've built quite an empire here, Barry.
What's the allure for companies
to come to Bangladesh?
Here, the real allure is labour.
The workers will work for wages
that most countries won't,
because there's no alternative.
Working for next to nothing is
better than working for nothing.
In real terms, next to nothing
is $38 a month...
or 24 cents an hour.
The lowest garment worker
wage on the planet.
The floodgates for
Canadian business opened
when Ottawa dropped import duties
from Bangladesh in 2003.
Canadian companies like Lululemon,
HBC and Walmart Canada
climbed aboard the Bangladeshi band wagon.
The result, imports grew by 618%.
Some say the front-runner
in the race to the bottom
was Loblaw brand Joe Fresh.
These TV ads shows the appeal of
its cheap and cheerful clothing line.
The line has bounced its way to
one of the top spots
in the children's wear market in Canada.
Speaking to the CBC in 2010
the company president said
he's just giving consumers
what they want.
They wanted fashion,
and they wanted fashion
that would play across the country
and they needed it
at amazing price points.
Joseph Mimran was now
a fast fashion icon.
But just how low could prices go?
Well look at this TV Ad for Walmart.
Clearly, the lower the better.
Now more styles, and more stylish
all at unbelievable prices
Exclusively at Walmart.
For designers like Sujeet Sennik,
beauty took a backseat to price.
What was the pressure put on you
to make cheaper and cheaper clothes?
Price is the starting point.
It's everything.
It was down to...
You got 6 buttons on your shirt,
take it down to 5.
Can we take it down to 4?
Sennik says he felt the pressure
from retailers to cut costs,
and so did the factory owners.
They can't say no to, to a
hundred thousand units.
That means a very long time that
the factory is going to be sitting idle
if they don't get that order.
So they needed you.
They need you. They need you.
And, you know, at the end of the day,
that's not my decision,
but, like...
I started wondering, Mark,
I really started wondering,
how is it possible for clothing to be
made at these low prices?
It's a good question.
Because while price was the priority,
there was signs worker safety was not.
In the decade before Rana Plaza,
hundreds of people died
in factory fires and building
collapses in Bangladesh.
Tragedy after tragedy, year after year,
and no one in Canada
seemed to notice.
That changed in the morning of April 24,
when the eight-storey
Rana Plaza collapsed.
More than 1100 people were killed.
Hundreds are still missing,
believed to be buried in the rubble.
Tell me what happened when
you learned about Rana Plaza.
It was like, if you start
having nightmares
and then they become real,
that was what Rana Plaza was for me.
The search for survivors
seemed to drag on and on.
Save us brother, I beg you brother.
I want to live.
Sujeet remembers being called into
one particular meeting
after the collapse,
where profits were put ahead of people.
We were in a room full of people
when we were told we were connected.
And no one said anything
about 1000 people.
1000 people died, no one said a thing.
They didn't, they didn't say
anything about them,
they just talked about their --
the loss in terms of units,
how are they going to
make up their margins.
People were talking about that.
And I sat there, I said nothing.
Shame on me.
Walmart was just one of
dozens of companies
that had used Rana Plaza.
At the time of the collapse the
biggest company in the building
was making clothes for Joe Fresh.
Their pink and red pants were
found in the rubble
along with the bodies
of the workers who made them.
One week after the collapse,
Joseph Mimran and
Loblaw chairman Gale Weston
faced the glare of the media.
This has been a -- quite a tragic event...
ummm, and it's something that
has touched all of our hearts --
It's been a very difficult
week for everybody.
I'm troubled that despite
a clear commitment
to the highest standards
of ethical sourcing
our company can still be a part
of such an unspeakable tragedy.
But just how deep was that
commitment to ethical sourcing?
What did Canadian companies know about
how their clothes were
being made in Bangladesh.
And what did they do to find out?
Sujeet wanted to find the truth.
So he made a life-changing decision
and quit his job.
I thought, I don't want to be
a part of this anymore.
I can't be a part of this.
So, I stopped.
When we come back,
Sueet's journey.
Are we sending people to factories
knowing that there's a huge danger?
And a teenaged garment worker
who survived the collapse.
Welcome to the wild west
of the global garment industry.
Bangladesh has one of the
world's densest populations,
political instability and
world class corruption.
And since the 90's, the economy has
grown by double digits,
fueled by fast fashion.
Factories sit unfinished,
Just waiting for new floors to be added
to accommodate new business.
And every morning, scenes like this
play out through the capital Dhaka,
as 4 million garment workers
quietly file into work.
They carry with them
memories of Rana Plaza,
wondering if a tragedy like this
could happen to them.
The Rana collapse
put Sujeet Sennik on a mission.
The former fashion designer
from Walmart Canada
now wanted to learn the truth
about how the clothes
he designed were made.
I had to find out for myself.
Is this what my industry has been doing?
Are we doing this on purpose?
Are we sending people to factories
knowing that there's a huge danger?
Sujeet traveled with us to Bangladesh.
First stop, a residential
neighborhood in Dhaka,
an unlikely backdrop for the deadliest
accident in the garment industry
before Rana Plaza.
This is Tazreen.
It's massive.
November 2012.
Fire broke out in the
Tazreen fashion factory,
a 9-storey building, though the
owner only had a permit for 3 storeys.
There were no fire escapes.
Many doors were blocked by boxes.
Windows were barred shut.
Months before the blaze,
the factory's fire safety
certificate had been revoked.
Most of the 112 victims here
were burned alive.
When the Tazreen factory fire
happened, I was horrified.
All these fingers were
pointing all everywhere,
and no one was saying, hey listen, maybe,
maybe, we might have just a little bit
to do with this.
Walmart did indeed have something
to do with this factory.
Their Faded Glory shorts were
pulled from the ashes.
The company tried to distance
itself from the tragedy,
insisting Tazreen was not an
authorized Walmart factory.
There's bars on every single window.
How were these people
supposed to get out of here?
There's no escaping.
I wonder for you, Sujeet,
what is this building...,
what is this a symbol of to you?
I think it's shame.
We should be ashamed of ourselves
to let something like this happen.
How was it possible that
people didn't know that
this factory was built this way?
This woman emerged from
the crowd of the curious
to tell us her story
how workers knocked out
a ventilation fan,
and how she survived by jumping
3 stories to the ground.
Will you ever work again?
Will you ever have another job
after your injuries here?
How am I supposed to work?
I'm afraid to work and
no one wants to take me.
I cannot sit or lie down for a long time.
I get better when I take medicine,
but when I don't it's painful.
With few prospects,
she appears as disposable as the
fast fashion she once made here.
This could have been one of my prints.
You know, snakeskin's in.
There it is.
It could have been a shirt, a dress.
Is it that important
that you have to bar people
into a building to meet our deadlines?
It's not, not for me.
It's disgusting.
So how did Walmart's clothes
end up at such a dangerous factory?
An investigation by Walmart
concluded one of its suppliers
subcontracted part of the order
to Tazreen without their permission.
But how hard would it be for
Canadian retailers to find out
where their clothes are being made?
We wanted to find out,
so we bought a Walmart shirt in Canada
that Sujeet had designed.
Shipping records led us to a factory
on the outskirts of Dhaka.
The record named the factory:
Hasan Tanvir.
Walmart publishes a list of
banned factories in Bangladesh,
factories that have failed
the company's audits.
And this factory has been
on that list since June.
We made repeated requests
to visit the factory,
but it wasn't until we showed up
with our camera
that the manager would even talk to us.
Hi, my name is Mark.
I'm from Canada.
Canadian television, how are you?
Fine.
We want to see where
our clothes are being made
and how they are being made.
And that's why we came over here.
I want to go inside and visit.
But even he wouldn't let us in.
Instead, he passed us off
to another manager.
Have you made this here?
We have a shipping record here
that shows that it was made here.
Hasan Tanvir Fashion Wears.
This is your address.
This is where this came from.
That's not mine.
Hello?
Excuse me.
He says he's never seen this before,
doesn't recognize it,
despite the fact that
we showed it was in fact made
right there at
Hasan Tanvir Fashion Wears.
Walmart puts it this way:
they do make shirts here,
but not our shirt.
In fact 3 months after
blacklisting this factory,
Walmart admits they are still
making clothes here...
one last order they say.
Since we couldn't get in
to meet the workers,
then we would take Sujeet to meet them
at home after work.
In this entire area here,
everyone who lives here
works in a garment factory.
It's like a compound of
garment factory workers,
so we're going to go in and
meet some of them tonight.
Okay.
We'll be there tonight.
Wow.
These are, 9 people
who work at the factory.
They asked us to hide their faces,
fearing they'd lose their jobs
simply for talking to us...
I want to know who are you
making garments for now
inside the factory.
Canada, Canada, Canada.
We hear that there are problems
working inside Hasan Tanvir
and we had reports that there was a fire
at the factory recently.
Can they tell us what happened?
When the fire really started to spread,
all the workers started to protest,
they broke the gates and escaped.
They didn't wanna let us out.
They never wanna let us out.
They just want to turn off the
lights and keep us in there
and say "sit down, shut up and work."
Do any of you worry that one day
you may die in your factory?
Of course. Of course.
And it happened all the time.
It happened regularly.
Yeah, it happened all the time.
Every few days there's a fire.
I want to know if...
if you recognize this shirt?
If any of you recognize having made
this shirt over the past few months?
Is this something that you
made in the factory?
We showed them Sujeet's shirt
that we bought in Canada.
Yeah, it's from the 5th floor.
I made it when I used to
work on the 5th floor.
So she worked on this garment?
Yes.
I designed this garment.
I drew this garment.
Look, I did this...
So you put these two pieces together.
So you put the sleeve in.
Thank you.
How do you feel meeting
the woman who made your design?
I'm grateful to meet you.
I wanted to meet you.
It's nice to finally be able to see you
and tell you that I think that
you should have a better life.
Coming up...
Why were Joe Fresh clothes being made in
the death trap that was Rana Plaza?
We go inside a prison in Bangladesh
looking for answers.
Every piece of clothing we wear
has a silent story stitched into it.
The story of who made it and where.
When Rana Plaza collapsed in April,
those stories came spilling out.
So, did the clothes from the ill fated
factory ever make it to Canada?
Well, we visited 6 stores in the
Toronto area, with a hidden camera,
3 months after the Rana Plaza collapse.
We found clothes made in Rana Plaza,
in sore after store.
So I have a question...
But you wouldn't know it
by asking the sales associates.
There was really like, there was
really only one product
that we were making in that
particular factory.
It was like this line of
pants that we did
We never ended up getting them.
Like obviously,
like we just like, got rid of it
and everything.
It's doubtful that it was
from that factory.
That stuff that was made in that place
never even made it here.
Loblaw's shipping records
revealed all these styles,
hundreds of thousands of garments were
made in Rana Plaza before the collapse,
and sold in Joe Fresh sores this summer.
So how did clothes for Joe Fresh
end up beingmade
in the death-trap that was Rana Plaza?
Well, that's a question we had
for the factory owner.
The problem is he's behind bars,
charged with negligence
in the deaths of the workers.
So "The Fifth Estate" petitioned
the Bangladeshi government
for permission to speak with him.
The government eventually agreed
but with one condition.
Our camera would not be allowed
inside the prison.
As public outrage grew after the collapse,
Bazlus Adnan surrendered to police.
His three factories occupied
almost half of Rana Plaza.
We arrived at Dhaka Central Jail,
where he's waiting trial.
He began our interview saying
how he parlayed an $8000 loan
from his dad in 1992,
and turned it into a
$15 million a year business,
thanks in large part
to his best customer, Joe Fresh.
Joe Fresh was my biggest client,
about $6 million year.
That is why I was going bigger.
He says he was eager to
please his biggest client,
so work had begun on Rana Plaza to add
a ninth floor for his booming business.
I asked whether he was under pressure
to make clothes cheaper... and faster...
Everybody is doing this.
They all squeezed me.
But Joe Fresh was a very good customer.
Their policy was just ship it on time.
Before my time was up for the interview,
I asked him to name one Loblaw employee
who had ever visited his factory at
Rana Plaza before the collapse.
He couldn't.
This ledger helps explain
how that could happen.
From the entries here, we
learned Loblaw placed orders
with a buying house in India
called House of Pearl,
who, in turn, placed Joe Fresh orders
with the factory at Rana Plaza.
House of Pearl, we learned,
hired inspectors to check the quality
of the clothes made in Rana Plaza,
but not to inspect building safety.
Outsourcing ethical
responsibilities to third parties,
enables companies like
Loblaw to distance themselves
from the work being done on the ground,
according to our
Canadian factory owner Barry Laxer.
You know, after Rana Plaza happened
all these realities were saying,
"well we didn't know."
Is that true? Did they not know
what was going on in this country?
A lot of companies just want
cheap manufacturing.
So, they don't really look.
Or ask the tough questions.
Or ask the questions,
because if you don't ask the questions,
you don't get the answers
that you don't want to hear.
Was the Rana Plaza collapse a
wakeup call?
I mean, do you really believe this
going to change anything here?
I think in the end a lot of
companies are continuing
just to look for margin and cost.
And -- and...
Ultimately that's why
they're here, right?
That's why they're here.
If that wasn't the issue,
they could be buying products
made in the United States or Canada.
We wanted to know more about the
working conditions inside Rana Plaza.
Who better to tell us than the
people who worked there.
After the collapse,
cameras captured this footage
of survivors recovering in a hospital.
We were intrigued by this girl, who was
trapped in the rubble for three days
pinned under two dead bodies.
She lost her mother, as well as her leg.
Both mother and daughter were
making clothes for Joe Fresh.
Months after the collapse,
we finally found her.
Her name is Aruti.
She tells us she is 17, though
her grandmother says she is really 15.
A kid making kids clothes for Canadians.
Do you recognize these shorts?
Like these shorts.
Yeah.
These pants were there.
She sewed pocket seams,
150 pockets an hour.
How do you feel
when you look at these pants?
I feel sad.
If I didn't work in that factory,
this would not have happened.
I feel very bad seeing these pants.
She says she's been working
in the industry for three years,
meaning she started
when she was just 12.
Like many women in Bangladesh,
she felt it was her only hope.
When I was little, I thought I would grow
up, go to school, study, and have a job.
If you study, you have a job,
a doctor, a teacher.
You can have any job.
But I couldn't do it, because
I'm poor, I have to work to eat.
That's why I went into garment work.
Aruti's shift was punishing,
12 hours a day, 7 days a week.
And when a rush order was placed,
overtime was demanded.
How did your bosses treat you
and the other workers?
If the others didn't know how to do
the work, they used to yell and swear.
If I can't work fast enough and meet
the target, they'll swear at me as well.
I would feel really bad.
She also remembers how cracks had been
spotted inside Rana Plaza
the day before the tragedy.
The building was evacuated.
She didn't believe the building owner,
who insisted everything was safe,
just hours before the collapse.
This is not a crack, it's just that
the plaster came off
a little bit. They made it
seem a big thing.
The next day, April 24th,
her boss phoned her home
and ordered her to get back to work,
or she'd be fired.
On that day that they told you
to go back to work,
were you afraid? Were you worried that
that building was dangerous?
There were many of us
who didn't want to go.
But they forced us. They said,
"Don't worry, nothing will happen.
And if you die we'll die, too."
But they didn't go inside.
They made us to start work and then left.
I was scared.
But there was nothing I could do.
If I stopped working, the line would stop,
and I would be in trouble.
She and her fellow workers returned.
An hour later, the building collapsed.
Aruti was on the 6th floor.
What do you remember about the moment
the building collapsed?
When it collapsed, I thought,
I wouldn't survive.
Two dead bodied fell on my leg
and my leg was stuck there.
The roof fell on top of the bodies.
I didn't know then that I would
actually come out alive.
Her family received some compensation
from the government
for the death of her mother
and the loss of her leg.
When asked what she received from Loblaw,
she told us she is still hoping.
When we come back,
we expose an even uglier side of the
fashion industry in Bangladesh.
You've been hit. You've been hit.
After the collapse of Rana Plaza,
the Bangladeshi government scrambled
to assure nervous retailers and consumers
that the country was a safe
place to do business.
But even Loblaw,
who had been making Joe Fresh
clothes in this country for 7 years,
wondered how garment workers
could be exposed
to what it called unacceptable risk.
So we took a closer look...
and discovered within 3 hours,
how easy it was to find the ugly
side of fast fashion.
A factory dumping technicolored
waste water directly into a river.
A river that now runs black.
Then we saw a jute factory with
an open door that caught our eye.
Inside, the air was tick with dust;
dust from a toxic dye.
Yet no one here wore a mask.
Within minutes, we were kicked out
by the owner and his thugs.
Finally, we went into one last factory
with a hidden camera.
I'll show you a very good factory.
Everything in one place.
And found these children operating looms.
One manager admitted some factory owners
hire kids under the age of 10 for menial jobs,
and paid them about a dollar a day.
The garment industry has made some
people in this country fabulously rich,
but poverty is still
everywhere you look.
Some of the poorest are these squatters
who live next to the railway tracks,
in the shadow of wealth.
This gleaming tower is home to the BGMEA.
That's the business group
that represents the titans
of the garment industry in Bangladesh.
We arrived to find a thousand
angry workers protesting outside.
They say they haven't been paid
by their employer in a month.
They work for a factory that,
until last fall,
made clothes for Canadians.
So what happened?
Shoom, shoom, shoom.
You've been hit. You've been hit.
He'd been hit.
He'd been hit. He'd been hit.
Who did this to you?
Bamboo.
Yes, yes, bamboo.
Who did this?
The owners hired gangsters?
Yes, yes, gangster.
And what were you doing?
You were just protesting?
Yes.
You were protesting because you
wanted your back-wages.
Yes.
And you make clothes for Canada?
Yes.
We had some questions for the
powerful head of the garment industry,
the top man Canadian retailers deal with.
Atiqul Islam is a prominent
factory owner in his own right.
He's made clothes for Walmart
Canada, Loblaw and HBC.
I asked him about the protest
outside his window.
This is completely open industry.
If you don't like there you can
go the other work there.
We have a 25% worker shortage in
the industry, still today.
In other words, if workers are abused,
his advice? Quit and work somewhere else.
When I ask him about the
bad factories we saw,
the child labor, the pollution,
the dangerous working conditions,
he wasn't alarmed.
A lot of factories that are
state of the art.
We've seen the nice ones.
We've seen the state of the art.
We've seen the example of where
the industry is moving.
But you're at a point right now
where there are some
shining examples but...
So for that,
sometimes the shiny is covered
by the cloud of this kind of thing.
So we need to clean the cloud.
But what about illegal subcontracting,
when one factory gives order
to another without approval?
If the factories are overbooked, they
must say no, I'm overbooked.
And as well as from the outside,
the retailers side also.
But you're a businessman.
Are they really going to say I'm
overbooked and I can't take the business?
Yah, yah, yah.
Everybody wants the business.
No, no, no.
It's not like that.
Things are completely changed.
It is not like that.
We had spoken with some sources
who work for Walmart Canada.
They placed an order with your group,
and they said that that order
was then ended up being
made at factory that was not approved.
Hasan Tanvir.
Hasan?
Hasan Tanvir.
Remember that Walmart shirt --
Well, we had questions about
who exactly made it.
We showed it to workers and
they said "yah", they made it.
It is very difficult for me to know
whether I'm making this, number one.
And number two, there's no way that
we're giving the goods to the outside.
It's absolutely no way.
Our all garments is made in our factory.
But Walmart told us Mr. Islam did indeed
have the contract to make Sujeet's shirt.
But at his own factory,
not not Hasan Tanvir.
Thank you. Thank you, I'll take that.
You don't need that.
Can I just see this one thing.
Just have a seat and I, uh....
Absolutely.
And then something extraordinary
happened after our interview wrapped up...
Look in the background,
as Mr. Islam conceals the garment
behind his desk with a pen in hand.
After we left we noticed the tag
on the shirt had been defaced.
The barcode and the Canadian
import number that could connect
their shirt to Atiqul Islam's
company were blacked out.
We asked him the next day if he
did it. He denied it.
As for Loblaw and Joe Fresh --
the Canadian company insists
it will help lead lead the way
to clean up the industry in Bangladesh.
Our industry can be a force for good.
Properly inspected, well built
factories play (an) important role
in the development of
countries such as Bangladesh.
Did Loblaw properly inspect before
Rana Plaza before the collapse?
They say they did visit the factory.
So why were they still
making clothes there?
That's what we wanted to ask Joe Mimran,
but we were told he wasn't
available for an interview.
I am troubled by the deafening silence
from other apparel retailers
on this issue.
And while Loblaw CEO Galen Weston
publicly criticizes other companies
for their deafening silence,
he declined to be interviewed
for this story.
Loblaw did send us an email
outlining their efforts to
help workers in Bangladesh.
They say since the collapse
they've contributed a million
dollars to two charities,
and joined a compliance accord
with other retailers
aimed at improving working
conditions in Bangladesh,
and the company will now
put "boots on the ground"
somewhere "in the region"
to inspect factories.
But there's another way.
Canadian factory owner Barry
Laxer wanted a safe factory,
so he built one.
It's run by a Canadian team.
And he visits it regularly.
But what are the effects then
of paying the cheapest possible price
in a country like Bangladesh?
Sooner or later there'll be
another Rana Plaza.
It's just a matter of time.
Sooner or later there'll be
another fire somewhere
that will claim more lives.
Because Bangladesh is just the
floor and the testing ground
for how cheap products can be sold.
Before former Walmart designer
Sujeet Sennik left Bangladesh,
we had one more stop to make.
There's one last thing I wanted
to show you before you go.
This is where Rana Plaza once stood.
Oh my god.
There's nothing left.
There are people walking around.
And in Canada wearing clothes that
were made by these people who died here.
This is kind of a monument to greed.
This is a product of
the race to the bottom.
So what are consumers to do?
Boycott clothes made in Bangladesh?
The jobs are pulling millions of
women out of poverty.
Like Aruti who, despite her loss, knows
has to go back to work.
Especially now that her mother is gone
and she'll have to support her
younger sisters and her grandmother.
Do you want to go back and work
inside a garment factory now?
If I wanted to work in the factory,
it's not possible to walk back and forth
and go up and down the stairs.
I can't do it yet.
That's the issue now.
I will be able to go back,
but I'm afraid.
Well, after watching tonight's episode,
you may be wondering more
about the clothe you buy
and how they were made.
Well for some of the brands
and lines of clothing
that we mentioned on tonight's program,
you can find out more information
by going to our website.
That's at cbc.ca/fifth.
Of course we'll continue
to update that website
with the developments on this story
in the weeks and months ahead.
Stay with us.
We'll be right back after this.