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.