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Rana Plaza disaster: what are the lessons for human rights and business?

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Episode notes

April 24 marks the ten-years since the collapse of the Rana Plaza building in Bangladesh. What did we learn from this disaster about how businesses and governments can better protect the rights of workers? In this episode of Voices, you will hear from IHRB’s Salil Tripathi and Sanchita Banerjee Saxena, IHRB’s Research Fellow and Director at the Subir and Malini Chowdhury Center for Bangladesh Studies at UC Berkeley, who have together authored a new briefing: Rana Plaza ten years on: lessons for human rights and business. Salil and Sanchita examine the impacts of the disaster and consider the renewed action needed to stop a similar tragedy from happening again. You will also hear Salil speak to Nazma Akter, a former child worker, garment factory worker, labour organiser, and Director of AWAJ Foundation, which Nazma founded in 2003 to protect workers’ rights in the Ready-Made Garment (RMG) sector of Bangladesh.