Dive Brief:

• A Gazipur, Bangladesh garment factor that supplied apparel for H&M and J.C. Penney ignited Tuesday putting workers there at risk.

• People were seen jumping from windows as smoke and debris poured out of windows; if the fire had begun an hour later, there would likely have been many more injuries, according to a report from the Clean Clothes Campaign, which advocates for worker safety. The blaze took four hours to extinguish, according to the campaign. 

• In a statement emailed to Quartz magazine about the fire and its factory conditions, H&M said it is in “close dialogue with the suppliers and are following up on the work that remains to be done.”

Dive Insight:

The fire in Gazipur broke out days after the Clean Clothes Campaign and three other labor rights groups released a report that safety renovations in H&M’s Bangladeshi factories were taking too long and that conditions continued to put workers at risk. A 2014 inspection of the factory found several fire and safety hazards that were to be corrected six months later, but few had been remedied, according to the Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh, which carried out follow-up inspections, including one as recently as the day before the Gazipur fire. 

Workers advocates for safety in garment factories in Bangladesh have pressed harder for improvements and basic safety measures since the deadly fire and factory collapse at Rana Plaza in 2013.

Yet progress has been slow. Fast-fashion brands in particular have been cited for poor progress in this area, in part because factories are under such pressure to produce apparel especially quickly. And H&M has been singled out in a critical report by the Clean Clothes Campaign, which noted that more than half of its factories in the country lacked fire doors or gates and a whopping 61% lacked fire exits.  

The issues are so widespread and so dire that progress has been understandably slow to some extent, but in some cases' progress is impeded by a lack of will and resources. One of the sticking points is that many factory owners ignore problems if they believe their buildings are under the radar.

“When it’s out of sight, they forget everything,” Kalpona Akter, the executive director of the Bangladesh Center for Workers Solidarity, told Quartz last year. “It’s been more than two years since Rana—I don’t believe factory owners learned anything from that.”

Tuesday’s fire is a reminder of the risks and the work to be done. But the intransigence of retailers on the issue is enabled by consumers, who continue to buy clothes that are produced with great speed, on the cheap. Improvements to factories and better working conditions and pay for workers don’t come free and have to be reflected somewhere—either in company margins or the price of clothes. While the issue has gained traction and resurfaces with every tragedy, it’s unclear whether consumers, who say the want sustainably and fairly produced clothes, would pay for that.

Still, some research finds that consumers aren’t so price sensitive, and would indeed pay extra, at least if they knew the clothing was ethically produced. It may be a matter of retailers giving them the chance.