Dive Brief:

• While the fire and collapse of a Bangladesh factory in 2013 was widely seen as a wake-up call to improve working conditions in the vast garment manufacturing space there, there has been little real improvement, activists say.

• About half-way through the five-year accord that several retailers with factories in Bangladesh agreed to, fire hazards and structural weaknesses in buildings remain, sources have told Quartz.

• In addition to slow progress in factories covered by the post-Rana Plaza collapse agreement, there are still numerous factories operating that the agreement doesn’t cover, activists say.

Dive Insight:

For real progress to be made in ensuring that factories in Bangladesh are safe, all stakeholders, including consumers, must be more vigilant, sources told Quartz.

Workers have become more aware of potential hazards and more outspoken about identifying them, and brands have acknowledged that the process to fix issues has been too 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.

H&M, for example, was 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.  

“Any factory where a lack of stairwell enclosure and fire doors has been identified, but where these hazards remain uncorrected, is effectively a death trap,” the report said, and noting that the situation puts some 79,000 workers’ lives are in danger.

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. “It’s been more than two years since Rana—I don’t believe factory owners learned anything from that.”