Kalpona Akter is the best known leader of the Bangladeshi garment workers' movement, a truly eloquent voice for safer working conditions in the garment industry there, and a key player in negotiating the ground-changing Bangladesh Safety Accord, through which hundreds of clothing brands signed onto an agreement to make the necessary repairs in the factories where their clothes were made. Akter has also been the main figure linking Western consumers with Bangladeshi garment workers and their world, helping to forge a very potent alliance between consumer groups (Clean Clothes Campaign), student groups (United Students Against Sweatshops), international government bodies (ILO) and Bangladesh workers. Her testimony in front of the U.S. Congress two years ago was crucial in framing legislation to ensure that clothing brought into the U.S. not be made under slave-labor conditions.