Exports and profits continue to rise but workers left behind
Three decades ago, Bangladesh created a network of export zones to attract foreign investment with tax incentives and other benefits. Today, a large majority of Bangladesh’s garment factories lie outside these zones, but the zones are favored by foreign investors. Rosita and its sister factory, Megatex, both owned by the Hong Kong conglomerate South Ocean, were the first plants in the Ishwardi zone. Zones like Ishwardi operate like countries within a country. They are governed by a separate agency, the Bangladesh Export Processing Zones Authority, and by separate laws. By tradition, the authority has been run by a military officer, active duty or retired, and many factories have hired retired soldiers to oversee security.
For workers, wages were higher in the zones and conditions were better. But unions were initially banned, and workers had no right to organize until 2004 when Parliament, facing international pressure, approved worker associations at individual factories.
At the Rosita factory, workers elected a 15-member association last December, with Mr. Uddin as president. In January, a female employee complained that a Bangladeshi middle manager was pressuring her to have sex with one of the Chinese bosses. Enraged, workers demanded that the management address her complaint as well as the discrepancies over annual raises and earned leave. Six weeks of confrontation and chaos followed. In February, equipment in the Rosita factory was damaged during a rampage. Nearly 300 workers were accused of vandalism and fired, with their names posted on a blacklist at the gate of the Ishwardi zone. Mr. Uddin, who denied any wrongdoing, was fired and temporarily jailed.
When he tried to return to work on Feb. 20, Mr. Uddin said two black-clad officers hustled him into the tiny guardhouse. The officers were members of the Rapid Action Battalion, a government paramilitary force infamous for vigilante attacks known as “cross fire” killings. He said one of the officers ordered him to sign a resignation letter.
“I didn’t do anything wrong,” Mr. Uddin said he told them.
He said one of the officers pushed a gun against his shoulder. “If you don’t sign,” the officer told him, according to Mr. Uddin, “we will take you in the car and you will have to face the cross-fire.”
Mr. Uddin signed. Inside the factories, according to several workers, police and paramilitary officers walked through the workrooms, holding termination letters. The message was clear: work or leave.
By March, an American labor rights group, the Institute for Global Labor and Human Rights, was advocating for the workers. A South Ocean executive arrived at Ishwardi and promised to address worker complaints over wages and unpaid leave. Then on March 20, workers discovered that managers had cut the piece rate, a type of production bonus, meaning a loss of wages. Another standoff ensued as managers closed the factories. But when workers returned March 25, the wage cut had not been fully restored.
Hundreds of workers gathered outside the front door of the factory in an impromptu sit-down strike. Eight workers, interviewed in June, said all the managers had left the factories. A small contingent of police officers soon arrived and ordered everyone back to work. A seamstress said a police officer knocked her to the ground, beating her unconscious with a stick and shredding her clothes. “I kept asking them to stop,” said the seamstress, who asked not to be identified, fearing reprisals. “But even after I fell to the ground, they kept beating me and pulled my hair.”
Workers began throwing stones and chanting slogans against the police, who fled. Hours later, after officials in Dhaka were notified, officers from the Rapid Action Battalion as well as surrounding police stations arrived. Officer Hossein, the police supervisor, denied that the police were aggressors, saying officers were told that foreign managers were trapped inside the factories and that angry workers were vandalizing equipment. “They attacked the police,” Officer Hossein said. “They started the violence.”
Cellphone videos show police officers firing rubber bullets and pummeling workers with cane poles. “They treated workers as if they were not human beings,” one worker said.
The Power Equation
Bangladesh’s two major political parties, the governing Awami League and the opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party, often seem engaged in a blood feud. Yet, many analysts say, the two parties agree on one thing: safeguarding the garment industry.
Three months after the clash at Ishwardi, tens of thousands of angry workers protested near Dhaka, demanding higher wages and crippling one of the country’s most important industrial zones for more than a week. Riot police officers dispersed the protesters with tear gas and rubber bullets, as scores of people were injured.
Following huge protests in 2010, Ms. Hasina raised the minimum wage for garment workers to $37 a month from about $20. But her government has resisted the renewed worker demands, even as executives at some leading brands have voiced support for adjusting wages and expressed concerns about labor unrest.
In June, top executives at the Swedish retailer H&M fretted that recurring labor protests were disrupting production and called on Bangladeshi factories to rectify the situation.
Major brands have been stung by bad publicity. This year, War on Want, a nonprofit group, found that workers in five factories making products for Nike, Puma and Adidas were paid less than the minimum wage and complained of workplace abuse and sexual harassment. In March, the parent company of the Tommy Hilfiger brand, PVH Corp., hurriedly donated $1 million toward a factory safety initiative as ABC News was preparing to broadcast a report on a fire that killed 29 workers in a Bangladeshi factory making clothes for Tommy Hilfiger.
“They want to see better standards and conditions in factories in Bangladesh,” said Julia K. Hughes, president of the United States Association of Importers of Textiles and Apparel, a trade group in Washington. “No company is arguing that wages should not rise in Bangladesh. They are not saying what the wage should be, but absolutely wages should go up.”
But many factory owners are skeptical that buyers are truly willing to pay higher prices. One owner, Shawkat Ali Bhuiyan, said he had stopped working with companies like Walmart and Target because his profit margin was almost nonexistent, while some Bangladeshi labor leaders blame the foreign brands for exploiting workers.
“We need to clean up the whole supply chain,” said Roy Ramesh Chandra, a powerful public sector union leader. “The brands need to fulfill their responsibility. The manufacturers need to fulfill their responsibility. And the government should comply with international obligations and respect international labor standards.”
Bangladesh has responded to international pressure in the past, sharply curtailing child labor and improving safety conditions in the 1990s. Now, though, the pressure points are the rights of workers to organize and collectively bargain for wages, issues that require action by a political system dominated by business interests, including the garment sector.
- K. Azad, president of the Federation of Bangladesh Chambers of Commerce and Industry, played down the garment sector’s political clout. “We are not powerful,” he said, adding: “Power lies with the politicians. Power lies with the media.”
But many apparel tycoons have also gone into politics or begun media careers, purchasing newspapers or starting independent news channels. Mr. Azad, who owns one of the country’s biggest garment factories, also owns a Bengali-language newspaper and a television station. Several Western diplomats privately noted that news coverage often emphasizes the disruptions caused by protests above the concerns of workers.
At the Rosita and Megatex factories, South Ocean management hired a labor oversight firm, Verité, which detailed a host of problems, including humiliation of workers, summary firings and deliberate interference with the ability of workers to organize. New management teams are now running the factories, and Verité is helping put in place changes to increase wages and protect worker rights. “South Ocean have taken labor issues at the two factories extremely seriously and have taken swift actions to address those issues,” the company’s law firm, Winston & Strawn of Hong Kong, said in a statement.
Many of the workers involved in the March 25 clash are back on the job, despite their anger over how they have been treated. The seamstress who was knocked unconscious, her clothes shredded, said she had little choice, since she was the family’s sole breadwinner. “I am helpless,” she said. “We have to get food.”
South Ocean dropped charges against Mr. Uddin but the police are still pursuing separate charges. Meanwhile, officials at the export zone authority have blacklisted him from being hired at factories inside the zones. “We spoke up,” he said. “And we became criminals in the eyes of all authorities.”
Bangladesh police on Sunday fired rubber bullets and tear gas at tens of thousands of garment workers as they rioted in a key industrial area outside Dhaka, demanding a reduction in working hours.
The workers left their factories and joined the protest, torching a police post and four police vehicles at Narayanganj, 20 kilometres (12 miles) south of the capital, authorities said.
“There were more than 100,000 workers. They were peaceful initially, but suddenly they stormed a police post at Shimrail and set it on fire,” Narayanganj police chief Sheikh Nazmul Alam told AFP.
“We fired rubber bullets and tear gas to disperse the rioters,” he said, adding two policemen were critically injured during the clashes. He could not say whether or how many workers were hurt.
Alam said a rumour over a killing of a worker at a factory at Adamjee Export Processing Zone, where plants sew clothing for leading international chains, sparked the protest, forcing the zone’s scores of factories to draw shutters.
It later became a full-blown riot the worst since June when hundreds of factories closed their shops for more than a week as labourers demanded shorter work hours, workplace security and other benefits, he added.
Tens of thousands of workers also blocked a major highway, halting transport movement between Dhaka and the port city of Chittagong for more than four hours.
Bangladesh’s three million garment workers typically work 10-hour shifts and some for up to 16 hours a day for the world’s lowest textile wages, starting at $37 a month.
Adamjee employees were demanding guarantees for a 5:00 pm end to the working day.
The South Asian nation has recently emerged as the world’s second-largest clothes exporter with overseas garment sales topping $19 billion last year, or 80 percent of total national exports.
The sector is the mainstay of the poverty-stricken country’s economy, employing 40 percent of its industrial workforce.
Protests over low wages and poor work conditions are a recurrent feature of the industry. The government very often employs brute force to quell the unrest in an effort to pacify buyers’ concern over delayed shipment.
Early this month, the Swedish fashion giant H&M, the world’s second-largest clothing chain, urged the government to raise wages at export factories.
( Main source for this article is AFP and Reuters)