A memorial set up by the Communist Party of Bangladesh at the Rana Plaza factory in Dhaka where 1,133 workers died in April. Credit: Robert Stefanicki/IPS

By Robert Stefanicki
DHAKA, Oct 2 2013 (IPS)

On the industrial outskirts of Dhaka, which is dotted with big and small clothes factories, thousands of workers took to the streets demanding a minimum wage rise.

Last week, protestors blocked roads, set factories on fire and clashed with police, who responded with rubber bullets and tear gas. Some 200 apparel plants – which make clothing for some of the world’s top retailers such as H&M and Carrefour – had to remain closed for a week.

The last time the government raised the minimum wage for the garments sector was in 2010. Now the workers are demanding an increase from 3,000 taka (38 dollars) to 8,114 taka (100 dollars). That is more or less the price that a pair of brand name jeans made in Bangladesh sell for after it reaches the shopping mall shelf in Warsaw or Berlin.“Western consumers are partly responsible for the low level of wages in Bangladesh.” -- Reaz bin Mahmood, vice-president of the Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association

The employers agreed a 20 percent hike, increasing salaries to 3,600 taka or about 46 dollars. But most commentators considered the increase a mockery and this offer led to riots.

In Bangladesh the minimum wage is fixed for each sector separately. The differences are substantial: transport workers or shop attendants get twice as much as the average wage for three million Bangladeshi garment makers.

The latter are at the bottom not just nationally, but globally. According to a study by the Japan External Trade Organisation released in December, only in Myanmar do garment workers earn less.

In neighbouring India their wages (in dollars) are twice as high as in Bangladesh, in China five times as high.

The minimum wage is theoretical, everyone takes overtime. IPS interviewed some women working as sewing machine operators who positioned their monthly earnings at 8,000 to 9,000 taka (about 102 to 115 dollars). Usually their workday stretches over 11 to 12 hours.

But raising the bottom threshold is important, because this means an increase for everyone.

According to trade union leader Masood Rana, the wage demands are partly a result of a growing awareness among the workers. After the hype over the collapse of the Rana Plaza factory building in April that took the lives of 1,133 workers, workers began to realise how much Western consumers pay for clothes made by their hands.

But why were the demonstrations so violent? “This is because the protests are spontaneous, there is no leader,” Rana told IPS.

Reaz bin Mahmood, vice-president of the Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association (BGMEA) – and a factory owner himself – presents a different theory: protests are the work of political provocateurs. He did not explain whom he meant.

“This problem cannot be settled on the streets,” Mahmood told IPS. “There is a government panel working on new minimum wage level, expected to announce the results in November. But I’m afraid that this may not happen if the protests continue.”

Various payment models have been proposed. “We have carried out an economic analysis of the garment worker’s cost of living, with the assumption that his or her pay should cover the consumption of their family,” Dr. Khondaker Moazzem, additional research director at the Centre for Policy Dialogue (CDP) in Dhaka, told IPS. “And we came out with three options.”

The first is the poverty line that makes the pay 6,444 taka (80 dollars). CDP rejected this variant as unacceptable.

The second option was based on the “aspirational level”, which provides that the worker eats well and enjoys life, in which case the monthly wage should be 17,800 taka (220 dollars). This too was rejected, because the minimum wage cannot exceed the average salary in the country.

The third option, based on the current expenditure level, was worked out at 8,200 taka – which is exactly what the workers are demanding.

“After we sent this recommendation to the government, I received numerous calls from manufacturers,” smiled Moazzem. “They said they were ready to give me some factories and let me try to make a profit with such exorbitant salaries.”

“Costs of production increase every year by 13 percent,” said Mahmood of BGMEA. “Bangladesh has to import cotton, India has its own. The currencies of India, Indonesia and Turkey are losing their value, the Bangladeshi taka remains strong, so we lose competitiveness.

“The government does not support us: there are frequent power outages, and travel from Dhaka to Chittagong port should take six hours instead of 26.”

To this list Moazzem of CDP adds the high cost of loans, difficulties with buying land for investment, and political instability.

But the apparel plants may not lose competitiveness as easily as the entrepreneurs lament. The prices of clothes are down and production costs are up, but this is compensated by increased efficiency.

“I recognise that my workers should get paid more, but for that the retailers must pay me more,” Mahmood said, explaining that the price is decisive in gaining contracts. “Western consumers are partly responsible for the low level of wages in Bangladesh.”

According to Moazzem, retailers make the most from clothes made in Bangladesh: 55 to 65 percent. About 25 percent is the cost of material. The rest, about 15 percent, is divided evenly between workers and employers.

It is not certain that the workers will get what they want. Shipping minister Shahjahan Khan has openly supported their demands, but the government is believed to be on the side of manufacturers. Nobody wants to harm the goose that lays the golden eggs – garment production provides Bangladesh with 80 percent of its export earnings, 22 billion dollars annually.

What is more, 30 percent of MPs in Bangladesh are businessmen, mostly from the apparel industry. They sponsor both major parties.

After talks with the leaders of more than 40 trade unions, Bangladeshi garment factory owners have promised to raise wages as soon as a government panel sets a figure, without bargaining.

Most commentators predict that the new minimum wage to be announced soon will be set on a “compromise” level.

Many of the workers who survived the factory collapse in Bangladesh have lost their limbs. Credit: Naimul Haq/IPS

By Naimul Haq
DHAKA, May 20 2013 (IPS)

“It was dark and hot with choking dust all around. The air was filled with the smell of decomposing corpses,” recalled Nasima, a 24-year-old factory worker who spent four days buried under the rubble of an eight-storey building that collapsed in a suburb of Bangladesh’s capital Dhaka last month.

The young woman recounted the terror that she and four fellow female workers experienced as they lay beneath glass and concrete, just “inches” from death. Rescue teams found them sandwiched between the fifth and sixth floors of the massive Rana Plaza that had housed five garment factories.

“I will resort to begging if I have to, but I’m not working in a garments factory ever again." - Mariam, a 25-year-old survivor of the Rana Plaza tragedy.
Nasima told IPS she was “too scared” to remember all the details of those 96 hours. “I saw my colleagues die, just a few yards from me, one after the other.” Her only indication that they were dead was when she could no longer hear their voices calling out to her in the dark.

Nasima had joined Ether Garments, one of the many companies housed in Rana Plaza, only 20 days before the tragedy, Bangladesh’s worst industrial accident, which killed 1,127 workers according to the latest count.

While families searched desperately for loved ones in the ruins in the town of Savar, 25 kilometres from Dhaka, reports of negligence and lack of workplace safety emerged. It became clear that factory owners had been warned of a possible collapse of the building that was only legally permitted to house five floors.

As survivors came to and began to speak out, they reported that management personnel had ignored recommendations by engineers to keep factories shut on Apr. 24, going so far as to threaten workers with dismissal if they failed to report for duty as usual.

The revelation sparked international outrage and shed light on the inner workings of Bangladesh’s garments sector, the country’s largest foreign exchange earner, which brings in about 20 billion dollars a year.

Multinational retailers like H&M, Gap, Walmart and Primark, which have outsourced most of their production to Bangladesh to take advantage of cheap, mostly female, labour, came under fire for failing to enforce safety standards.

While these accusations are not new, rights groups hope this latest tragedy will jolt the industry into implementing better labour laws and adhering to safety standards.

They say the roughly 2,500 rescued workers, many of them women, are living proof that Bangladesh must not repeat the mistakes that led to the Savar tragedy.

Living proof of negligence

Speaking to IPS from her hospital bed in the National Institute of Traumatology & Orthopaedic Rehabilitation (NITOR), 19-year-old Shapla, whose left arm was so badly injured that it had to be amputated on the site, recalled surviving for several hours squeezed between the second and third stories of the building, “with blood and corpses all around.”

Shapla’s husband, Mehedul, who worked as a sewing operator on the same floor, told IPS he survived by sheer luck, as he had been at the back of building at the moment the massive structure pitched forward.

Most of those working at the front of the building were crushed under the full weight of falling concrete slabs and crumbling walls.

Others, like 21-year-old Razia, say it is too painful to go on. “Someone give me poison. I want to die,” she cried out in the hospital ward where she and 121 other survivors are being treated free of cost.

She told IPS she and a few other girls had been “gossiping about the previous day’s decision to keep the factory open,” despite large cracks appearing on the pillars the day before. The next minute she heard what sounded like a huge explosion; then everything went dark.

For the next 14 hours, she struggled to breathe through the thick dust that hung around her.

In the hospital bed beside her lies Shamsul Alam, a 28-year-old quality inspector whose doctors say his spinal injuries are “too dangerous to operate on” and may end up being fatal.

Though he has not been informed of their bleak diagnosis, he told IPS he now “knows what its like to be in a coffin”, explaining the helplessness of being trapped and listening to people die around you.

Meanwhile, the trauma has wiped some survivors’ memories clean. An operator named Runu, unable to recall a single thing about that fateful day, stares vacantly into space while her sister tells IPS that Runu spent a full two days under the rubble before finally seeing daylight.

Those who can remember have vowed neither to forget nor to step foot into a factory again. “I will resort to begging if I have to, but I’m not working in a garments factory ever again,” 25-year-old Mariam, whose legs and arms were pulverised by concrete and iron rods, told IPS.

“My freedom means I was born again,” added a former worker named Shakhina. “I will not make the mistake of stepping back into that death trap.”

Meanwhile, major players in the industry are finally taking heed.

A.K.M Salim Osman, president of the Bangladesh Knitwear Manufacturers and Exporters Association (BKMEA), one of the industry’s apex bodies, told IPS that the incident in April was a “wake up call for us who depend on the labourers for business.”

“If we continue to ignore strict ethical standards (around) safety issues we will fail again,” he warned.

Osman said the recently ratified Bangladesh Building and Fire Safety Agreement is a step in the right direction. Under the accord, a tripartite committee comprised of company representatives, trade unions and a neutral inspector chosen by the International Labour Organisation (ILO) will monitor progress in implementation of safety standards as laid out in previous protocols such as the 2006 Occupational Safety and Health Convention.

Initiated by the IndustriALL and UNI Global Unions, the regulations insist that all buildings vulnerable to minor or major cracks be inspected and recommendations put forth by engineers adhered to immediately.

“If necessary we will force factories (with defects) to shut down until standards are met,” Mohammad Shafiqul Islam, former president of the Bangladesh Garments Manufacturers and Exporters Association (BGMEA), the largest body in the business, told IPS.

In a cabinet meeting on Apr. 29, the Bangladesh government decided to form a committee tasked with carrying out regular inspections of factories, installing fire safety devices and ensuring that companies conduct regular fire drills for the workers.

According to a statement by the American Apparel and Footwear Association, the agreement has also won support from all major locals unions, which represent the roughly 3.5 million workers employed in over 5,000 factories housed in and around Dhaka, and in the port city of Chittagong.