Activists say only 40 percent of employers comply with minimum wage regulations. Credit: Obaidul Arif/IPS

By Naimul Haq and Kanya D'Almeida
DHAKA/NEW YORK, Jun 10 2015 (IPS)

Some say they were beaten with iron bars. Others confess their families have been threatened with death. One pregnant woman was assaulted with metal curtain rods.

 These are not scenes typically associated with a place of work, but thousands of people employed in garment factories in Bangladesh have come to expect such brutality as a part of their daily lives.

Even if they don’t suffer physical assault, workers at the roughly 4,500 factories that form the nucleus of Bangladesh’s enormous garments industry almost certainly confront other injustices: unpaid overtime, sexual or verbal abuse, and unsafe and unsanitary working conditions.

The event that prompted the international outcry – the collapse of the Rana Plaza factory on the morning of Apr. 24, 2013, killing 1,100 people and injuring 2,500 more – was deemed one of the worst industrial accidents in modern history.

Government officials, powerful trade bodies and major foreign buyers of Bangladesh-made apparel promised to fix the gaping flaws in this sector that employs four million people and exports 24 billion dollars worth of merchandise every year.

Promises were made at every point along the supply chain that such a senseless tragedy would never again occur.

But a Human Rights Watch (HRW) report released on the eve of the two-year anniversary of the Rana Plaza disaster has found that, despite pledges made and some steps in the right direction, Bangladesh’s garments sector is still plagued with many ills that is making life for the 20 million people who depend directly or indirectly on the industry a waking nightmare.

Based on interviews with some 160 workers in 44 factories, predominantly dedicated to manufacturing garments sold by retailers in Australia, Europe and North America, the report found that safety standards are still low, workplace abuse is common, and union busting – as well as violence attacks and intimidation of union organisers – is the norm.

Still, there is a silver lining on the dark cloud: an international donor’s fund set up in 2013 under the aegis of the International Labour Organisation (ILO) recently reached its goal of raising 30 million dollars, which will be paid to victims and survivors of the 2013 tragedy.

In a statement on Jun. 9, 2015, ILO Director-General Guy Ryder stressed, “This is a milestone but we still have important business to deal with. We must now work together to ensure that accidents can be prevented in the future.”

Garment worker at a Bangladesh factory. Credit: B A Sujan/Map/IPS

By Kalinga Seneviratne
SYDNEY, May 25 2013 (IPS)

Australia’s largest textile workers’ union and activist groups are up in arms that the country’s leading retail chains, who source most of their fashion labels from Bangladesh, are refusing to sign a legally binding accord that will help to improve labour and safety standards in Bangladeshi garment factories.

Local Bangladeshi unions and international human rights groups have approached international clothing manufacturers to join the global initiative for improved building and safety conditions following the collapse of the eight-storey Rana Plaza on Apr. 24 that killed almost 1,200 factory workers.

“Companies that search the globe to find the lowest labour costs cannot claim ignorance (of) the consequences of that decision.” -- Michele O’Neil
As rescue teams pulled corpses and survivors from the debris in the town of Savar, about 25 kilometres from Bangladesh’s capital, Dhaka, they also found the charred remains of clothing labels bearing the names of major Western retailers like Walmart, H&M, Gap, Primark and many others who outsource their production to Bangladesh to avail themselves of cheap labour in the impoverished country of 150 million.

As a result, the proposed Bangladesh Building and Fire Safety Agreement requires companies to conduct independent safety inspections, make their reports on factory conditions public and cover the costs for needed repairs.

It also requires them to stop doing business with any factory that refuses to make safety upgrades and to allow workers and their unions to have a voice in factory safety.

Major Australian retail chains that source garments from Bangladesh, like Kmart, Target, David Jones and Big W, have not been connected with the Rana Plaza tragedy; but in the spirit of creating a global culture of ethical production, labour unions and rights groups like Oxfam Australia are urging them to sign the agreement.

According to their annual reports, Target Australia’s total revenue in 2012 was about 70 billion dollars, while Kmart, which runs 170 retail outlets across Australia, had revenues of roughly 3.8 billion that same year. Big W (a branch of Woolworths) increased their sales revenues by almost five percent last year to 53 billion dollars.

“Those companies need to (publicise) what they’re making in Bangladesh and they need to be completely transparent about their supply chain,” said Michele O’Neil, national secretary of the Textile, Clothing and Footwear Union of Australia (TCFU).

To date, “No Australian company has agreed to publish the location of their supplier factories,” Oxfam Australia’s Labour Rights Coordinator Daisy Gardener told IPS.

“This is important because it would allow independent verification of conditions by researchers, NGOs or unions who could visit the factory site and speak to the workers about wages, health and safety and other issues.”

She said it was “important that all Australian companies sourcing from Bangladesh” sign onto the accord, which gives workers the right to refuse dangerous working conditions.

It is possible that if the accord had existed prior to Apr. 24, the death toll would have been significantly lower: days before the disaster, huge cracks had appeared on the ceilings and beams of the building, which was intended to house just five floors.

Despite these clear signs, and warnings from engineers that a collapse might be inevitable, factory managers threatened workers with dismissal if they stayed away due to safety concerns.

Thirty international companies, including the Italian fashion brand Benetton, Spanish retailer Mango and British retailer Marks & Spencer, have so far initialed the binding agreement, along with other big names like Tesco and PVH (the parent company of Tommy Hilfiger and Calvin Klein).

In an angry email response to IPS’ queries, Kmart’s general manager of corporate affairs and sustainability, Tracie Walker, said, “We have not refused to sign the accord.” She referred IPS to the company’s “strong ethical sourcing code”, which is supported by “very stringent policies.”

Kmart says that none of the recent tragedies in Bangladesh occurred in factories that make clothes for them. The company says it organised a forum with its suppliers and auditors, and has also visited factories there.

“One of the key outcomes of the audit process was the identification of ‘high risk buildings’, which are those located above market places and factories located in multi-storey buildings with shared ownership,” the company noted. “Kmart no longer places orders with factories in these high risk locations.”

But activists like O’Neill do not believe that “brand-specific codes, self-regulation and private sector audits” will do the job, echoing activists in the U.S. who say refusals to sign the accord amount to admissions that companies “do not want to be held accountable for workers’ safety.”

According to O’Neill, only consumers have the power to force retail chains to sign the labour accord.

“The results of not having strong laws and unions is clear: look no further than Rana Plaza,” O’Neill noted in a statement on TCFU’s website. “Companies that search the globe to find the lowest labour costs cannot claim ignorance (of) the consequences of that decision.”

About 49 percent of Bangladesh’s population lives below the poverty line. Desperation drives many, particularly women, to seek work in one of the country’s 5,000 factories, taking on 10-hour shifts, seven days a week, in exchange for little more than 30 dollars a month.

Speaking on ABC national radio, Bret Inder, a development economist at Melbourne’s Monash University, said that Bangladesh has grown to be the world’s second biggest garments manufacturer precisely because it offers such a cheap workforce.

“Western buyers have been contracting out to producers all over, particularly in Southeast Asia and South Asia, moving from one country to the next (in search of) the cheapest labour,” he noted.

“There’ll be another country waiting in the queue if Bangladesh prices itself out of the market. To make an accord that is specific to Bangladesh doesn’t make any sense at all,” he added.

Others argue that Bangladesh is a special case that deserves targeted policies. Since 2005, at least 1,800 garment workers have perished in factory fires and building collapses, according to research by the International Labour Rights Forum.

The incident on Apr. 24, the industry’s worst disaster in history, came just months after a fire at a different factory, in November 2012, killed 112 workers.

Oxfam believes that the Better Factories Cambodia project, through which Cambodia gets easy access to U.S. markets in exchange for improved working conditions in the garment sector, may be a good model for Australia to follow.

“There have been international calls for garment companies to ensure they are paying factories enough to ensure workers (receive) a living wage,” notes Oxfam’s Gardener. “The Australian government can help educate Australian businesses about their responsibility to uphold the human rights of the people working in their supply chains.”

She added that the labour cost compared to the overall retail price is very small, sometimes just a few cents per garment, meaning Australian retail companies are able to pay their suppliers more without it having a significant impact on their bottom dollar.

Eighteen-year-old Shapla, a garment worker who survived the Apr. 24 factory collapse, lies on a hospital bed in Dhaka. Credit: Nari Uddung Kendra (the Centre for Women’s Initiative)

By Suvendrini Kakuchi
DHAKA, May 10 2013 (IPS)

Last month, 18-year-old Shapla was just another one of thousands of garment workers employed in a factory in Savar, a suburb of Bangladesh’s capital Dhaka.

Today she is a handicapped survivor of one of the worst industrial accidents in history: the collapse on Apr. 24 of the massive Rana Plaza, a building housing five factories, that buried scores of workers under a wave of cement and glass.

The death toll reached 996 on Friday, though officials and families are still counting the bodies and searching for others beneath the rubble.

“I am desperate about the future,” Shapla said, echoing the sentiments of hundreds of female apparel workers like her who lost their limbs on that fateful day.

The young mother is now recovering in a hospital in Dhaka after her hand was amputated. Having survived the collapse, Shapla is considered one of “the lucky ones”, but she is loath to see the bright side, as her handicap will almost certainly prevent her from finding work.

Experts say that women, who make up 80 percent of the workforce in this country’s booming garments industry, have borne the brunt of this tragedy. According to initial reports, over 80 percent of those who lost lives and sustained injuries in the collapse were women.

“They are now socially and economically heavily disadvantaged,” said Mashud Khatun Shefali, founder and head of Nari Uddung Kendra (the Centre for Women’s Initiatives).

A leading advocate for female garment workers’ rights, Shefali says her organisation, which has lobbied for better conditions such as safe housing for workers, is now focusing on helping female survivors overcome the trauma of the accident.

Some of the workers are “so badly affected that they say they never want to work in factories again,” Shefali told IPS. “They need long-term physical and mental rehabilitation…and they need to be accepted as disabled persons by their families and society.”

A woman named Nazma Begum, whose legs have been amputated as a result of her injuries, told a local television station this week that she “worried incessantly” about how she would handle her disability, until her husband assured her of his continued support and love.

The dark side of manufacturing

Over the last decade, Bangladesh – a country of 150 million of which 49 percent live below the poverty line – has become a crucial player in the international apparel trade by providing a vast supply of cheap labour.

Bangladesh’s garment industry is now the third largest in the world after China and Vietnam, bringing in 20 billion dollars or roughly 80 percent of the country’s annual foreign exchange.

Major apparel companies based in the West and wealthy Asian countries like Japan and South Korea began shifting their production centres to Bangladesh when old manufacturing hubs like Thailand began to raise wages.

Mass-produced and bargain clothes that include such labels as Gap, Primark, HMV, Walmart, Sears and American Apparel are all manufactured here and then sold in the importing countries.

The biggest to the smallest of these factories are staffed by mostly young women hailing from rural areas, who come to the cities in the hopes of acquiring skills they have no access to in Bangladesh’s agricultural regions.

When they arrive in the city, they often live together in close quarters, sharing bathrooms and food.

Uneducated and illiterate, these women have few means by which to earn a steady income; their vulnerability makes them easy prey for manufacturers who claim that, in order to remain “competitive” on the world market, they must hire the cheapest possible workforce.

According to Shefali, young women often start off as interns, meaning they do not receive a wage but instead labour for a stipend that can be as low as a dollar per month.

Within a year, they move on to operating more sophisticated machinery and drawing a regular salary, she added.

Most women sew, wash and pack garments for roughly 30 to 40 dollars a month, working a daily average of 10 hours, seven days a week. In contrast, men tend to be hired for high-level positions, such as quality control and management.

The garment sector has been hailed as one of the country’s biggest employers, bringing a steady wage to thousands of women. But a string of tragedies has recently highlighted the hazardous nature of this work.

Last November, over 100 garment workers perished in a fire in the Tazreen Fashion Factory on the outskirts of Dhaka. Survivors of that tragedy claim they tried to escape, but were locked in by the factory managers.

Similarly, on Apr. 24, employees were threatened with dismissal if they failed to come to work, despite warnings that the eight-storey building, which only had a permit to house five floors, was unsafe. A week before the incident large cracks had begun to appear on the ceilings, prompting engineers to issue warnings that a collapse might be inevitable.

Negligence of workplace safety is just one of many labour violations women workers face. Sometimes they are forced to work 14-hour shifts in order to turn around a quick profit for the factory owners.

Still, activists point out that in a Muslim country with high poverty rates, the garment industry provided a rare opportunity for women to leave their homes and raise their status from housewives to breadwinners.

This increased economic independence enabled them to exercise more autonomy in their own lives, to choose their own husbands and enter into marriages on more equal terms.

But the Savar tragedy has dealt a hefty blow to this hard-earned status.

Sharmin Huq, a retired professor at the Dhaka University who specialises on the handicapped sector, fears that social discrimination will make life harder for women than ever before.

Those who survived the tragedy will likely lose their jobs, as their injuries will prevent them from performing at the level demanded by factory owners.

Huq told IPS that generous donations pouring in from countries like the United States and Germany to help the survivors must be channeled directly towards “the large number of (affected) female workers, to help them re-start their lives.”

This includes support for everything from acquiring artificial limbs to accessing regular counseling to deal with the trauma of the tragedy.