Twenty-five-year-old Razia is one of 2,500 survivors of the factory collapse in Bangladesh. Credit: Naimul Haq/IPS

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Jun 27 2013 (IPS)

Citing Bangladesh’s alleged failure to respect international labour rights, U.S. President Barack Obama Thursday suspended trade benefits for the South Asian country’s exports under the Generalised System of Preferences (GSP).

The move came two months after the collapse of a building, the Rana Plaza, in Dhaka that killed more than 1,200 textile and garment workers.

The disaster, which followed last November’s fire that killed 112 workers at the Tazreen garment factor, drew unprecedented attention to labour conditions in Bangladesh’s fast-growing apparel industry and to the major western retailers that are its chief customers.

“I have determined that it is appropriate to suspend Bangladesh’s designation as a beneficiary developing country under the GSP program because it is not taking steps to afford internationally recognised worker rights to workers in the country,” Obama, who is currently on a tour of Africa, said in a statement issued by the White House.

“The recent tragedies that needlessly took the lives of over 1,200 Bangladeshi garment factory workers have served to highlight some of the serious shortcomings in worker rights and workplace safety standards in Bangladesh,” said U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) Michael Froman after the White House announcement.

He noted that Washington would begin “new discussions with the government of Bangladesh regarding steps to improve the worker rights environment in Bangladesh so that GSP benefits can be restored and tragedies like the Rana Plaza building collapse and Tazreen Fashion factory fire can be prevented”.

A broad indirect impact

The direct impact of Thursday’s decision, which followed a multi-year USTR review initiated by U.S. labour unions that have long complained about working conditions in Bangladesh, is likely to be minimal, since the country’s apparel exports – its biggest industry by far – are not covered by Washington’s GSP programme.

“GSP doesn’t cover sensitive products like apparel,” said Dan Anthony of the Coalition for GSP, a lobby group for U.S. companies that benefit from GSP, which provides about 750 million dollars a year in tariff relief for products from developing countries. Last year, importers of Bangladeshi products received about 35 million dollars in GSP benefits.

Of that total, the tobacco sector was the largest beneficiary, accounting for over 11 million dollars in exports. Exports of golf equipment, porcelain and china hotel and restaurant tableware, and plastic bags each received around five million dollars in GSP benefits, according to Anthony.

While the total represented less than one percent of the more than four billion dollars in apparel goods imported to the United States from Bangladesh last year, the indirect effects of the GSP suspension are likely to be much greater, according to labour activists and their supporters.

“The decision to suspend trade benefits sends an important message to our trading partners,” according to a statement released by the Richard Trumka, the head of the AFL-CIO, the largest U.S. trade confederation which initiated the government’s review of Bangladesh’s labour conditions more than six years ago.

“Countries that benefit from preferential trade programmes must comply with their terms. Countries that tolerate dangerous and even deadly – working conditions and deny basic workers’ rights, especially the right to freedom of association, will risk losing preferential access to the U.S. market,” he said.

Others stressed that the decision will exert renewed pressure on U.S. apparel companies to adhere to binding agreements regarding their responsibility to improve and oversee working conditions in the garment factories, including the Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh (Safety Accord) that has been signed by several dozen mainly European retailers, such as H&M, Primark and the Benetton Group, since it was concluded last month.

“While the decision is an important step by the U.S. government, the decision alone may not ensure that action will be taken to end the epidemic of senseless deaths of Bangladesh’s garment workers,” said Liana Foxvog, organising director at the International Labour Rights Forum (ILRF) here.

“As a next step, we ask the U.S. government to call on U.S. companies like Gap and Walmart to make legally binding commitments to invest in the future of Bangladesh garment workers by joining the Safety Accord,” she said.

Most major U.S. companies have so far declined to sign the accord due to concerns that disputes could wind up before U.S. courts that could grant huge damages for non-compliance.

Safety considerations

Bangladesh is currently the world’s second biggest apparel exporter, with an estimated 5,000 textile plants. Since last November, more than 1,500 workers have died in fires and the Rana Plaza collapse.

In documents submitted to the USTR, the Bangladeshi government itself admitted that the rapid expansion of the textile industry “has outstripped the pace of our progress” in ensuring adequate regulation and oversight.

For all of the country’s plants to meet minimum safety standards, improvements will cost on the order of about three billion dollars – or an average of 600,000 dollars per factory, according to labour activists who worked on the Safety Accord. That accord requires signatories to pay for all of the improvements.

The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday that major U.S. retailers, including Wal-Mart and Gap, are expected to reach their own accord next month that would establish a 50-million-dollar, five-year fund to support the needed improvements.

Unlike the Safety Accord, the proposed plan would strictly limit the circumstances under which any disputes could be taken up by U.S. courts and limit the liability they could face there.

Activists consider the U.S. plan, which is being negotiated with the help of the Bipartisan Policy Centre, to be inadequate in almost every respect.

Last week, 113 organisations sent a letter to Secretary of State John Kerry urging the administration to support the Safety Accord. Public demonstrations against the recalcitrant companies are being organised in front of their stores in 30 U.S. cities as part of the International Day of Action to End Deathtraps.

“No one will want to wear clothing that is ‘Made in Bangladesh’ if it is made on the blood of workers,” said Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman Robert Menendez, who held a hearing on labour issues in Bangladesh earlier this month. “It’s time for American industry to show leadership and work with their European counterparts on a global standard for safety.”

Labour activists stress that safety is not the only challenge workers in Bangladesh face. Threats and violence against union organisers are also common.

Last month, the International Labour Organisation and the World Bank rejected Bangladesh’s application to join their “Better Work” programme, which carries out unannounced inspections of textile factories, complaining that the countries labour laws were too weak and repression against union organisers too great to warrant the country’s membership.

By Mario Osava
RIO DE JANEIRO, Mar 16 2012 (IPS)

A year after workers’ riots that brought work on the Jirau hydroelectric dam to a halt for months and forced the government and companies to engage in national negotiations to improve labour conditions in the construction industry, another strike has caused tension again in the dam construction project in northwest Brazil.

The strike, which 1,500 workers of Enesa Engenharia, the company installing the generating units on the project, began on Mar. 8, grew this week to include all of the workers on the Jirau hydropower plant – around 20,000.

The workers went on strike because Enesa did not sign a new national labour agreement.

The “national commitment to improve working conditions in the construction industry” has been in effect since Mar. 1. It includes measures designed to ward off strikes and labour conflicts on construction sites, and was signed by the government, nine large construction companies and six central trade unions.

The tripartite agreement established permanent representation for workers in on-site negotiations with the administrators of construction projects, and the creation of health and safety commissions. It also stipulated that workers must be hired through official channels, thus eliminating the abusive “gatos” or cats, the name given to those who recruit labour for unscrupulous employers.

But Enesa did not sign the agreement and has not responded to the grievances of its employees in Jirau, such as demands for better workers’ dormitories and common areas, said Cláudio Gomes, president of the construction workers’ union, CONTICOM.

“There are eight people in each lodging unit, and no privacy,” said Gomes, while the Enesa workers’ neighbours, who work for the Camargo Corrêa construction company, have better conditions.

Gomes travelled from the southern city of São Paulo to support the local union in the negotiations.

Describing demands that will be negotiated in May, the trade union leader said the striking workers are also seeking better wages and other benefits.

On Friday morning, a workers’ assembly decided to continue the strike, although the labour courts declared it illegal on Thursday, in a ruling that orders the local union to pay a fine of 111,000 dollars for each additional day the workers are on strike.

Tension is running high again at the Jirau construction site, Gomes said. But the peaceful nature of the strike stands in contrast to the violence that broke out at the same site on Mar. 15, 2011, when furious workers set fire to 60 buses and other vehicles and most of the lodgings, built to house 16,000 workers.

The chaos spread, aggravated by the equally violent police crackdown, and thousands of workers fled to Porto Velho, the nearest city, 130 km away, where they were given shelter, mainly in a stadium.

The uprising also led to the interruption of work at the Santo Antônio hydroelectric dam being built on the Madeira river, just seven kilometres from Porto Velho, the capital of the northwest Amazon jungle state of Rondônia.

Overnight, more than 40,000 workers were left without employment and many returned to their homes in distant states. Construction on the Jirau dam gradually resumed only three months later, and completion of the hydropower plant was postponed to nine months after the initial target date, originally set for this month.

The 2011 crisis prompted the federal government to push for negotiations between the construction companies and trade unions, to avoid further conflicts and ensure that priority infrastructure works and the construction projects for the FIFA World Cup, to be held in 12 Brazilian cities in 2014, would be completed on time.

For the last five years, trade unions have been trying to negotiate a collective national agreement for the construction industry, to overcome the precarious nature of employment in this strategic sector, but without getting a response from the companies, said Luiz Carlos Queiroz, secretary general of CONTICOM.

The unrest in Jirau a year ago triggered a wave of strikes at other major construction sites, and finally brought about the dialogue that led to the achievement of the tripartite national agreement, he said.

“We accepted the agreement that was within our reach; we did not get everything we wanted,” but it was a step forward, and can be improved through mobilisation and monitoring, he said.

At first only nine large companies signed the agreement, including two involved in construction of the Jirau and Santo Antônio plants. Other companies have the option to join voluntarily. There are 170 construction companies in the country, according to the Brazilian Chamber for the Construction Industry (CBIC).

Trade unions view the agreement as “timid,” but it sets in motion a process that allows longstanding problems to be solved for a sector of workers who have historically been “marginalised” and have now gained “spectacular power” because Brazil’s construction frenzy has created a shortage of labour, Gomes said.

At present there are more than four million workers employed in construction, a number that “has tripled in 10 years.”

A decade ago, over 60 percent of the workforce of construction firms were informal labourers, and now the proportion is “no more than 30 percent,” Gomes said. Counting “all those economically active,” including independent workers, the reduction in the number of informal workers is equally great, but the proportion in the informal sector is still around “40 to 45 percent,” he said.

The struggle for decent work in the construction industry, overcoming the traditional precariousness and low wages, is hampered by the high turnover, low-skilled jobs and frequent migration, which do not favour the organisation of workers, said Queiroz, the son of a migrant from Brazil’s poor northeast region.

Many people accept piecework, and then work extremely long hours in order to increase their earnings, risking illness or accident and the curtailment of their future employment prospects, he complained.

But conditions for construction workers are changing. In São Paulo, basic wage scales for workers in the industry are higher than for metalworkers, a conquest achieved through “strikes and struggles” that also won them the right to breakfast and an afternoon snack, Queiroz said.

In his view, the Jirau riots were “a starting point” for more promising times. The concentration of large number of workers at the sites of big infrastructure building projects favours the organisation and growth of trade unions, he said.

The Rondônia construction workers’ union, STICCERO, for example, became stronger as a result of the huge increase in its membership after work commenced on the Santo Antônio and Jirau hydropower projects in 2008.

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