On a treadmill at $10 a week: garment workers and Bangladesh

Bangladesh is the prime example of the durability of sweatshops in a booming industry. On November 1 workers in the country’s ready- made garment industry got a raise in their minimum wage to $43 a month. As in other Asian countries, the official minimum wage generally is the actual wage paid to most workers.

Before November 1 Bangladesh’s 3,400,000 garment workers, mostly women, were the worst paid garment workers in the world. After months of struggles for a living wage, they are still the worst paid garment workers in the world.

Meanwhile, the latest annual export earnings of the industry came to $12,600,000,000. The industry is also a vehicle for capital flight, chiefly through over-invoicing,

Garment factory owners in Bangladesh claimed they could not afford a wage increase larger than finally imposed. But a new report, quoting a Dhaka-based World Bank economist, said that labor costs “typically constitute one to three percent for garments produced in the developing world,” indicating that the new minimum could be absorbed without a price increase.

The plight of the country’s garment workers is described at length in that report, the work of the International Labor Rights Forum and Sweatfree Communities. So have dozens of reports over the past two decades by the AFL-CIO, the International Trade Union Congress, the International Labor Organizations, Human Rights Watch, human rights groups in Bangladesh itself, and various other groups.

But Bangladesh remains on a treadmill. The 2010 report of the UN Development Program ranks Bangladesh low on its human development index – 129th out of 169 countries.


I’ve written countless articles about Bangladesh over the years. One, from the May 4, 2005, issue of my Website, is titled “Greed Kills, and Greed Pays” at http://www.senser.com/05-05-04.htm.

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How many more will have to die…?

…before the world’s business and political leaders start to rid the globe of sweatshops?

At least 21 workers died and dozens of other workers were injured on February 26 when a fire swept through a sweater factory near the capital city of Dhaka in Bangladesh. Most of the victims, at least 14 of the dead, were women.

Since the year 2000 alone, 143 garment workers, almost all women, were killed in Bangladesh’s factory fires.

How many more women will die in sweatshops, in Bangladesh and elsewhere, before a pundit like Nicholas Kristof stops writing that sweatshops are good for women?

Moreover, “why does the garment sector in Bangladesh continue to grow despite the fires and despite the abusive working conditions that nobody denies – not even the brands themselves?”

Bjorn Claeson, director of Sweatfree Communities, adds that and other pointed questions, in an article published in “Labor is Not a Commodity,” a blog jointly operated with the International Labor Rights Forum and other groups dedicated to global labor solidarity.

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A Tribute to Neil Kearney 1950-2009

He was less than two years into a heart-wrenching job – leader of a global union whose workers endure the worst excesses of globalization. He had already visited more than 150 garment factories and textile mills on every continent.

That was in March 1990, when I first met Neil Kearney, general secretary of the International Textile, Garment, and Leather Workers Federation (ITGLWF). By chance, we were then both in Bangladesh, where he had meetings with the fledgling trade unions, some affiliates of his federation, some not.

I was there researching the country’s sweatshops. He was there to eliminate them, much to the anger of the owners and managers of the country’s garment factories, even though he wasn’t trying to eliminate the shops, just the “sweat,” or grueling conditions, in them.

This month Kearney once again visited Bangladesh, for the 50th time in 20 years, some said. But he didn't complete his tight four-day schedule, which included an investigation into reports, publicized in Europe, that a large factory was in gross violation of its worker rights commitments.

Early on the morning of Thursday, November 19, the heart of tireless Neil Kearney stopped beating. He was 59 years old.

The Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Owners Association (BGMEA), and several union leaders held a Thursday press conference at the employers’ headquarters to announce Kearney’s death. Together, the BGMEA and the unions started a three-day mourning period on Friday.

“We lost a great friend of Bangladesh who fought for the welfare of the core segment of our country,” Shafiul Islam Mohiuddin, the BGMEA’s acting president, said.

In Brussels, the shocked headquarters staff of the ITGLWF announced that the Federation’s congress will, as scheduled, hold its world congress in Frankfurt, Germany, on December 2-4. The planned theme, “Unionize = Decent Work = Decent Life,” will be supplemented by a celebration of how much Neil Kearney’s life has contributed to decent work and to the decent life of workers throughout the world.
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My book, “Justice at Work: Globalization and the Human Rights of Workers,” mentions Neil Kearney at points in four different chapters, but of course that falls far short of telling the full story. His action-packed life has story material for a dramatic movie, even if, or especially if, it focused on Bangladesh alone.

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Who Cares About Bangladesh?

I’ve been neglecting my Blog because I am working on a long-delayed project: writing the last chapter of a book. But in my email I just got a press release about Bangladesh, which has a special place in my heart because long ago I researched the plight of women workers in the garment industry there. The email told me that in Bangladesh it’s still the same old story of human exploitation.

Every time I think that the campaign against sweatshops is succeeding, I learn about a story like this one. The government of Bangladesh, with the help of an American law firm, continues to crack down on the rights of workers. I’ve stopped keeping track of how many times the International Labor Organization seeks to shame Bangladesh for its repressive activities, without any success.

The workers in the country’s booming Export Processing Zones have recently taken the initiative to form a union through which they hoped to protect their rights. But the government has again intervened to crush the worker initiative.

This latest chapter in a story that goes back 20 years is told in the press release just issued by head of the International Textile Garment, and Leather Workers Federation, Neil Kearney.

In his testimony before the ILO Committee on the Application of Standards in Geneva on June 6, Kearney described the workers’ plight and said: “Garment workers in Bangladesh, mainly women, cannot be allowed to drop further into serfdom.”

Accordingly, the committee censured Bangladesh, as it has many times before. Once again, Bangladesh provides evidence that U.S. trade legislation needs to be strengthened to protect the rights of hundreds of thousands of women workers in Bangladesh, who are essentially part of our labor force.

Who cares?

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Bangladesh 's Anti-Labor Crackdown

The government of Bangladesh, never friendly to worker organizations and their supporters, on January 24 arrested Mehedi Hasan, a field investigator of the Worker Rights Consortium, and kept him in shackles when a lawyer and family members were allowed brief visits.

Hasan, a Bangladeshi national, was in the midst of checking worker rights violations in the garment industry in Dhaka. His organization monitors labor rights compliance on behalf of 178 universities and colleges that market apparel and other products made in Bangladesh and other countries.

Security forces seized Hasan's computer, which contained information from interviews held with workers away from factories. This leads to concerns for the workers' safety.

Hasan's arrest is part of wave of government harassment of unions and their advocates. A Bangladeshi staff person of the AFL-CIO Solidarity Center's Dhaka office was also recently arrested while participating in a worker rights clinic.


In June last year the AFL-CIO filed a petition with the U.S. Trade Representative to withdraw some of Bangladesh's trade benefits unless it ends its most glaring abuses of labor rights. (Scroll down to "Bangladesh's Workers on a 17-Year Treadmill" at http://www.senser.com/008-01.htm.)

For at least 17 years now, the AFL-CIO and other organizations have been pressing USTR to invoke U.S. trade law sanctions because of Bangladesh's non-compliance with that law. USTR has rejected each petition. The current AFL-CIO petition is still pending.
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