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Bangladesh: The human cost of cheap clothes
29 April 2013. A World to Win News Service. Bangladeshi
garment workers have suffered yet another tragedy and outrage, this
time in the industrial suburb of Savar, 30 kilometres outside of Dhaka.
Those who first arrived on the scene could see mangled body parts amid
the mangled metal and concrete and hear calls for help from those
trapped in the ruins. As of 29 April, the bodies of more than 380 people
have been found in the ruins of the Rana Plaza. Most were crushed to
death by the collapse of the building where they worked. Several hundred
people are still missing. Over 1,200 have been injured, many with loss
of limbs. Four days after the collapse a fire broke out on one of the
floors, putting an end to the barely audible voices still crying out to
be saved. Rescue workers wept after coming
so close but ultimately failing to save a trapped woman they had been
talking to. After days of working through the rubble with bare hands and
small tools, and with the passage of time dimming hope, the heavy
construction machinery brought contributed to sharply deducing hopes for
finding more survivors.
Officials noted a crack in the
walls of the eight-storey building on 23 April, and people were
evacuated. The shops and a bank on the ground floor stayed closed on the
next day. But factories owners threatened their employees to go back to
work or face being docked a day's pay or worse. At 9 am,
one hour into the day's start, a huge noise was heard as the back end of
the building caved in and the storeys collapsed one on another, burying
more than 3,000 workers, mainly women.
Over the next several days,
racing against time, relatives and local residents helped rescuers sift
through the mountains of unstable rubble as the voices of buried
survivors became increasingly faint – tugging, pulling and
easing out bodies as the death toll mounted. Thousands of local people
rushed to the inundated hospitals to donate blood for the survivors.
Occasional moments of hope
would occur when rescuers tried to smash through a slab of a concrete
wall, and heard a voice call out: "'Help, get me out, cut off my legs
but just get me out of here.' The woman's desperate voice was later
joined by dozens more – up to 40 men and women who had been trapped
together in the corner of a third floor room which had somehow survived
the collapse of four floors on top of it. As they were led out of their tomb some wept and shook.'' (25 April 2013, Telegraph)
As the death toll rose
hundreds of thousands of furious workers went on strike. They blocked
major motorways outside Dhaka and laid siege to the main manufacturers'
association demanding that those responsible be punished. In some areas
cars were set on fire and factories forced to shut down. Demonstrations
spread as far as the port city of Chittagong. Part of the intense
outrage stems from the frequency with which lives have been snuffed out
by the dangerous working conditions that are business as usual in the
Bangladesh garment industry. When the police fired rubber bullets at the
demonstrators, the crowd became even more outraged at being attacked
for their righteous anger.
The Rana Plaza was
constructed on marshy land in violation of zoning regulations, with
improper foundations. It had been constructed with eight floors and a
ninth floor in the building stages, despite only having permission for
six. But enforcement is lax. Although the law includes the possibility
of jail for violating workplace health-and-safety provisions,
infractions mainly result in paltry fines or nothing at all. The Rana
Plaza's owner, caught trying to escape to India, has been arrested along
with other individuals, among them factory owners who forced employees
back to work and engineers responsible for the building's poor
construction.
In the face of continued anger
among Bangladeshis, Home Minister Alamgir sought to quickly turn the
page on this disaster. He claimed that rescue team did ''better than the
average international effort in such cases'' and emphasized the number
of people pulled out of the rubble, not the dead and missing. But the
building's collapse was not a natural disaster. It was the result of a
murderous conspiracy to disregard the potential cost in human lives in
keeping the international profit machine humming.
In November of last year, a
fire at Tazreen Fashions killed 121 workers and injured 200. Despite
government and employer promises to rectify the situation, nothing ever
came of it, and no one was ever charged. Since 2005 and before this
latest disaster – the Rana Plaza collapse is considered one of the
countries' worst industrial tragedies – more than 1,000 textile workers
have died in fires and collapsed buildings. According to an AFL-CIO
account, since the fire at Tazreen 41 other instances of fire have
occurred, killing nine workers and injuring 660. (cmc.ca/news/world/story)
Among the businesses in the
Rana building were Phantom Apparels Ltd and the New Wave group which on
its website named 27 main customers, including some of the biggest
clothing brands such as firms from Britain (Primark), France
(Carrefour), Spain (Mango), Italy (Benetton) Canada
(Loblaw) and the United States (Wal-Mart). Labels of many of these
companies were found strewn among the broken bodies and broken concrete.
In interviews conducted by
the British charity War on Want (waronwant.org), women describe working
conditions in the factories that are not only dangerous but also
degrading. They tell of being slapped or beaten if they try to refuse
overtime. Shifts last as long as 15 hours. Some relate that pay cheques
always fall behind and when they are finally paid it is never the
correct amount due them. They compare the luxurious living conditions of
the factory owners to the cramped one-room shacks where they live.
Their shacks are in close proximity to the multi-story factory buildings
where you can see steel-reinforcing rods poking from the rooftops in
preparation for the addition of that yet another floor of sewing
machines.
When
the U.S. instituted quota restrictions on the importation of apparel
from countries like China, Indonesia, Malysia and Thailand, the growth
of the garment industry in Bangladesh was given a boost. As a "least
developed country" Bangladesh received preferential access to the U.S.
and European Union markets. The traditionally large clothing producers
relocated ready-made garment (RMG) factories to countries that were free
from quota restrictions and had enough trainable cheap labour.
Bangladesh was seen as a promising place for the industry to invest.
Since the 1980s the RMG industry went from 4 percent of the country's
total export earnings to 80 percent today.
While
that preferential treatment lasted only until 2004, the garment
industry in Bangladesh became a favourite production site for many big
brands. The less-than-a-living wage is $38 a month. The vast pool of
available workers are mainly women, often part of a newly arrived and
huge influx of people from the countryside desperately searching for
whatever work they can find to support their families. In addition to
the super-exploitation, the women are often sexually harassed. Despite
laws against it, in the smaller sweatshops where local factories
outsource work, often child labour is used.
Now Bangladesh is the
world’s second largest clothing exporter, after China. Almost 4 million
people are employed in more than 4,500 textile factories. The government
of Sheik Hasina works hand in hand with an association of clothing
manufacturers whose members include Bangladesh's most prominent
families. Her job is to protect the status quo so nothing is done that
might frighten away the major clothing brands. That includes turning a
blind eye to the hellish conditions created by the local factories
owners who extract only a small part of the wealth generated by the
super-exploitation of the garment workers. The situation in the
Bangladeshi garment industry is not a throwback to the past but a
defining feature of where the world is going today as globalized cheap
manufacture plays an increasingly major role in the international
process of capital
accumulation.
Different ideas have been
put forward about who is responsible and how to resolve the intolerable
working conditions for garment workers. Calls have been made for more
corporate responsibility, more government intervention, more fire and
building inspections, more audits, more unions. Union organisers are
often arrested and sometimes brutally killed. Some measures have been
taken with little progress. Some NGOs and union organisers made attempts
to call together the clothing industry importers to form an independent
organism to monitor the various garment factories to improve safety
conditions but no agreement could be reached. Now with the shame of the
world cast on the name brands they have shed crocodile tears and offer
some food to families of the victims.
John Hilary, executive director at War
on Want, told Reuters, ''What we're saying is that bargain-basement
(clothing) is automatically leading towards these types of disasters."
He said that Western clothing retailers' need to undercut rivals has
translated into increasing pressure on foreign suppliers to reduce
costs."If you've got that, then it's absolutely clear that you're not
going to be able to have the right kind of building regulations, health
and safety, fire safety. Those things will become more and more
impossible as the cost price goes down." Hilary said the push for lower
costs inevitably led to factories cutting corners. "As a result of that,
we see the sort of
disaster that happened yesterday," he said.
The brand name companies see
the obstacles as too many and too costly to solve. Their bottom line
after all is profit. If they don't maximise profit by cutting costs one
company will be devoured by another. And if profits are not made in
Bangladesh, which is now part of the world imperialist market, then the
companies will move to another oppressed country where they can find a
suitable workforce to super-exploit. By the internal logic of
capitalism, where profit and competition rule over everything, each
player at every level of the
trillion dollar garment industry must keep costs to a minimum to
effectively beat out competitors. Further, to remain competitive and
profitable today clothing retailers must be able to change
styles quickly and often, with tight deadlines adding to the intense
pace imposed on garment manufacturing. These economic necessities
translate into the destruction of human lives and potential on a mass
scale.
The
deaths and injuries at Rana Plaza are not an aberration but part of the
workings of a ruthless system. The sorrow and righteous anger of the
Bangladeshi people is a world wide wake up call. The next time you don
your clothes, look at the label and remember there is blood on it that
you don't see.
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