Rubina and her husband, Abdul Hamid, made enough to support themselves and their two children after they moved five years ago from a village to Dhaka, the Bangladesh capital. Both were employed as garment workers. But their efforts to ensure an even better future for...
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Rana Plaza, 1 Year Later: ‘Everybody Is Scared to Work’
Most of the garment workers who survived the April 24, 2013, collapse of Rana Plaza in Bangladesh say they have been so physically injured and emotionally traumatized, they are unable to ever again work in a garment factory. “Everybody is scared (to work) now (after...
Rana Plaza One Year Later: Living in Constant Pain
When the multistory Rana Plaza building collapsed on April 24, 2014, in Bangladesh, Moriom Begum was trapped for two days in the room where she worked as a sewing operator. Hunched in the dark, unable to move beneath a sewing stool and suffering from serious injuries,...
Six Months after Rana Plaza, Workers Struggle for Voice at Work
Today marks the six-month anniversary of the Rana Plaza building collapse in Bangladesh, which killed more than 1,200 garment workers, primarily women, and injured 2,500 more. In the wake of this catastrophe, several steps have been taken to address workplace safety...
REPORT: IDENTIFYING EFFECTIVE WORKER VOICE
When workers can “speak up, articulate and manifest collective agency that ultimately improves the terms and conditions of their employment and their livelihoods,” they also have a role in shaping their societies and “contributing to democratic participation beyond...
Bangladesh Factory Fire: ‘This Amounts to Murder’
Worker rights advocates and the international human rights community are expressing sorrow, disbelief and outrage over the horrific fire at the Hashem Foods Ltd., factory in Bangladesh that killed at least 52 workers and more than a dozen children early this week....
Unions: Bangladesh Accord Must Be Extended
Worker rights and human rights advocates are urging multinational corporate fashion brands to commit to a binding successor agreement that will continue the pathbreaking work of the Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh, a landmark agreement that made...
Thai Union Organizer Connects COVID-19 and Worker Rights
อ่านบทความเป็นภาษาไทย In Thailand, where automotive assembly plants have temporarily shut down due to COVID-19, the closures have reverberated throughout the country’s supply chain, with many small- and medium-sized businesses laying off workers or freezing or cutting...
Bangladesh Garment Workers: New Blocks to Form Unions
In Bangladesh, garment workers often seek to form unions and worker associations to better protect against wage theft, unfair treatment and lack of health and safety protections, including large-scale safety threats like building collapses. Yet they increasingly are...
Bangladesh: Garment Worker Safety Gains Threatened
On the seven-year anniversary of a deadly Bangladesh factory fire that killed 112 mostly young, female garment workers and injured more than 200 others, progress made by workers to improve their workplaces is threatened by the country’s crackdown on their right to...
Bangladesh Garment Workers Safer after Fire Trainings
Six years ago, the preventable Rana Plaza collapse in Bangladesh killed 1,134 garment workers in the world’s worst garment industry disaster. Corporate greed, inadequate labor and building code enforcement, and worker exploitation all contributed to the April 24,...
Bangladesh Workers Targeted with Gender-Based Violence
Even as 11,000 Bangladesh garment workers were fired in the wake of strikes they waged in December and January to protest low wages, many seeking to form unions or take collective action also have been physically threatened, attacked and arrested on trumped-up...
Bangladesh Garment Employers Retailate Against Workers
Tens of thousands of Bangladesh garment workers waged weeks-long strikes in December and January to protest low wages and unequal pay increases—and now workers say factory employers are using the walkouts to further repress their efforts to form unions and...
Sri Lanka Garment Workers Stand up for Their Rights
Just outside Sri Lanka’s Bandaranaike International Airport, where more than 2 million tourists start their vacations each year, a different reality unfolds in the Katunayake export processing zone (EPZ). There, thousands of garment workers take their places in...
For Bangladesh Garment Workers, Safety Still an Issue
More than five years after the Rana Plaza and Tazreen Fashion disasters killed more than a thousand garment workers and injured many more, workers in ready-made garment factories in Bangladesh still struggle to make ends meet. And even now, garment workers often are...
Invisible Work: Exploitation in the Global Garment Industry
Approximately 1 in 5 workers worldwide are employed in global supply chains. Millions of them do not have access to decent work and must endure long hours, low wages and hazardous working conditions. The majority of people working for the world’s biggest multinational...
Speed is Key in Reforming Bangladesh’s RMG Sector
We need to hold every new deal we see in supply chains up to the now gold standard of the Accord,” says Shawna Bader-Blau, executive director of the Solidarity Center. “No more Rana Plazas. We need something better and it is up to us to make it happen, and freedom of association is key…”
Bangladesh Garment Workers Stand up for Rights at Work
Five years after the deadly Rana Plaza building collapse in Bangladesh, workers and union activists say despite the massive demand from workers for union representation to achieve safe workplaces, worker-organizers must face down threats, harassment and violence to...
‘Everyone around Us Was Dead’
I am Ziasmin Sultana. I came to Dhaka at a very young age with my family and got married two years later in 2007. I was happy with my family even though our earnings were not much. It was in 2011 that I joined a factory in Rana Plaza hoping to provide for our growing...
Bangladesh Garment Worker: ‘There Is Lots More Work to be Done’
I am Khadiza Akhter, vice president of the Sommilito Garments Sramik Federation (SGSF), where I have worked since 2008. I started to work in a garment factory at a very young age. My family was poor, so I did not have the luxury to continue my education. One day I...