Nov 19, 2013
A year after the deadly factory fire that killed 112 garment workers at Tazreen Fashions Ltd. in Bangladesh, survivors and the families of those killed and injured say they have been forgotten by the factory owner, international buyers and the government.
In interviews with Solidarity Center staff in Dhaka, the Bangladesh capital, many survivors said they were so injured in the blaze and escape from the building that they are unable to work again. Yet the compensation they received after the disaster—if they received any assistance at all—was not sufficient to cover initial medical bills, let alone pay for the expensive, ongoing care many need. Some were the sole breadwinners and, without the ability to work and with no financial assistance to see them through their recoveries, their families often go hungry, they cannot afford to send their children to school and many even risk losing their homes.
“I am not able to work and I don’t think that I will be able to work anymore,” said Shahanaz Begum. “Now, my life seems worthless.”
Like nearly all Tazreen garment workers who made it out of the burning multistory building alive on November 24, 2012, Shahanaz survived by jumping through a window. Windows—most of them barred—were the only exit because the factory had no fire escapes and staircases were locked or led to the burning storage room on the first floor. And like all survivors with whom the Solidarity Center spoke, Shahanaz said a factory manager told her she could not leave. She left anyway, searching through the smoke and darkness for a way out until she was forced to jump.
Now, Shahanaz said, “I cannot see through my right eye. I have problems in my spinal cord and can’t even walk properly. I cannot sit properly as my left leg was broken, my right leg is filled with blood clots and I cannot lift heavy weights.”
Shahanaz’s daughter, Tahera, also worked at Tazreen and suffers debiltating physical and emotional trauma. Shahanaz’s husband married a second wife after the disaster and now provides her with little financial support. As a result, she no longer takes her medicine because she cannot afford it. And she is unable to pay her rent. The compensation she received from the Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers Employers Association and two private organizations was used up paying for the extensive treatment she required in four separate hospitals.
According to news reports, Tazreen Fashions earned $36 million annually supplying garments to major buyers in the West. Yet the burning material that engulfed the building was not properly stored in a fireproof facility. Stairwells were locked, fire escapes nonexistent and no safety equipment was available to fight the blaze. Tazreen garment workers know the fire was preventable—yet so far, no one has been held accountable. And the garment workers who survived, and the families of those who did not, say they have been abandoned. As Anjuara, a Tazreen survivor said, the Bangladesh government has not compensated victims, but it offered condolences. “Our factory owner did not even express condolences to us,” she said.
After the Tazreen tragedy last year, ABC News summed up the situation: “Bangladesh has become a favorite of many American retailers, drawn by the cheapest labor in the world, as low as 21 cents an hour, producing clothes in crowded conditions that would be illegal in the U.S. In the past five years, more than 700 Bangladeshi garment workers have died in factory fires.”
In a country, a region and an industry where death on the job has become routine, all those involved along the garment supply chain continued business as usual after the Tazreen disaster. Since Tazreen, Solidarity Center staff has tracked 51 garment factory fire incidents, with some two dozen workers killed and more than 700 people—most of them women—injured.
Only after the Rana Plaza building collapsed outside Dhaka in late April, killing more than 1,200 garment workers, have concrete steps been taken to address deadly factory working conditions. Nearly 100 clothing brands have signed on to the Accord on Building and Fire Safety, a new and binding agreement that covers 1,800 factories in Bangladesh, mandates that both brands and the companies they source from fix building and fire hazards and ensures unions are a key part of this process. In another step forward, the government has allowed 60 unions to register—and if the unions are not resisted by employers, they will have the ability to improve the safety and health of vulnerable and impoverished workers who cannot fight alone for their rights.
But none of these moves help the Tazreen survivors. “Leading a better life is not only the hope of rich people but also the poor people like us,” said Morsheda, 25, a sewing machine operator at Tazreen, who is too injured to work and whose husband’s meager income in a garment factory cannot support them. “Garment owners have much money, they have the capability to run so many garment factories, they have nothing to lose. But we poor have lost everything.”
Oct 24, 2013
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 at the country’s thousands of garment factories: Some 100 major corporations have signed on to the Bangladesh Accord on Building and Fire Safety, a binding agreement that commits brands and the companies they source from to addressing building and fire hazards and ensuring unions are a key part of this process; and the Bangladesh government has moved toward allowing registration of unions at garment factories.
But on the factory floor, garment workers are reporting a torrent of employer resistance when they seek to form a union to ensure they have a collective voice to fight for workplace rights like job safety and health. Workers who spoke recently with Solidarity Center staff in Gazipur, Bangladesh, described the difficulties they face when seeking a union, even though forming a union would allow them to address deadly working conditions, such as those that led to the Rana Plaza disaster, where a multistory building pancaked in on workers.
Workers are the best monitors of conditions in their factories because they are on the shop floor every day, and many of those at Rana Plaza factories have told the Solidarity Center that they were threatened with the loss of their meager wages if they did not go back to their machines. If they had had a union, they could have had the strength to resist being forced into a death trap.
Workers also told Solidarity Center staff that at the center of what they want from their employers boils down to this: “respectful treatment.”
They know that with respect, all the rest—clean drinking water, sufficient wages to support their families, unlocked fire escapes—will follow.
Sep 12, 2013
Tim Ryan, Solidarity Center Asia Region Director, sends us this report from the AFL-CIO quadrennial convention in Los Angeles.
In a dramatic demonstration of how deadly the global supply chain really is, Scott Nova, director of the Worker Rights Consortium (WRC), opened a panel on worker rights in Bangladesh with this observation: “Of the four deadliest factory disasters in history, three of those four happened in the last 12 months.” He cited the Baldia factory fire in Pakistan, which killed 347 workers, the Tazreen Fashions fire, which killed 112 workers, and the Rana Plaza building collapse, in which more than 1,200 workers lost their lives. To find another industrial disaster of that proportion, you have to go back to the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire in New York in 1911. This was a pretty shocking thought to me and underscored how the global garment supply chain is increasingly dangerous to workers and why they need to redouble their efforts protect their rights.
Nova gave his remarks at the panel discussion, Bangladesh Fire and Safety Accord: A New Standard in Global Framework Agreements? Some 30 participants attended the workshop, which presented a truly new approach to framework agreements and protecting worker rights. Ben Davis, international director of the United Steelworkers (USW) moderated the panel, which included Nova; Kalpona Akter, director of Bangladesh Center for Worker Solidarity (BCWS); Owen Herrnstadt, international director of the International Association of Machinsts (IAM); and Garrett Strain, international campaign organizer for United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS).
Nova outlined the Accord on Building and Fire Safety, a new and binding agreement that 87 clothing brands have signed. The accord covers 1,800 factories in Bangladesh, mandates that both brands and the companies they source from fix building and fire hazards and ensures unions are a key part of this process.
“Workers’ justice starts for me with workers’ safety,” Akter said, and called the accord important for workers to provide activists the political space to organize and to interact with company managers to improve conditions. She also emphasized that although Bangladesh labor law is “decent” compared with some other countries, the law is not enforced. If the accord works, she said, “This could be a historical turning point.”
“Why are U.S. unions interested in the accord?” asked Owen Herrnstadt. “First, workers all over the world deserve safer workplaces,” he said. The IAM, an affiliate of the global union, IndustriALL, is bringing together workers from many industries, including the garment sector and is looking for “innovative tools to change corporate behavior.” Herrnstadt called the accord “one of the most significant breakthroughs,” one that is “radically different” and that needs to be emulated.
Strain discussed a delegation he led to Bangladesh with six USAS student activists to find ways to coordinate public campaigns in the United States with Bangladeshi labor union activists on the ground. In the coming weeks, USAS will encourage a Global Day of Action at the six-month anniversary of Rana Plaza on October 24. November 24 is the one-year anniversary since the Tazreen fire, and USAS is encouraging more actions on that day.
Most important, all the panelists encouraged the support of the democratic, independent unions in Bangladesh, which now have a chance to organize unions for the first time in the past 20 years.
Aug 9, 2013
The Bangladesh government has re-registered the Bangladesh Center for Worker Solidarity (BCWS), a move that means the organization can fully function again and pursue its mission of educating workers about their rights.
The Bangladesh government revoked the organization’s registration in 2010 and arrested its leaders, Babul Akhter, Kalpona Akter and Aminul Islam, on criminal charges following protests by garment workers against unsafe working conditions and poverty-level wages. All three, who were held in custody and later released, say they were tortured in prison. In 2012, Aminul’s body was found dozens of miles from his home, severely beaten and tortured.
The government last month dropped charges against Babul and Kalpona and announced it would step up the search for the people who tortured and murdered Aminul. All these actions follow the decision by the U.S. government in June to suspend preferential trade benefits with Bangladesh because of chronic and severe labor rights violations. The Generalized System of Preferences (GSP) reduced tariff benefits agreement is worth $34.7 million a year for Bangladesh.
Despite international outcry, including a U.S. congressional hearing and then U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s call for justice in the case, Aminul’s murder has gone unsolved. He had sought to improve the working conditions of some 8,000 garment workers employed by Shanta Group, a garment manufacturer based in Dhaka.
Since his murder, two massive garment factory disasters in Bangladesh have killed more than 1,000 workers, including the April building collapse of Rana Plaza, where 1,133 were killed. On Thursday, another garment worker Monwar Hossain, 22, died from his injuries at Rana Plaza. In the past eight months, there have been more than 40 fire and fire-related incidents at Bangladesh garment factories, according to data compiled by Solidarity Center staff in Dhaka, the capital.
Aug 4, 2013
Women around the world work make up the vast majority of workers in dangerous, difficult and low-paid jobs—and in Bangladesh, garment workers, the majority of whom are women, often risk their lives for a chance to support themselves and their families. More than 1,100 workers were killed in the most recent garment factory disaster when the eight-story Rana Plaza building collapsed in April.
Morium Akter Sheuli, elected this year as general secretary of the 100,000+ member Bangladesh Independent Garment Workers Union Federation (BIGUF), was 9 years old when she began work in a garment factory. At age 14, she began organizing co-workers to gain a collective voice on the job to improve workplace safety and wages.
Bangladesh has “more than 4 million garment workers, of which 80 percent are women (and) almost 70 percent of all women employment in the nation’s manufacturing sectors,” said Morium. She spoke last week in in São Paulo, Brazil, during a July 30-31 Solidarity Center conference, “Women’s Empowerment, Gender Equality and Labor Rights: Transforming the Terrain.”
Although garment exports account for 75 percent of Bangladesh’s exports, workers in the country’s 5,000 garment factories are paid a minimum of $38 a month while enduring dangerous and deadly workplaces.
Following the Rana Plaza tragedy and other mass deaths at Bangladesh garment factories, the United States in June suspended its Generalized System of Preferences (GSP) reduced tariff benefits agreement with Bangladesh. In July, Bangladesh passed a new labor law, one that Morium says “is not enough for workers.”
“In some ways, the previous law was better than this one,” Morium said through a translator, in an interview with the Solidarity Center. “Workers are not very happy with the new law after Rana Plaza, thinking it is imposed on them.”
Although the government has made registering unions easier in recent weeks, the new labor code still does not apply to the hundreds of thousands of workers in the country’s export processing zones where a large number of garment workers are employed, according to an analysis by the AFL-CIO. The International Labor Organization (ILO) has found that current law that regulates labor relations in the zones violates core labor standards.
Like conference participants from a variety of countries, Morium, who has been actively involved in various union leadership positions and union organizing efforts, described how international support has been essential to improving women’s working conditions. She sees hope in the international Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh, a legally binding agreement committing the more than 80 major corporations that signed on to funding safety and building upgrades and holding independent factory inspections.
“I think that it will be a better tool for our workers in Bangladesh,” she said.
