Garment Industry on a Dormant Volcano of Genuine Labour Grievances

8/8/2019 Garment Industry on a Dormant Volcano of Genuine Labour Grievances

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Garment Industry on a Dormant Volcano of Genuine Labour

GrievancesAnalysis , by Nurul Kabir , 3-June-2006

[Blog]One cannot rule out foreign conspiracies against a cheap market be it of labour,commodity or capital particularly when history records hundreds of wars to capture

anothers market. But before looking for conspirators outside the border, it is prudent toexamine the reported grievances of the workforce within the national boundary. With theinternal grievances addressed, the chances of external enemies, if there is any, to succeeddiminish automatically. Nurul Kabir elaborates.

That the four days of violent agitations by garment workers near the capital has inflictedenormous amount of damage on the readymade garment industry on the one hand and thenational economy as a whole on the other is not a matter in doubt.

The agitated workers had reportedly set 14 factories on fire and damaged some 70 others,including about 30 in the Export Processing Zone in Gazipur between May 20 and May 23.The labour unrest caused deaths to three workers, injuries to 150, arrest of anotherhundred, and a halt to production in several hundred factories in the area, burning downthousands of pieces of finished products along the way. The whole episode will have, by allprobabilities, far reaching adverse implications on the national economy in general and thegarment industry in particular. If nothing else, the news of violent protests and destructionthat spread across the world like wildfire would scare American and European buyers ofreadymade garments, marking a fall in exports. A New Age report on May 24 said, quotingcommerce ministry officials, that a good number of buyers and market players in Europeand the United States have already contacted the ministry, over telephone or by email,enquiring about the state of agitations and expressing their concerns.

The biggest share of the countrys foreign exchange earnings comes from readymadegarment exports, which was, according to the Bangladesh Banks annual report (2004 -2005), $6,418 million in 2005 some 76 per cent of the total foreign exchange earnings by

the country. The commerce ministry officials reportedly claimed that even a 10 per centfall in RMG exports could mean a loss of $850 million in earning, much higher than theearning from any other sector, excepting remittance from Bangladeshi workers abroad.

Besides, the destruction of the factories may stand in the way of repayment of capital bythe factory owners concerned to the banks, and rebuilding of the factories would result inextra pressure on the banks concerned, eventually affecting the banking system. In themeantime, several hundred workers may remain out of employment, creating extra burdenon a society already suffering from lack of adequate employment opportunities. More than20 lakh people, a majority of them women, work at some 4,000 garment factories inBangladesh at the moment.

Moreover, one cannot rule out the possibility of capital flight by the factory owners, bothlocal and foreign, suffering from a sense of insecurity. If it so happens, it would create atremendous adverse impact in the economy.

In these circumstances, the good news is that all the parties involved the government,the factory owners and the workers have expressed grave concern over the violentdevelopments in the garments sector. What is more important, all the parties havereportedly agreed, on May 24, to resolve the standoff in the sector through tripartitenegations a process of dispute resolution that has been absent for so many years now.


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The parties concerned have also formed a minimum wage board, comprisingrepresentatives from all the three parties, to deal exclusively with the wages in the garmentindustry a demand of the workers that has been gathering dust in the labour ministrysince 2001.

Misleading conspiracy theories

By way of agreeing to the process of tripartite negotiations and forming the minimumwage board comprising representatives from all the three parties involved, thegovernment and the factory owners have eventually admitted that the absence of anegotiation process and the longstanding dispute over the wage structure have much to dowith the present labour unrest in the garment sector. But their public reactions to the labourunrest appear to be misleading nothing more than political rhetoric that would hardlyhelp solve the problem.

Local government and rural development minister Abdul Mannan Bhuiyan, himself a formerlabour leader, claimed on May 23, before even initiating an investigation, that local andforeign conspiracy was behind the violent outbursts. Some other ministers, including

finance and planning minister M Saifur Rahman also joined the conspiracy theorists. Earlier,on May 21, the Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association, the apexbody of garment factory owners, pointed its fingers at a blueprint of a neighbouringcountry to destroy the countrys booming garments sector, by keeping buyers off theBangladesh apparel industry. Terming the outburst a well designed conspiracy,Abdus Salam Murshedy, BGMEAs acting president, told the media on May 21, When thegarment industry is posting a robust growth and orders keep flooding the factories, theagents of a neighbouring country targeted Bangladeshs apparel industry The agents ofthe neighbouring country are out to destroy our factories by instigating some unrulyworkers. Some factory owners accused some NGOs receiving foreign funds of incitingthe workers to impede the growth of the sector.

To put it in a nutshell, the BGMEA believes, or wants others to believe, that the labourunrest in question was a result of anything but labour movement. It was no labourmovement. The destruction of factories was done by conspirators and outsiders, saidShahadat Hossain Chowdhury, a vice-president of the BGMEA, on May 25. The primeminister asked the home ministry on May 22 to investigate the allegations of conspiracies.The probe is yet to be initiated.

One cannot rule out foreign conspiracies against a cheap market be it of labour,commodity or capital particularly when history records hundreds of wars to captureanothers market. But before looking for conspirators outside the border, it is prudent toexamine the reported grievances of the workforce within the national boundary. With theinternal grievances addressed, the chances of external enemies, if there is any, to succeeddiminish automatically.

Genesis of the labour outburst

The labour unrest in the garment sector did not begin on May 20. The unrest, born out ofyears of genuine grievances of a large section of garment workers, rather took violentexpression in the spontaneous, and therefore thoughtless, protests of a small group ofworkers who reportedly felt cheated by the management of FS Sweater Factory of the SQGroup. The management closed the factory on May 16, with the issue of paying dues,including salaries and overtime bills for three months, remaining unsettled. The


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management, however, assured the workers that it would settle the issue on May 20. Whenthe workers came to the factory premises on the stipulated day, they were greeted by agroup of musclemen allegedly hired by the management, and the management refused totalk about the dues let alone settling them. The mercenary musclemen assaulted some ofthe workers as they wanted to know when the factory would open.

Humiliated and enraged, a group of workers of FS Sweater took their grievances out onseveral other factories in the areas, presumably to secure sympathy of fellow workers, andthey got positive response. True that the workers of many a neighbouring factory, whojoined the agitations of the workers of FS Sweater, operate under better conditions; but it isnot unusual, or unprecedented in the history of labour movements, that better paid workersshow solidarity with their deprived colleagues belonging to different factories. This is equallytrue for factory owners as well: many a good pay master stands by the side of theirworse counterparts, organised under the umbrella ofBGMEA, when it comes to safeguardingthe material interests of factory owners.

Things started taking a turn for the worse when the police fired on the agitating workers,killing one and injuring dozens. The killing actually added fuel to fire, eventually contributing

to turn the spontaneously organised workers into a violent mob. A mob can do anything. Amob can also unwittingly play into the hands of vested quarters. In the present case, it ranamok at and around the Export Processing Zone in Gazipur.

But the factory owners, and the government, only found foreign conspiracy behind thesudden outbursts of the workers, which means that they refuse to even recognise thegrievances of the workers, and take into consideration the fact that the aggrieved workerscan resort to agitation to realise their legitimate demands. The result was obvious: theworkers continued to agitate the next day and the following day, until the government andthe factory owners agreed to form a minimum wage board.

The longstanding deprivation

There are, mainly, four parties involved in the apparel industry: the government, the factoryowners, the western buyers of the finished garments, and the workers. Of the four partiesinvolved, the first three are the immense beneficiaries, while the workers remain deprived deprived of just wages, sound working conditions, the democratic right to tradeunionism, etc.

The government, as said earlier, receives from the sector more than $6,000 million inforeign exchange to pay its import bill every year not to mention the revenue collectedinternally. The western buyers, who get their garment products at the cheapest possibleprice, make huge profits in the European and American markets. Most of the local factoryowners make adequate money out of the industry to build palatial houses in posh areas ofthe capital, have their childrens education and treatment abroad, ride luxury cars, holiday

at tourist resorts across the world. But the garment workers, who make all these profits andbenefits possible for the other three parties involved, are forced to live a miserable life inthe city slums for years upon years. Lack of job security, lack of hygiene, lack of nutritiousfoods and health, lack of education for the children, lack of right to legitimate protestagainst ruthless exploitations, etc are their daily destiny, which is carefully crafted, andperpetually nurtured, by the three other parties. This is a situation that cannot help ensurea sound capitalistic development in the country.

If one simply takes a look at the pathetic wage structure for garments workers, study the


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factory owners inhuman active opposition to the workers demand for negotiation over alegally fixed minimum wage structure, and the governments indulgence to the irrationalwhims of the owners for years in this regard, one would readily understand the level ofexploitation the workers are victims of.

The minimum wage for private jute and textile sector workers was fixed in 1985, which was

only Tk 560 per month. Later, in 1994, the minimum wage for a worker in the garmentssector was fixed at Tk 930 per month. Meanwhile, in 1997, the minimum wage for a workerin the public sector was fixed at Tk 1,550 per month.

Subsequently, the private sector workers, including those in the garments sector,demanded re-fixation of their minimum wage, and the government eventually set upminimum wage board, but the private sector employers did not pay heed to the idea ofreadjusting the minimum wage structure with the rise in the cost of living and thereforerefused to send any representative to board. The government, following a protracted labourmovement, announced in July 2001 the minimum wage structure for the private sectorworkers, fixing Tk 1,200 as minimum monthly salary for unskilled workers in smallindustries, Tk 1,250 in small and medium enterprises and Tk 1,350 in large industries.

But the Bangladesh Employers Federation rejected outright the government proposal anda member of the federation, an owner of a garments factory, moved the High Court inNovember 2001, on the ground that the wage board which announced the minimum wageswas not represented by the employers. The court found, on this technical ground, thegovernment order illegal. Since then, the government and the employers have happilypassed time until the private sector workers started agitating again in the first quarter of2004. The government again sought official recommendation of the employers in April 2004for national minimum wages for the private sector workers. The employers continued tooppose the idea of fixing minimum wage for the workers.

The government, which grants various kinds of incentives to the private sectoremployers from the public exchequer on a regular basis, did not play any pro-active role tomake the employers respond to the legitimate demand of adjusting the minimum wage.Sultan Ahmed, assistant executive director of the Bangladesh Institute of Labour Studies,rightly told New Age on April 29, The government has surrendered to the owners of theprivate sector industries.

This burning issue of minimum wages apart, there are other inhuman exploitations that thegarments workers have been vocal against for more than two decades, including thedemand for paid maternity leave, safe working conditions, weekly holidays, an end toharassment including sexual harassment, the right to trade unionism, etc.

Garments workers in Chicago fought against the tradition of working 12 to 13 hours a dayand seven days a week as many as 120 years ago this month, while the phenomenon still

remains intact in Bangladesh. And as for working conditions, they are one of the worst inthe world frequent garment factory fires taking dozens of lives due simply to lack of safeexits being the burning example. In these circumstances, one wonders why the garmentsworkers of the country would need instigation from abroad to burst into violent protestsagainst decades of multifarious exploitation.

The Brussels-based International Textile, Garment and Leather Worker Federation, on May24, termed the BGMEAs reaction to the labour unrest in question divorced from thereality of the industry and observed that such reaction makes the employers of


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Bangladesh a laughing stock internationally. In their estimation, in February 2005 agarment worker in Bangladesh received only 6 cents as wage per hour, when the figure is20 cents in India and Pakistan, 30 cents in China, 40 cents in Sri Lanka and 78 cents inThailand. The organisation described the wages as truly scandalous.

What is to be done

The labour unrest has initially contributed positively towards the restoration of the standardprocess of the tripartite negation for resolving the longstanding disputes prevalent in theapparel sector. The process should be taken forward through mutual respect between theemployers and the workers. Although the employers have agreed to a tripartite negotiationon the wage issue, the have shown a tendency of containing future labour movements, ifany, in a coercive manner. On top of saying an absolute no to the workers democraticright to sound trade unionism, they have demanded industrial police and a securitymonitoring and control cell at the BGMEA office stationing senior officials of different lawenforcing agencies including the Rapid Action battalion and Bangladesh Rifles. Such warpreparation against possible labour unrest would help little to develop a sound industrialrelation in the sector.

The workers, on the other hand, are keeping a watch on the developments as regards thepossible outcome of the tripartite negotiations. But they do not seem optimistic about apositive solution to the longstanding problems, and therefore have called a strike in thegarments sector for June 12. What the workers need to realise in this regard is that themess created for decades cannot be cleaned over night. They would need some patience toconsolidate the victory that they achieved in terms of making the employers come to thenegotiation table. If the negotiations can begin a healthy process of industrial relation, allparties involved would eventually win. But an honest governmental role remains crucial inforging a constructive negation between the two conflicting forces of the industry thefactory owners and the wage labourers, and the government should play honest, keeping inmind that the apparel industry remains the lifeline of the national economy.

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Garment Industry on a Dormant Volcano of Genuine Labour Grievances