The crisis in the garments sector goes unabated in
Bangladesh. On January 30, 2008 two workers in World Dresses Ltd, Mirpur,
Dhaka, were attacked and beaten by management staff at the end of an evening shift.
Khokon and Malek were apparently almost the last workers on the premises at
8pm, as they were washing themselves before leaving. Five officials appeared
and accused them of loitering with intent to rob the company. They then beat
the workers severely.
As their condition deteriorated, the management staff
eventually took them to hospital; Khokon died at 3am, while Malek is still
| Garment workers in Bangladesh |
hospitalised with broken limbs. Fearing unrest
and attempting to hide the incident, management closed the factory on Thursday,
falsely claiming a failure of power supply. When knowledge of the attack
reached the company’s workers, hundreds demonstrated outside the factory on
Friday morning. When police baton-charged the crowd they responded with stones
and bricks. Ten workers were injured. As the para-military Rapid Action
Battalion arrived in the area, workers dispersed.
To illustrate the scale of events in
the past two years: around 4000 factories in Dhaka have been on wildcat strike,
16 factories were burnt down by strikers and hundreds more ransacked and
looted, pitched battles were fought with cops and private security forces in
workplaces. These events have ignited a wave of fierce class struggle in the
garment industry up and down the country. These revolts are spreading beyond
the workplace and are absorbing the wider working class community.
Reason behind the crises
The garment industry of
Bangladesh has been the key export division and a main source of foreign
exchange for the last 25 years. The industry provides employment to about 3
million workers of whom 90% are women. This sector is
entirely export oriented and is composed of over 5000 units – most working for
international buyers, some owned by international companies. Most of the
garment units are clustered in industrial areas and Export Processing Zones (EPZs)
in and around Dhaka. In 1978 the Bangladesh government set up EPZs to attract
foreign capital and earn export dollars. In 1993 the Bangladesh Export
Processing Zone Authority (BEPZA) was set up and a blanket ban on trade union
activity imposed. The EPZs now employ 70,000 workers, mostly in the garment and
shoe-making industries (though most of the garment industry exists outside the
EPZs). National labour laws do not apply in the EPZs, leaving BEPZA in full
control over work conditions, wages and benefits. Garment factories in
Bangladesh provide employment to 40 percent of industrial workers. More than
three-quarters of the $7.8 billion of Bangladesh’s export earnings comes from
exporting garments. Most of the garment workers have migrated from the
poorest rural areas into the city slums. The slum population of Dhaka has
doubled in the last 10 years (up to 3.4 million in 2006 from only 1.5 million in 1996
following heavy rural-urban migration). More than 90 per cent of the
slum dwellers have income below poverty line, which is Taka 5,000 (£ 37.00) a
month per household. The dwellers are mostly transport workers, day labourers,
garment workers, small vendors, informal traders and domestic helps. It is this
wider community that usually joins in the clashes and riots with the garment
workers.
The global economy is controlled by the transfer
of production, where firms in developed countries turn their attention to
developing countries. The new system is centred on a core-periphery system of
production, with a comparatively small centre of permanent employees dealing
with finance, research and development, technological institution and
modernisation and a periphery containing dependent elements of production procedure.
Reducing costs and increasing output are the main causes for this arrangement.
They have discovered that the simplest way to cut costs is to move production
to a country where labour charge and production costs are lower. According to
one report (see Editorial Section, New Age, 30/01/2008) the hourly
wage in Bangladesh is $0.25 compared to $0.35 in China, $0.60 in India, $0.40
in Indonesia, , $0.40 in Pakistan, $0.45 in Sri Lanka and $2.40 in Mexico. Since developing nations provide
areas that do not impose costs like environmental degeneration on the factories
who make the mess, this practice protects the developed countries against the problems
of environment and law. The transfer of production to Third World has helped
the expansion of economy and also sped up the economy of the developed nations.
Two non-market elements have performed
a vital function in confirming the garment industry’s so called continual
success in Bangladesh; these elements are (a) quotas under Multi-Fibre
Arrangement (MFA) in the North American market and (b) special market entry to
European markets.
The MFA and special market entry to European markets rest
on a system of clothing and textile export quotas allocated to developing
countries by developed countries. The industrialised nations established these
quotas as a means of protecting their own sectors in the face of increasing
competition from countries where goods could be produced at lower costs, such
as Asia. The quotas allocated to highly competitive exporting countries, such
as the South Korean Republic, tended to be very limited, while those allocated
to those that exported less were bigger. This led clothing exporters to move
all over the world in search of the quotas available, contributing to the
creation of millions of jobs in countries that previously had a very small
clothing export base, or none at all, such as Bangladesh. Indeed, as a
developing country reached its export quota ceiling, production was redirected
to countries with either unfulfilled quotas or no quotas at all. Some of these
states did not have the infrastructure needed for the harmonious development of
this sector, but still saw a rise in the growth of clothing manufacturers
thanks to the quota system alone.
The
MFA was renewed on three occasions over the years and was finally phased out on 1 January 2005. The MFA expired and
Bangladeshi exporters were no longer protected by the quotas restricting
imports of textiles and clothing from more competitive countries like China and
India. The end of the quota system led to the loss of 1 million jobs in
Bangladesh’s clothing industry. The Bangladeshi government itself estimated
that at least 200,000 to 300,000 workers lost their jobs. Millions of jobs in
related sectors of activity, such as transportation, button making, information
businesses, hotels, financial services and property companies went into risk.
USA’s imports of baby
clothes from China more than quadrupled in 2002, whilst those from Bangladesh
fell by 16%. Other types of clothes show similar trends: according to the
government, Bangladesh has lost 33% of its export markets for the 29 products
removed from the quota system on 1 January 2002, mostly to the benefit of China
and Vietnam. Hundreds of garment factories were closed between 2001 and 2003
following the drop in demand from the USA after the attacks on September 11
2001. As the import of
Chinese goods increased, the USA also started to buy more clothes from
Caribbean and sub-Saharan African countries, which have recently been granted
customs-free access to this market for their clothes. At the same time, the USA
has kept high taxes on clothes imported from Bangladesh. In 2002, Bangladesh paid
almost the same amount in tax on its 2.4 billion dollars of clothes exports to
the USA (approximately 330 million dollars) as France for its 24 billion million
dollars of exports to the USA. The other major market for Bangladeshi
exporters, the European Union (EU), has scrapped import dues though only on a
few clothes containing a certain proportion of materials with the “made in
Bangladesh” label.
Solely concerned with
making profits, Bangladeshi garments employers are quick to accept orders even
when they know it will be very difficult to deliver them on time. They put
pressure on employees to do a lot of overtime. Given the low basic wages, the
workers are forced to agree to do this overtime. However the fatigue that the
latter produces adds to the existing bad health of many workers in this sector
and to a reduction in the quality of products and in the companies’
productivity. That has gone worse since the government has recently announced
that it would increase the amount of authorised overtime and reduce the restrictions
on women’s night work.
Trade Unions
The textile and
clothing companies in Bangladesh are some of the most hostile towards
recognition of workers’ union rights. Out of 3,000 textile firms that produce
for the export market barely 127 have an officially registered union and less
than a dozen employers have serious negotiations with unions. Workers are
frequently victims of sackings, beatings or false accusations by the police of
militancy within their unions. Workers who try to set up a union are not
protected before its registration and so are often subjected to harassment from
their employers, which sometimes assume a violent form with police support. The
names of workers asking to register a union are often passed on to employers,
who quickly try to transfer or sack them, above all in the textile sector. Even
once a union has been registered those workers suspected of activism are
subjected to frequent harassment. Majority of trade unions in Bangladesh have direct or indirect links with local and
foreign Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs), and receiving lucrative grants
seem to be their main goal. Most of the trade unions appear to be tools of main
political parties, strikes being used more as vehicles for pursuing political
goals against rival parties rather than improving workers’ conditions.
Minimum wage for the workers is now Taka 950 (£7.00)
a month that was fixed around 12 years ago. Nearly all workers
in the Bangladesh garment industry work for little more than starvation wages,
under conditions closer to those endured by European workers 150-200 years ago.
Physical and sexual abuse in the workplace is common where most are girls as
young as 12 years old. Over time is often compulsory and wages are sometimes withheld
for months. The condition is worse outside the EPZs where 80% of the garments
workers are employed (see www.libcom.org).
Exploitation
To
stay in the international competition without any quota system in place, the
garment employers are sucking the blood out of the workers. The minimum wage
hasn’t improved for years and with no clear trade union intervention regarding
this matter, employers are exploiting workers at will. The easiest way the
system can extract surplus value is by prolonging the working hours. This is a
classic example of extracting absolute surplus value. In Capital Vol 1, Marx
mentions:
The
prolongation of the working-day beyond the point at which the labourer would
have produced just an equivalent for the value of his labour-power, and the
appropriation of that surplus-labour by capital, this is production of absolute
surplus-value. It forms the general groundwork of the capitalist system…. (Karl Marx, Vol 1, Part 5, chapter 16)
There
is a limit in increasing the total working hours. It has serious impact on the
health of the workers, resulting in inefficiency. A study carried out in 2003 by a
Bangladeshi institute on over 800 textile workers discovered that 42% of women
workers and 24% of their male counterparts are suffering from chronic diseases
(such as gastro-intestinal infections, urinary complaints, blood pressure
problems and anaemia, etc.). 45% of the women and 36% of the men who were
interviewed said they felt weak, whilst 3% of the women and 4% of the men had
fainted in the months prior to their interviews. Their weakened state is causing
major losses of productivity but has not encouraged the bosses to make radical
improvements to the situation
This
is not the end of the plight of the workers. With huge job losses in the
garments sector women workers are the most vulnerable. It can be said that
trafficking of Bangladeshi girls to foreign countries could increase as the
number of jobs falls in the textile industry. The prospect of getting a job in
this sector in Dhaka or other major cities attracts tens of thousands of young
women from rural areas, who are determined not to return to their villages
without having succeeded in earning a lot of money. The traffickers are well
aware that these young women are in a very vulnerable position.
In most cases these women have no idea of the risk they run of ending up in foreign prostitution
networks. The traffickers sell these girls for around 100 to 400 US dollars.
India, Pakistan and some Arab countries are the main destinations for these
smuggled girls.
Conclusion
Karl Marx wrote 120 years ago, “Capital is dead labour, that,
vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more
labour it sucks.” (Capital, Volume I,
Chapter 10). Marx’s quote is an exact example of the capital system in the
garments sector. In Bangladesh the
capital system is worse than vampires. The crises in Bangladesh should also be examined from a global
perspective. Globalization yields bad results
as seen from the garments sector. In the case of Bangladesh it is clear that
impediments to exports worsen the financial stability of poor people. The
evidence from the garments sector suggests that relying on trade or foreign
investment alone is not enough to improve the condition of poor people of Bangladesh.
The poor need education, improved infrastructure, ability to relocate out of
contracting sectors into expanding ones. Apologists
for capitalist globalization claim that they are bringing jobs and economic
development when they chase low wages throughout the developing world. Instead
it destroyed many rural based economies and agricultures, driving millions off
their land. This is a pattern repeated by all the so-called free trade
agreements.
Lenin made it clear in his “Imperialism: the Highest Stage of
Capitalism,” that imperialism is not a policy. It is a stage of capitalist
development, an objective process. The same is true of capitalist
globalization. It is not a policy of this or that government. It is an
objective process of transnational capitalist development. This distinction is
important to understanding the class struggle today. Government policy can have
impact on how capitalist globalization proceeds, as long as capitalism is the
dominant economic system, its globalization will continue.
The process of capitalist globalization is a very important
context for understanding the labour movement in the Bangladesh today. How did
we get here? Why such a steep decline in union membership in the last 25 years?
These are some of the questions we would like to follow in a later article.
Capitalist
globalization has to be met with international labour solidarity. The process
of building global labour solidarity is an objective process of the class
struggle, just as capitalist globalization is an objective process. One clear
responsibility for progressive forces in labour is to make the connections and
push for greater and greater international ties and contact with workers of the
world.
