Vol. 77/No. 38      October 28, 2013

The seven workers were killed Oct. 8 in a fire at the Aswad Composite Mills factory in Gazipur, some 25 miles north of Dhaka, the capital.

“The fire started in the knitting department on the second floor, which is also a warehouse, and then spread upward,” Kalpona Akter, executive director of the Bangladesh Center for Workers Solidarity, who visited the burned site, said in a phone interview from Dhaka Oct. 14. “The top floor was badly burnt. Yarn and chemicals stored there made the fire spread very fast and workers were unable to put it down.”

Some 50 workers have been reported injured, some with severe burns.

It could have been a lot worse, Akter said. Most of the 3,000 workers employed at Aswad Composite had left for the day, leaving some 170 working overtime inside.

On Oct. 11 workers in Gazipur held a meeting to protest the needless deaths and injuries and an attack on a demonstration they staged the previous day. They also demanded payment of their Oct. 15 Eid al-Adha holiday bonus and wages. Protesters clashed with cops, who fired rubber bullets and tear gas, injuring at least 30 people.

Garment workers have organized some of their biggest actions in recent months, with rallies, strikes and demonstrations. Central demands have been safer workplaces and a raise in the monthly minimum wage from $38 to $103. They have also intensified efforts to organize unions in the plants, which have been met by bosses with stiff resistance.

“There is a holiday here now, so there aren’t many demonstrations,” Akter said. “But we will resume our actions for a raise in the minimum wage and safety when work starts again.”

In April the shoddy Rana Plaza, with five garment factories, collapsed, killing more than 1,100 workers. This followed a fire at Tazreen Fashions in November last year where more than 120 perished.

A recent study of Next Collections Ltd., which produces for Gap and Old Navy and employs 3,750 workers, shows bosses keep two sets of books, a public one and a real one. The company is part of the Ha-Meem Group, Bangladesh’s second largest garment exporter with more than 25 factories and some 30,000 employees.

The real book shows that workers put in 17-hour shifts, seven days a week, sometimes not ending until 5 a.m.

Current and former employees say bosses often short wages, regularly fire workers illegally, force pregnant women to resign, deny maternity leaves and holiday pay, and physically abuse and harass workers who try to form unions.

The outcry by liberal nongovernmental organizations and politicians from the U.S. to Europe over the mass deaths at Rana Plaza and Tazreen Fashions has included calls for imperialist governments to impose investment and trade restrictions to ostensibly “help” workers there. Meanwhile, the brutal but progressive economic and social development continues apace. Garment exports climbed 24 percent from July through September compared to last year. These important changes are taking place amidst increased combativity and initial moves toward organization by the growing working class — the one force capable of imposing safer conditions.

Many companies are moving their operations from China, the world’s biggest garment producer, where workers have won substantial wage increases.

Bangladesh has 4 million garment workers and exports $20 billion in clothes annually. Vietnam employs 1.5 million with $13 billion in exports and Cambodia has 615,000 with about $5 billion in exports. Capitalists have begun to eye Myanmar and Ethiopia as possible new, more profitable options.
 
 
Related articles:
Coal bosses’ drive for profit kills 3 miners in 3 days
On the Picket Line
Only working class can enforce safety
 
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home