I drew this cartoon over the weekend, before I read the article below which explains that not only the importer/retailers, but also their governments, reap huge amounts of wealth from the products made by exploited workers in Bangladesh and other countries, through tarrifs and taxes. That appropriated wealth goes to whatever it is our governments spend money on: infrastructure, perks for politicians, tax refunds for rich corporations, subsidized agriculture, wars, etc.

This article explains how that happens, and why the workers rebelled recently in Dhaka. It was sent to me by its author Anu Muhammad, journalist and editor of Megh Barta, an online progressive journal based in Dhaka; and Professor of Economics at Jahangeer Nagar University, Dhaka.

Why the Workers Became So Audacious?
by Anu Muhammad

Bangladesh witnessed an unprecedented workers revolt in and around Dhaka, the capital city of Bangladesh in 21 to 23 May 2006. ‘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 another hundred, and a halt to production in several hundred factories in the area, burning down thousands of pieces of finished products along the way’ (New Age, 28 May 2006). What made the workers so desperate, who apparently had always been timid and afraid of management?

Garment industry is the largest foreign exchange earning sector in Bangladesh. The six- billion-dollar industry functions with 2.2 million workers, eighty per cent of whom are women. Yet workers in this sector get the lowest wage rate in the world. In 1994, the minimum wage was fixed at 930 taka. There are many factories those pay workers below this line. Since 1994, cost of living for workers increased more than 100 per cent. Recent price hike reduce workers real wage further. No revision of the minimum wage took place since 1994. The garment owners or their umbrella organization BGMEA stubbornly refused to deal with this subject for the last twelve years.

As export-oriented industry, garments sector receives many incentives from the government and also gets legal and coercive support from it to ensure a regimented environment in the factory. Workers do not get appointment letters, therefore they do not have no security of job. Any worker may lose her /his job anytime on any pretext. Moreover, management has the authority and practices to behave with the worker like anything; there is no scope on the part of worker to have any safeguard. Bad words, harassment and also physical assault are common in many factories. Sexual harassment is also reported in many studies on female workers in the industry.

Garments owners feel free to put load on workers to work for 12/13/14 hours or to work for continuous shifts to ensure timely shipment of export products. They prefer not to appoint sufficient number of workers but to make a fewer number of workers to work overtime. Therefore, many workers have to work for seven days a week. No weekly holiday, even public holidays find garment industry working. Even after this Herculean job load, regular payment of wages and overtime has been rare in the industry. Arrears of wages and overtime reaches to more than 20 billion taka in the industry. We know of many instances where workers have been fired without payment after working for months.

Things do not end here. There are many owners who do not feel necessary to ensure workers safety. In the last few years, many hundred workers were killed because they were not allowed to go out when fire broke out inside the factories; about a hundred were killed when a faulty designed factory building collapsed. Cruelty finds many other forms. Few days ago, a teen-age worker was mercilessly beaten and killed by the management in a factory. No action was taken in any of these incidents. On the contrary, on 21 May an agitating worker was killed by police in Gazipur, another was killed the day after.

This context should be kept in mind while we try to understand the violent incidences that took place in and around Dhaka in 22-23 May, where garment workers rose in fury, showed an unprecedented uprising, audacity and violent expression. They were not allowed to form trade union or have links to any organization. Therefore, the uprising could not find any organized shape. There was no leadership. Objectives were not clearly spelled out. There was only display of anger. This was an explosion, protesting against long suppressed deprivation, insult, harassment and super exploitation.

It is possible that competitor countries or vested interests at home and abroad took advantage of this unrest. There might have been some deliberate provocation. However, these should not be an excuse to sidetrack the real factors working behind the agitations.

The global dimension of super exploitation

The extent of super exploitation in the garments sector becomes clearer when we bring in the global dimension of garments trade, especially its marketing in the west. Let me here quote Mahmood Ali who lives in Sweden. He wrote a piece in www.meghbarta.org, explaining how European countries extract larger share of benefits from garments of Bangladesh. He wrote, ‘The Bangladesh garment industry has supplied products worth of US dollar 4.3 billion in the fiscal year 2003-4 to European markets. An example from the Swedish garment market can be used to illustrate the diversity of profiteering that emerges out of the exploitation of Bangladeshi garment workers. An average price of a woollen sweater in Sweden is around Swedish Crown (SEK) 300 (around Taka 2700). Prices of these items are high before Christmas. Most people tend to buy sweaters after the Christmas holidays when these are put on sale at reduced prices. For a sweater sold at SEK 150, the government of Sweden earns 25 percent (i.e., SEK 37) as value added tax (VAT). The Bangladeshi garment supplier sells the item at a price of SEK 35. The lion share of the sale (around SEK 77) goes to the Swedish garment importer while the Bangladeshi worker does not earn even half of one SEK. While both the Bangladeshi exporter and the Swedish importer can incur some expendi tures, the government of Sweden, without encountering anything, earns 75 times more than that earned by the Bangladeshi garment worker. This is a source of income of the Swedish government that emanated from the exploitation of poor garment workers of Bangladesh and is used subsequently to provide high standard of living for its own citizens who are immensely happy to enjoy high quality garments at a bargain price.’

The same equation is true for the United States and Canada. To put the case in simpler terms it may be said that every garments that is sold at US$100 in the western market , the governments of those countries earn more than US$25, foreign buyer makes US$50 and of the rest nearly US$25 go to the owners, raw material suppliers etc. For workers it comes to less than US$1.

During fiscal year 2004-5 Bangladesh exported nearly US $5 billion worth of garments to Europe and North America. So, the governments of these countries earned around US dollar 1.5 billion out of it through tax. This amount is more than what Bangladesh ‘receives’ from these governments in the name of ‘foreign aid’. In other words poor garments workers of Bangladesh provide more to the developed countries than they pretend to give us as ‘aid’ and double of this to the corporates.

Therefore it is a global network, local and foreign stakeholders are sharing the cake in different proportions. All of these rich beneficiaries are standing on poor workers. If I talk in terms of extraction of surplus value of workers, it can be clearly shown how surplus value is extracted at global level. That is what capitalist globalization is. The bigger share of surplus value is going to the metropolitan state and their big corporate bodies. Most of the local owners, in trying to make their smaller share more lucrative, squeeze workers more and more and takes them to a life not better than a slave.

The incidents of workers’ revolt have shown peoples urge to break the chain of a slave and to get a life of a worker with dignity.