Bangladesh's rioting garment workers

Many thanks to Jeremy Seabrook, author of Freedom Unfinished: Fundamentalism and Popular Resistance in Bangladesh Today, for this guest blog from Dhaka.

On 29 July, a new minimum wage for garment workers in Bangladesh was set at 3,000 taka a month (US$40), a rise of 80% on the 1662.50 agreed in 2006 (US$24). Following this announcement, angry workers demonstrated all over Dhaka, vandalising shops, setting fire to cars, wrecking machinery, even attacking the upmarket shopping area of Gulshan Circle. The workers are demanding a minimum of 5,000 taka (about US$70). Three quarters of Dhaka’s 1.5 million garment workers are women, in an industry which earns 80% of the country’s foreign exchange. Some of the workers’ representatives have accepted the new minimum wage. Among those who have resisted, there have been arrests and imprisonment. The garments sector remains restive; and a sense of unfinished business hangs over the city.

For some years, minor disturbances have broken out almost daily on the streets of the capital – wages unpaid for months, rent hikes, abuse, fines for alleged indiscipline. Violence reflects a daily experience, in which workers are often killed in fires and accidents: in February 2010, 21 perished in a blaze in Gazipur in the industrial belt of Dhaka.

In April 2010, after riots in 22 factories, six thousand workers blockaded the Dhaka-Chittagong Highway. Late last year, several thousand people besieged the Nippon Garment Factory: police shot dead three people and injured over a hundred. They then lodged legal cases against the protesters, including those they had killed. On 25 May 2010, 35 people were hurt in pitched battles between police and workers protesting against housing costs. On 13 June 2010, seven garment factories were suspended, including those owned by the president of the Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers’ and Exporters’ Association: workers vandalised six factories and fought police. On 19 June, 7,000 workers ransacked 37 factories; police fired rubber bullets and teargas, and 100 people were injured. On 21 June, all apparel units in the industrial suburb of Ashulia were closed following skirmishes that blocked roads and burned vehicles. Demonstrations, outbreaks of vandalism and arson have continued since the new minimum wage was announced.

Leaders of Britain’s Unite union, together with the United Steelworkers of the US and Canada, recently placed an advertisement in one of Dhaka’s leading newspapers declaring solidarity with the garment workers under the umbrella of Workers Uniting, which was formed in 2008 as the first truly global trade union.

Garment workers in Bangladesh are the lowest paid in the world, and the recent rise does little to remedy their position. The World Bank reported in May 2010 that Bangladesh is the third largest exporter of garments after China and Turkey. Workers get US$1.66 an hour in China, 56 cents in Pakistan, 51 cents in India, 44 cents in Indonesia, 36 cents in Bangladesh. This is an overestimate: anyone on the new minimum of 3000 taka will be earning little over 12.5 cents an hour for a 60-hour week.

Rent and food prices have doubled in the past five years. Workers wanted a minimum of 5,000 taka month. Most are recent migrants, who came to Dhaka so they could send money to their landless families; but after living expenses, nothing is left; the only gift to those they love is their own absence – one less mouth to feed.

With time, they do acquire skills which enable them to remit money to rural areas; but the city does not broaden their horizons. If anything, the wide skies and ferocious cyclones that devour land and flood crops tell them more about the world than their twilit factory experience. Most do not know the identity of their employer and have never seen the managing director. They know only their status as operative in the productive hierarchy. They have never heard of the destination of items that pass swiftly through their dexterous hands, or of how garments become apparel, acquiring value as they fly from buying house to exporter to importer, wholesaler and retailer on the global High Street.

House-rent accounts for half the monthly income; home is a windowless room in a concrete building shared with five others or a sweltering hutment of tin. The urban poor are being compressed into a declining area of the city, while factories, palaces blazing with light, tower over slums and tenements. In the evening, vehicles bearing the message On Emergency Export Duty rush through the city: garments earn three quarters of the country’s foreign exchange.

The diet of the workers is rice, dal, vegetables; no meat, eggs, fruit or milk. Even fish, traditional protein of poor people, is too expensive. Ripe mangoes, which at home fall from the trees into the hands of children, are now out of reach. They tell of unreliable water supplies, long queues for the latrine, sweaty nights under roofs that retain the heat of the day, youth and energy sewn into throwaway garments, made with a Juki machine on a plastic-topped table under shadowless strip lighting.

More than 30 MPs of the ruling Awami League are factory owners. This is reflected in the government’s response to unrest. After the April disturbances, the Home Minister said: “No one will be spared if found to be involved in creating unrest in the garments sector.” Government said it had “information that outsiders often fuel trouble in this sector.” The ruling elite cannot imagine that poverty, and not malice, drives people, although owners spend as much on a night out as their workers earn in a year. In any case, they prefer to see in the unrest evidence of conspiracy or sabotage by their political opponents.

Disturbances in Bangladesh are closer to 18th century ‘bread riots’ in pre-industrial Europe than demonstrations of worker unity and organisation. In any case, unions are banned in many factories, and even where they are not, they are often organised by management or funded by foreign NGOs. The workers of Bangladesh still think of themselves as belonging to the village from which they came. Theirs is not yet an urban sensibility; nor is Dhaka an industrial city: it is, rather, an extended assembly line. Trade unionism finds it difficult to take root in the shallow soil of factories which have been in existence for barely 20 years.

The landmass of Bangladesh, equal to that of England and Wales, bears two and half times the population. With an army of landless, its people stranded between rural and urban, and the fragile hold of a garments industry which can fly by night to more lucrative locations, Bangladesh has few options. Loss of employment is the last thing workers want. There are few other livelihoods in this, the fastest-growing, most congested city on earth. Chaotic protests are likely to continue. The rise in the minimum wage will not scare the garments industry away, as many manufacturers claim; but indifference to the concentration of urban poverty in Dhaka and Chittagong may well do so. 

Jeremy Seabrook
Dhaka, August 2010