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NEWS & LETTERS, November 2004Toiling in Bangladesh
Chicago--Two Bangladeshi women garment workers spoke at
DePaul University along with a former garment worker, now president of the
Bangladesh Center for Workers Solidarity (BCWS). Their tour, organized by the
National Labor Committee (NLC), sought solidarity in demands on U.S. companies
like Wal-Mart, Disney and Kohls. Robina Akther said: I’m about 18 years old. Two years
ago I went to work at the Western Dresses factory in Dhaka, and I had to do 120
to 150 pieces an hour. After just seven days, the line chief slapped me four
times, screaming that I was not making my target. In the first six months I did not have a single day off.
I got paid seven cents an hour. Eighty percent of the workers are women 16 to 20
years of age. When workers reach 30 or 35, the minute they have trouble with
their eyesight, the factory forces them to leave. The other day we went into a Wal-Mart store and I found
the clothes that my co-workers and I sewed. Please help us win our rights. Maksuda said: I had to go to work in the garment
factories when I was 11 years old. Later at the Lucid Garments factory in my
seventh month of pregnancy, I became sick. I asked my supervisor if I could take
a break. He said, "Leave the factory if you don’t want to work."
Then he violently kicked me in the stomach and I fell to the floor. My
co-workers picked me up and went to the production manager. My daughter is now
almost two years old. To this day, she has a bruise on her head and we have to
be very gentle with her. If you touch it, she cries. The law says we should be paid for six weeks before the
birth and six weeks after. But the management said, "We do not have the law
of maternity leave." We don’t want a boycott. We need these jobs. But we
want the companies to stop beating us, and torturing and abusing us. The
companies should pay us our overtime correctly and not cheat us as they always
do. Sk Nazma, president of BCWS, said: At the Pantex factory
just outside Dhaka, the workers were being forced to work five hours overtime a
day with no overtime pay. Instead of the legal 48-hour week, the company said
the regular workweek would be 66 hours. On Nov. 3, 2003, the workers went on strike. They
blocked a shipment of garments from leaving the factory. The factory owner
called in the police, who opened fire, killing six or seven workers. A
13-year-old girl was shot in the stomach. Charles Kernaghan, NLC senior associate, challenged the
audience to reject the capitalist idea that the economy operates according to
natural laws, outside of human creation, but was unable to escape its logic when
he stated: "If the giant corporations would only agree to pay 25 cents more
per garment, we could lift 1.8 million Bangladeshi garment workers and their
families out of misery and at least into poverty." (See www.nlcnet.org) Kernaghan knew that corporations wouldn’t agree to pay
25 cents more per garment. In fact he said he asked a U.S. company to increase
pay by one cent per garment and the company said it had planned to cut pay by
two cents. His proposed solution was to get U.S. consumers to pay 25 cents
more per garment. His desire to foster solidarity between Bangladeshi
workers and U.S. youth was limited to a consumer relationship with the U.S
"consumer" on top: "Young people here in the U.S. have the key to
unlock misery because the basis of the struggle today is in the market
place." This position fails to recognize that capital’s
degradation of the human being cannot be abolished by increasing wages and
securing worker rights, which are nevertheless needed. It also limits the
potential for conceptualizing revolutionary solidarity that can transform human
relationships around the globe, including the miserable conditions of life and
labor that exist here, within the U.S. --Sonia Bergonzi |
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