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Starving for Justice: Bangladeshi Garment Workers in a ‘Post-Rana Plaza’ World

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 July 2015

Dina M Siddiqi
Dina M Siddiqi*
Affiliation:
BRAC University, Bangladesh
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Extract

On the afternoon of August 2, 2014, I walked into Hossain Market, one of the many nondescript multistoried buildings lining the commercial thoroughfare in Uttor Badda, Dhaka. I had gone to show solidarity with hunger-striking garment workers of the Toba Group, three of whose units were housed in the building. Since July 28, several hundred workers had occupied the upper floors, demanding payment of three months back wages, overtime, and a festival bonus. The market entrance looked deserted, not exactly the hotbed of industrial action I'd expected. “Is this where the strike is?” I asked no one in particular. A couple of young women immediately escorted me up several flights of stairs – past the inevitable collapsible gates and oversized padlocks adorning each floor. On the seventh floor landing, young student volunteers were buzzing around a media and communications desk they had set up. Inside, I found half a dozen workers sprawled across cutting tables and makeshift beds, being administered saline by a medical team provided by a well-known health rights NGO. Hundreds of others, mostly women but also some men, milled across the room. Before I could speak to the workers, Shahidul Islam Shabuj, a labor organizer and sometime acquaintance, spied me from a distance and whisked me away to the top floor for an audience with Moshrefa Mishu, president of the Garment Workers Unity Forum and the prime mover behind the “fast unto death.” For Shabuj, my presence was fortuitous—an opportunity to get the workers’ formal message out.

Type
Reports from the Field
Information
International Labor and Working-Class History , Volume 87 , Spring 2015 , pp. 165 - 173
Copyright
Copyright © International Labor and Working-Class History, Inc. 2015 

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References

NOTES

1. Here I use “deep state” as a “short hand for the embedded anti-democratic power structures within a government,” irrespective of what party is in power. See “What is the Deep State?” in On Religion, July 4, 2013. http://www.onreligion.co.uk/what-is-the-deep-state/. Accessed June 3, 2015.

2. Thus, on the 2014 anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, Hunter College organized a forum entitled From Triangle Shirtwaist to Bangladesh: The Garment Industry, Tragedy and Workplace Safety Reform at which I was asked to speak. The event, which brought together US labor historians as well as activists, was productive and revealing.  It proved to be difficult to transcend the implicitly evolutionary framing inscribed in the terms of debate.  The conversation is online. [http://www.roosevelthouse.hunter.cuny.edu/events/triangle-shirtwaist-bangladesh-garment-industry-tragedy-workplace-safety-reform/ (accessed 6/22/2015)]Roosevelt House, Hunter College, CUNY.  New York, March 25.

3. In this regard, the schedule laid out for  Bangladeshi labor organizer Kalpana Akter, on a tour of the US, last October, is instructive.   In the course of one week, Ms. Akter traveled to Walmart's headquarters to address their Board, lectured at a conference in New York organized by South Asian leftists, consulted with fashion models eager to promote ethical sourcing during New York's fashion week, and picketed GAP stores in the city.

4. For an analysis of how the retailer American Apparel used the Rana Plaza collapse to promote its Made in the USA clothing label, see Siddiqi, Dina M “Solidarity, Sexuality and Saving Muslim Women in Neoliberal Times” in Women's Studies Quarterly Vol 42, No. 3–4, Fall/Winter 2014 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5. Sarah Butler, “Bangladesh factory owners threaten inspection agencies with legal action.” The Guardian, May 26, 2014. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/may/26/bangladesh-clothing-factory-safety-agreement-compensation-closures (accessed 1/13/2015)

6. Taslima Akter, personal communication.

7. Wright, Melissa W. Disposable Women and Other Myths of Global Capitalism.  Routledge, 2006 Google Scholar.

8. International Labour Organization. Union Registrations Rise Sharply in Bangladesh: New Labor Laws Pave Way to Improve Conditions, Workers’ Rights. http://www.ilo.org/dhaka/Informationresources/Publicinformation/Pressreleases/WCMS_236042/lang--en/index.htm (accessed 1/13/2015).

9. This is an ironic position for Nazma Akhter to inhabit today. Along with Lovely Yeasmin, she was a leading member of BIGUF when it was first set up in the early 1990s. Like Yeasmin, she too left to start her own organization, the Awaaj Foundation. At the time, she told me she was frustrated with BIGUF priorities which she felt were set by people in Washington, not by the needs of workers in Bangladesh. For more on Nazma Akhter, see Dina M Siddiqi, “Do Bangladesh Sweatshop Workers Need Saving? Sisterhood in the Post-Sweatshop Era.” Feminist Review 91, 2009:154–174. Indeed, unlike most other federations, BIGUF does not support pressing for duty free access of Bangladeshi garments to the US, for instance.

10. The United States has turned out to be an unexpected site of ethnographic observation of the garment industry in Bangladesh. In the last two years, I have attended and spent time with Nazma Akter at a two day long workshop on the future of the garment industry at New York University’s Stern School of Business, found myself translating for the current president of BIGUF, Namita Nath, at a Washington DC event organized by the International Labor Rights Forum, interviewed Kalpona Akhter during a lunch break at a New York conference to which she had been flown in by the South Asia Solidarity Initiative (SASI) and listened to survivors of Rana Plaza promoting the Accord at a Students Against Sweatshops event at New York University.

11. Trade unionists routinely face physical intimidation and legal harassment through being charged with false cases. The BCWS has even had its license temporarily revoked by the NGO bureau. However, the abduction of Aminul Islam was somewhat unusual and perhaps reflected the political environment of the time, in which extrajudicial killings and disappearance of political rivals was routine.