One Garment Worker Killed as Bangladesh Turmoil Hits Inflection Point
One person was shot dead and at least 20 others injured in Bangladesh on Monday after a skirmish between garment workers and security forces turned violent in the industrial suburb of Ashulia near the capital of Dhaka, forcing several factories to close.
Local media identified the deceased man as Kawsar Hossain Khan, a 27-year-old Mango Tex employee who was among several hundred protestors demanding higher wages and better working conditions. Workers blocked the Nabinagar-Chandra highway, lobbed bricks at police vehicles and pelted rocks at officers, a law enforcement official said.
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The Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association, the trade group better known as the BGMEA, expressed its condolences to Khan’s family, along with a gift of 500,000 Bangladeshi taka ($4,187), at a press conference that same evening. It also called for “enhanced safety measures” amid continuing disruptions that have aggravated production delays from the anti-government uprising and recent floods.
“We are demanding safety, and without it, the factories will suffer due to the labor unrest,” Abdullah Hil Rakib, senior vice president at the BGMEA, told reporters.
Both the BGMEA and government officials have blamed the chaos on “outsiders” rather than workers. Nazmul Kabir, managing director of AR Jeans, told the Dhaka Tribune that he formed a “protection belt” with 300 workers to guard his factory from vandals and arsonists.
Others say that workers’ demands are legitimate and reflect long-simmering tensions that have no other outlet in an environment hostile to organizing and freedom of association.
That unrest persists despite an agreement to meet most of the workers’ demands strikes a blow at efforts to restore a semblance of normalcy. The politically fraught period has seen several global brands reevaluating future orders. Already, some 30 percent of orders have either dried up or shifted to countries such as India and Vietnam, BGMEA president Khandoker Rafiqul Islam told The Business Standard last week. He later told The Daily Star that manufacturers have lost more than $100 million due to their inability to maintain production during the demonstrations. The sector’s biggest challenges, Islam said, are increasing the pace of production and shipping goods to clear the backlog.
Even so, issues with the country’s 4.1 million-strong garment workforce—the backbone of roughly $45 billion in exports every year—run deep. Of the 18 demands that workers provided, many revolved around wages, allowances and bonuses—the same concerns that drove unprecedented wage protests this time last year. Although the minimum wage had ticked up 56 percent from 8,000 to 12,500 taka ($67 to $105), workers said they needed at least 23,000 taka ($193) to cope with mounting costs due to spiraling inflation. The WageIndicator Foundation backs this up, estimating that the minimum wage comprises just 38 percent of what would constitute a living wage in Bangladesh.
The BGMEA said that factories will be providing an additional 225 taka ($1.90) in attendance bonuses, increasing night and lunch (also known as tiffin) allowances by 10 taka (80 cents), paying any outstanding wages by October and engaging in non-discriminatory hiring of male versus female workers.
Meanwhile, the Ministry of Labour and Employment has agreed to consider forming a new minimum wage board in the next six months, extend maternity leave from 112 to 120 days, increase workers’ access to rations, resolve all outstanding cases against workers involved in last year’s protests and provide compensation to the families of those killed or injured during the wage demonstrations and pro-democracy riots. It will also review allegations of biometric blacklisting and take the reins of the jhut, or post-industrial fabric waste, business to monitor cases of extortion and fraud.
“We’ve addressed all the demands,” labor advisor Asif Mahmud Shojib Bhuiyan said last week of the 18 demands. “We have immediately approved the demands we found reasonable, while the rest will be dealt with according to committee recommendations. Any further unrest will be met with legal action.”
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