Crunch time for garment industry

Millions of garment workers across Bangladesh are waiting to learn if they have finally been granted a pay rise.

DHAKA: Millions of garment workers across Bangladesh who put in 13-hour shifts making Western clothes for the lowest industry wages in the world are waiting to learn if they have finally been granted a pay rise.

“Next week’s decision is so important – for the workers, for the industry, for the country,” Shanty Begum, 34, who has worked in a factory for 17 years, told AFP.

Garment workers from multiple factories interviewed by AFP described routine violations of the current minimum standards including underpayment, working hours far in excess of the statutory limit and abuse by factory managers.

“I hadn’t been paid for three months. I told my manager: ‘If you don’t pay us, we won’t work,’ and he smashed my head into a sewing machine,” said Begum, a thin, nervous-looking woman with jagged scars running across her scalp,” she said.

The Bangladeshi government and industry representatives are now locked in discussions over the wage hike, with unions demanding a 5,000-taka minimum and factory owners resisting a substantial increase.

“If they do not meet our demands we will have no option but to strike, we will create a militant movement, we will be on the streets again,” said Mosherafa Mishu, head of the Garment Workers Unity Forum.

This week, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina entered the highly charged debate for the first time, telling the powerful garment industry, which accounts for 80 percent of the South Asian country’s annual exports, to compromise.

“It is not possible for the workers to live on the wages they get now,” Hasina told parliament on Wednesday.

“Factory owners are profiting from this industry, they have to share some of these profits with the workers,” Hasina said, adding she believed the negotiations would find an “acceptable solution” on a wage increase.

Published in The Express Tribune, July 26^th, 2010.