Canadians urged to help BD labourers

A year ago, Kalpona Akter stood inside a still-smouldering garment factory on the outskirts of Dhaka, looking for clues amid a scene of horror.

Around her were signs of the panic that workers on the production floor experienced hours earlier when the Tazreen factory caught fire, killing 117 workers. Burned bodies were still scattered around. There were signs that people had tried to remove bars from the windows to escape. Some had succeeded and leaped from windows to their deaths. “It was unbelievable.” Akter, a former child labourer, who has made it her life’s mission to improve deadly working conditions in the Bangladeshi garment industry, slipped into the factory and began searching piles of clothing looking for labels to verify which companies the clothes were being made for. What she found and saw around her became part of the evidence linking the conditions in the brutal sweatshops of Bangladesh, the Western retailers who sell their products and the consumers who buy them, and part of the campaign to turn the industry around. This week, the diminutive Bangladeshi powerhouse was in Canada to pressure businesses, consumers and the federal government to help improve the kind of deplorable working conditions that led to the deaths of 1,200 Bangladeshi garment workers – the vast majority of them women – in the past year alone. In both the Tazreen factory fire in November 2012, and, five months later, the Rana Plaza building collapse in which more than 1,100 workers were killed, the clothes being made were sold to Western companies, including Canadian companies and those that sell to Canadians. Canadian companies and consumers have the responsibility to help change the situation, she said, and so does the federal government. The government, she says, should follow the US example and place conditions on its trading status with Bangladesh in order to monitor and influence workers wages and work conditions. Consumers can also exert influence, she said, but that should not include a boycott. “Not buying is not the solution,” she said. “A boycott would be suicide for the workers who work in this industry. We are talking about four million workers, and over 85 per cent are female. There is no doubt we need these jobs but we want them with dignity. We want a safe working place, a decent wage and a union voice at our factories.” Akter encouraged Canadian consumers to pressure companies to sign the accord with garment workers unions that brings a mandatory independent inspection process to the system and gives workers a voice at the table. She also says consumers should put pressure on companies that haven’t paid compensation in the case of garment factory disasters. Although Loblaw – whose Joe Fresh clothes were being made at Rana Plaza – is the only Canadian company to sign the accord, Akter says it has not yet paid compensation to workers and their families. She met with company officials during her visit to Canada who have said they plan to pay compensation. She also said consumers should “raise their voices” to say retailers should charge more for their clothing so workers can be better paid, in the range of $100 a month. (Most estimates put current wages at around $60 a month.) “As consumers, they have purchasing power they can use to make these factories safer and to give a better voice to our workers.” Akter knows well what it is like to work in gruelling, unsafe work conditions for minimal pay. When her father became sick, she was sent to work at a garment factory, along with her brother. She was 12 and he was 10. The two children were working to support a family of seven. Akter, who is now 36, says she worked more than 400 hours a month for a salary of $6. Workers were slapped by managers for minor mistakes, were prevented from using the bathroom and were often locked on the work floor. Once, she said, there was a fire on another floor and managers would not let workers leave, saying the fire would not reach them. Workers panicked and managers finally relented, opening the door, but when they did workers stampeded down the partially blocked stairway and many were seriously injured. Akter helped form a union at her plant when she was just 15 and was fired a year later. She had a hard time getting work in any garment factory after that, but eventually went to work for a union and recently helped form the Bangladesh Centre for Worker Solidarity, which offers education, support and lobbying on behalf of garment workers. Still, despite the growing awareness of human rights violations, abuses and threats to workers safety, she said that little has changed over the years. When she went to the site of the Tazreen fire, Akter said she watched panicked workers jumping from windows. One woman later told her that she had not jumped to save her life, but so that her family would be able to identify her body. When the Rana Plaza collapsed, Akter was in the US lobbying for better working conditions in Bangladesh, but quickly returned and went to the site. She said she saw families with pictures asking if anyone had seen their loved ones and even small children with pictures of their missing mothers. “There was so much pain in the air. Families were crying and screaming.” Akter said she cried all night when she heard about the Rana Plaza disaster. “How much can you take? Every single hour, every single minute it was like you were keeping score of the bodies.” The final tally was more than 1,100 workers. A spokesman for the Department of Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development said Canada is concerned about working conditions in the global ready-made garment sector and supports efforts to provide workers with safe and healthy working conditions. But Canada’s Least-Developed Country Tariff, which provides duty-free access to Canada for Bangladeshi goods, was created in 1983 to promote development in the world’s poorest countries with no other conditions. A spokesman also noted that the US effort to suspend tariff benefits is largely symbolic, because the US program does not cover apparel, which is Bangladesh’s largest industry. The EU announced after the Rana Plaza collapse it would continue Bangladesh’s duty-free status.