Why Bangladesh’s Garment Factories are a Warzone 

By Sohini Chakrabarti, MINT 2nd Year

In April 2013, 3,000 labourers went into Rana Plaza, an eight-story structure located in the Bangladeshi suburb of Savar, Dhaka, to carry out their regular tasks. They made clothing for the global supply chain that originates in South Asia’s cotton fields, passes through Bangladesh’s labour and machinery, and ends up in Western retail establishments. Garments for famous brands such as Benetton, Bonmarché, Prada, Gucci, Versace and Zara, conventionally associated with quality and luxury, are mass-stitched here, as are less expensive clothes like those that hang on Walmart racks. On April 23, Bangladeshi authorities had asked the owner, Sohel Rana, to evacuate the building due to structural problems. Rana, however, claimed that the damage was minor and nothing serious. The next day, the building collapsed in the span of two minutes, killing at least 1,132 people and injuring over 2,500 more. 

The list of avoidable ‘accidents’ in Savar is long and painful. In April 2005, at least 79 workers died in a factory collapse; in February 2006, 18 workers died in yet another collapse, followed by 25 in June 2010 and 124 in the Tazreen Fashion Factory fire in November 2012. Since the Rana Plaza devastation over a decade ago, at least 109 other buildings in the area have collapsed. These deadly factories are a byproduct of the 21st century globalised economy: poorly built shelters for a tedious production process, third-rate machines, and workers whose lives are submitted to the imperatives of just-in-time production. 

Bangladeshi factories are part of the landscape of globalisation that is reflected in factories along the US-Mexico border, in Haiti, in Sri Lanka and in other places around the world that opened their doors to the garment industry’s savvy uptake of the new manufacturing and trade order of the 1990s. Subdued countries that had neither the patriotic will to fight for their citizens, nor any concern for the long-term debilitation of their social order, rushed to welcome multinational clothing companies that no longer wanted to invest in factories. So, states turned to subcontractors, offering them narrow profit margins and compelling them to run their factories like prison houses of labour. The garment industry in Bangladesh, which comprises 80 percent of the country’s total export earnings, grew entirely in areas of heightened security, offering workers few prospects to unionise. From sites of opportunity and income, factories transformed into a locus of exploitation and silencing. They are a warzone. An occasional outburst of liberal sentiment in the Global North forces some companies to ‘self-regulate’, an exercise in whitewashing the horrors of the global commodity chain. Capitalist democracy requires this alliance of brutality and reform, of neo-fascism and paternalism. It celebrates the Ranas of the world until they become a liability, and then it simply replaces them.

Wage protests also pose a major challenge to the incumbent Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, who has ruled the country with an iron fist since 2009. A resurgent opposition has challenged her rule as she prepares for elections that are due before January 2024. For many of the country’s four million garment sector workers, monthly pay starts at 8,300 taka ($75). A government-appointed panel raised wages on November 7 by 56.25 percent to 12,500 taka, but striking workers demand a near-tripling of the wage to 23,000 taka. Security has been tightened in key industrial towns outside Dhaka after unions threatened to hold new protests, with the police unhesitant to open fire on dissenting labourers. Around 600 factories that made clothing for many major Western brands were shuttered earlier this month and scores were ransacked in the biggest wage protest in a decade. Four factories were torched and at least five workers were killed in altercations with law enforcement, with tens of thousands of workers blocking highways. 

Sweatshops, synonymous with the garment industry in Bangladesh, have long been scrutinised by critics of the fast-fashion excesses of capitalism for subjecting workers – an overwhelming portion of whom are women – to low wages, poor working conditions and occupational hazards. The history of this industry highlights how it was built by riding the wave of ‘feminization of poverty,’ a rising global trend of gender-related financial vulnerability for women. The UN reports that the majority of the 1.5 billion people living on 1 dollar a day or less are women, thus implying that the majority of the world’s poor are female. From the textile mills of the Industrial Revolution to the modern-day sweatshops in developing countries, women have been at the forefront of the struggle for fair labour practices. Yet their struggles have been overshadowed by the prevailing narrative that these jobs are opportunities for women in impoverished regions, ignoring the exploitative nature of the conditions they endure – in this way, narrow conceptions of empowerment are mainstreamed. The mere presence of employment overshadows unethical production and procurement practices, the marginal increase in incomes obscures poverty and violence, and seemingly inalienable human rights are forsaken for financial improvements. Are labour rights really, then, human rights? While those claiming to engage in progressive policy and development discourse would wholeheartedly endorse an affirmative response to the question, in a neo-liberal paradigm that encourages and protects the amassing of super profits at the expense of human lives, the indivisibility of rights stands on farcical foundations.