Savar tragedy: Female garment workers bear the brunt

 

Last month, 18-year-old Shapla was just another one of thousands of garment workers employed in a factory in Savar, a suburb of Bangladesh’s capital Dhaka.

Today she is a handicapped survivor of one of the worst industrial accidents in history: the collapse on Apr. 24 of the massive Rana Plaza, a building housing five factories that buried scores of workers under a wave of concrete and glass.

The death toll reached at least 1127, though officials and families are still counting the bodies and searching for others beneath the rubble.

“I am desperate about the future,” Shapla said, echoing the sentiments of hundreds of female apparel workers like her who lost their limbs on that fateful day. The young mother is now recovering in a hospital in Dhaka after her hand was amputated. Having survived the collapse, Shapla is considered one of “the lucky ones”, but she is loath to see the bright side, as her handicap will almost certainly prevent her from finding work.

Experts say that women, who make up 80 percent of the workforce in this country’s booming garments industry, have borne the brunt of this tragedy. According to initial reports, over 80 percent of those who lost lives and sustained injuries in the collapse were women.

“They are now socially and economically heavily disadvantaged,” said founder and head of Nari Uddung Kendra (the Centre for Women’s Initiatives).

A leading advocate for female garment workers’ rights, Shefali says her organisation, which has lobbied for better conditions such as safe housing for workers, is now focusing on helping female survivors overcome the trauma of the accident.Some of the workers are  “so badly affected that they say they never want to work in factories again,” Shefali told IPS. “They need long-term physical and mental rehabilitation…and they need to be accepted as disabled persons by their families and society.”

A woman named Nazma Begum, whose legs have been amputated as a result of her injuries, told a local television station this week that she “worried incessantly” about how she would handle her disability, until her husband assured her of his continued support.

Over the last decade, Bangladesh – a country of 150 million of which 49 percent live below the poverty line – has become a crucial player in the international apparel trade by providing a vast supply of cheap labour.

Bangladesh’s garment industry is now the third largest in the world after China and Vietnam, bringing in 20 billion dollars or roughly 80 percent of the country’s annual foreign exchange.

Major apparel companies based in the West and wealthy Asian countries like Japan and South Korea began shifting their production centres to Bangladesh when old manufacturing hubs like Thailand began to raise wages.

Mass-produced and bargain clothes that include such labels as Gap, Primark, HMV, Walmart, Sears and American Apparel are all manufactured here and then sold in the importing countries.

Owner of a Dhaka-based apparel factory agree that garment workers are forced to labour in tough conditions, but claim that employers, too, are “under heavy pressure”.

He told IPS smaller garment companies like his are expected to meet high trading standards or else accept huge losses.

His 500 employees, the majority of them women, produce clothing such as jeans and denim jackets for European and U.S. markets.

But the strict quality standards and deadlines imposed by parent companies in the West often cannot be met in Bangladesh.

While Bangladeshi suppliers work for the promise of tidy profits, they also face massive risks in the “cut-throat capitalist market”.

“This is the key reason businesses are reluctant to support higher labour standards, including higher wages, for the workers,” he said, adding that he welcomes stricter monitoring of the industry.

More than 5,000 factories employing over 3.5 million workers are packed into high-rise buildings in Dhaka and outlying districts, operating round the clock. The biggest to the smallest of these factories are staffed by mostly young women hailing from rural areas, who come to the cities in the hopes of acquiring skills they have no access to in Bangladesh’s agricultural regions.

When they arrive in the city, they often live together in close quarters, sharing washrooms and food.

Illiterate, these women have few means by which to earn a steady income; their vulnerability makes them easy prey for manufacturers who claim that, in order to remain “competitive” on the world market, they must hire the cheapest possible workforce.

Young women often start off as interns, meaning they do not receive a wage but instead labour for a stipend that can be as low as a dollar per month. Within a year, they move on to operating more sophisticated machinery and drawing a regular salary, she added.

Most women sew, wash and pack garments for roughly 30 to 40 dollars a month, working a daily average of 10 hours, seven days a week. In contrast, men tend to be hired for high-level positions, such as quality control and management.

The garment sector has been hailed as one of the country’s biggest employers, bringing a steady wage to thousands of women. But a string of tragedies has recently highlighted the hazardous nature of this work.

Last November, over 100 garment workers perished in a fire in the Tazreen Fashion Factory on the outskirts of Dhaka. Survivors of that tragedy claim they tried to escape, but were locked in by the factory managers.

Similarly, on Apr. 24, employees were threatened with dismissal if they failed to come to work, despite warnings that the eight-storey building, which only had a permit to house five floors, was unsafe. A week before the incident large cracks had begun to appear on the ceilings, prompting engineers to issue warnings that a collapse might be inevitable.

Negligence of workplace safety is just one of many labour violations women workers face. Sometimes they are forced to work 14-hour shifts in order to turn around a quick profit for the factory owners.

Still, activists point out that in a Muslim country with high poverty rates, the garment industry provided a rare opportunity for women to leave their homes and raise their status from housewives to breadwinners.

This increased economic independence enabled them to exercise more autonomy in their own lives, to choose their own husbands and enter into marriages on more equal terms.

But the Savar tragedy has dealt a hefty blow to this hard-earned status.

Sharmin Huq, a retired professor at the Dhaka University who specialises on the handicapped sector, fears that social discrimination will make life harder for women than ever before.

Those who survived the tragedy will likely lose their jobs, as their injuries will prevent them from performing at the level demanded by factory owners.

Huq told IPS that generous donations pouring in from countries like the United States and Germany to help the survivors must be channeled directly towards “the large number of (affected) female workers, to help them re-start their lives.”

This includes support for everything from acquiring artificial limbs to accessing regular counselling to deal with the trauma of the tragedy.

Worker advocacy groups in Dhaka are calling on some of the most high-profile U.S.-based clothing companies to make drastic reforms to their international labour practices in the wake of the factory collapse.

But critics say U.S. companies appear to be “meeting” these demands with increasingly creative ways to circumvent their core recommendations, by forming their own safety initiatives that rights groups say are essentially meaningless, or pulling out altogether to avoid the risk.

“Any meaningful programme needs to be legally binding,” Liana Foxvog, communications director at the International Labor Rights Forum (ILRF), an advocacy group here, told IPS. “It needs to pay prices sufficient for ensuring compliance and needs to include worker representation so that worker voices on what they truly need are at the table.”

U.S.-based companies The Children’s Place and Cato Fashion have both been tracked as sourcing from the factory, but companies such as JCPenney, which sells European brands manufactured at the factory, are also under pressure from activist groups.

As critics strengthened calls for substantive changes in business practices to prevent another Dhaka tragedy, multinational companies responded with a flurry of press releases and attempts at deflecting blame.

“We did not have any ongoing production at the time of the incident,” Cato said in a statement.

The Children’s Place issued a similar statement, saying “none of our apparel was in production” there at the time of the collapse. Activist groups also point to companies’ reluctance to sign onto a binding agreement known as the Bangladesh Fire and Building Safety Agreement as a lack of commitment to worker safety.

“The clothing brands’ insatiable hunger for lower prices and faster delivery by factories cultivates this deadly psychology in Bangladesh,” the Workers Rights Consortium (WRC), an independent monitoring group, said in a statement.

According to the WRC, the agreement would obligate participating companies to “open the doors of their Bangladesh factories to independent inspection and … pay for a country-wide program of renovations and repairs to make these buildings safe.”

The agreement, negotiations over which began in December 2010, needs four companies to become binding; so far, it has only attracted two.

One of the most notable instances of a prominent company bowing out of the negotiations was GAP, Inc., which owns GAP, Old Navy, and Banana Republic, among others. The company chose instead to create their own programme in October 2012.

Yet critics say that GAP’s alternative plan is inadequate. The plan carries no provisions about paying more to factories so they can abide by safety standards, for instance, and does not involve workers or unions in oversight and implementation.

Most importantly, the plan is voluntary and has no teeth for enforcing the measures. IPS contacted GAP for comment but did not receive a response. Walmart, one of the largest retailers in the United States, denied a connection to Rana Plaza to IPS, but had been listed on the factory website, raising questions from activists. It has taken a similar route to that of GAP.

In an e-mail from the company’s international corporate affairs office, IPS was referred to a description of the store’s 1.6-million-dollar donation after the Tazreen fire in 2012 to establish the Environment, Health and Safety Academy in Bangladesh. The Academy would give “comprehensive training” on workplace safety to apparel workers.

Walmart also pointed IPS to a press release about the company’s “strengthening” of fire safety regulations in January 2012 in its factories. Those regulations include “conducting regular fire drills, ensuring adequate number of exit routes and mandating fire safety training to all levels of factory management”, which critics say underscore a weak and inadequate commitment.

Missing from both GAP’s and Walmart’s plans is any mention of higher pay to suppliers to pay for safer buildings, which some critics say would be the first line of response if the companies were genuinely committed to the safety of their workers.

This is all just part of a “game” these companies play, Scott Nova, executive director of the Workers Rights Consortium, told IPS.

“These companies recognise they have to claim they’re doing something in order to avoid damage to the image of the brand, but they don’t want to have to do anything,” he said.

“So what we see are token donations and empty promises that can’t be enforced. They weather the public relations crisis and expect [the media spotlight] to fade.”

Source: Weekly Holiday