Industry insiders and trade union leaders blamed the recent unrest in the garment sector entirely on Shipping Minister Shajahan Khan, who they said is the heart of all trouble now.
“The minister got involved in the whole situation to gain some political leverage ahead of the election by winning hearts of workers,” said a labour leader asking not to be named.
A factory owner said, “Shajahan is the man who incited violence and he should know how to fix the problem.”
And some labour leaders threw their weight behind the minister to accelerate the campaign for more wage, said the leading garment maker, who also preferred to remain anonymous.
The owners and trade union leaders were venting their anger to reporters after attending a meeting with the minister at his secretariat yesterday to seek security of their factories that came under spells of attacks in the last few days.
Shajahan in the meeting said he got engaged in the workers’ affairs as Labour and Employment Minister Rajiuddin Ahmed Raju is abroad now.
But Raju left for Kolkata only yesterday, for his treatment, according to a labour ministry official.
State Minister for Labour Monnujan Sufian told The Daily Star that she was not aware whether Shajahan was assigned to handle the workers’ issue, which she said is actually under the jurisdiction of her ministry.
“A rally [on Saturday] was not needed while an independent wage board was working to fix the salary of the workers. The rally was called on the advice of the minister,” a labour leader said.
The minister was trying to pass a message to a large section of the 3.6 million garment workers in the country that the government has managed a new wage structure for them, he said.
“The minister was successful, to some extent, in gaining from the rally,” said the trade union leader who was present at the gathering at Suhrawardy Udyan in the capital.
More than 400 factories in Dhaka, Gazipur and Savar remained shut on Saturday as workers demanded a one-day leave and took to the streets to join the rally.
Since Saturday the unrest has been continuing and a number of factories have been vandalised so far in Ashulia, Savar, Mirpur, Uttara, Badda and Gazipur.
“We sought security and cooperation from the minister [Shajahan] and the labour leaders so we can run our factories peacefully,” said SM Mannan Kochi, vice-president of Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association.
“We are ready to follow any logical proposal on wage hike,” he said at a briefing after the meeting yesterday.
But many garment owners will not be able to pay the workers before Eid-ul-Azha if the unrest continues, he said.
Montoo Ghose, president of Garment Sramik Trade Union Kendra, a platform of workers, said: “Someone might have instigated the unrest from behind.”
He urged the wage board to announce the minimum salary for the workers as soon as possible to restore normalcy in the sector.
“The minimum salary at Tk 8,000 is our demand; still we have scope for further negotiation,” he said.
Shajahan at the briefing said he was not responsible for the unrest by any means. “The unrest is the act of the fundamentalists.”
The minister assured the garment factory owners of security and urged them to reopen the closed units.
He said the owners should “identify the unruly workers so that they can be brought to book”. The minister also advised the workers to join work from today.
He said the objective of the Saturday rally was to establish the rights of the workers, protest the derogatory comment of Hefajat-e Islam chief Ahmed Shafi, and raise “our demand for regaining the GSP in the US market”.
This, however, is not the first time that the shipping minister has run into a controversy.
It was none but Shajahan who before a parliamentary sub-committee in February last year demanded that extortion be made legal to stop rampant corruption in the transport sector.
Other than his ministerial duties concerning one of the modes of transport in the country, he is a leader of the transport workers’ federation and the owner of a transport company.
Shajahan has allegations of extortion against him, and at the same time, he serves as an adviser to the government’s road transportation and road safety councils.
Source: The Daily Star
