Epidemic Of Exploitation Of Laborers In Garment Factories Based In Third World Countries

By Teesta Dasgupta

Years back, when my aunt who lived abroad gifted me a pair of branded jeans I was elated. The hem lines were immaculate and the fabric was soft and warm but the illusion of ‘pharen’ goodness was shattered when the tag read ‘MADE IN BANGLADESH’. Since I live in Siliguri, Bangladesh is just 5 miles away. My denims had to travel half way across the world and back to be considered worth anything. Fast forward to India today, brands have made an entry in a big way and other than a few big names, most companies that trade in garments, have their factories in China, Bangladesh, Bankok (Thailand) or Cambodia. If you are asking, why these places the answer is cheap labour. For Bangladesh, duty-free access to the European Union is a major factor. But the bigger question is – ‘At what cost?’ The chilling truth is – at the cost of many lives – both in death toll and quality. A certain fashion magazine was all praise of China’s retail boom citing examples of large-scale employment and export values but I wonder whether living and working in buildings with no safety regulations, fire exits, at minimal wage and no employee benefits was quite what these workers had in mind.

Testimony to this is Tazreen factory on the outskirts of Dhaka that supplied clothes to international brands like Walmart, Dutch retailer C&A and ENYCE and a label owned by US rapper Sean “Diddy” Combs. It caught fire on 24^th November 2012 killing over 100 people. Just months later, the Rana Plaza garment factory complex collapsed in Dhaka, killing 1,130 people. The retaliations were brutally supressed on 5^th June with the police open-firing on former workers and relatives of the victims of who were protesting to demand compensations promised by the government. On 22nd September, at least 50 people were injured when police fired rubber bullets and tear gas into a crowd of protesters who were blocking streets in Dhaka demanding a wage raise. Workers of garment factories have been clashing with the police in Phnom Penh, Cambodia almost every day since last year. Cambodian riot police used sticks, tear gas and guns to break up the strike, killing one woman and wounding eight people in one of the most violent crackdowns on labour unrest in years. The epidemic is not restricted to the mentioned countries only. Prato has become a center for Chinese-run factories producing low-cost garments mostly for international retailers. This has struck a heavy blow to Italy’s own clothing industry. Many of the workers aren’t declared to authorities. They sleep, eat and live in the factories where they work.

Very recently Dhaka’s senior judicial magistrate Wasim Sheikh issued the warrants of arrest against the two fugitive owners, Delwar Hossain, his wife Mahmuda Akter, and four other company officials for the Tazreen factory fire. This seems like a classic case of treating the symptoms and not the disease. Delwar represents thousands of businessmen who are taking up contracts to provide factory space and labour at minimum cost to multinational companies. It is a vicious circle of companies wanting cheap labour to stretch their profit margins and third world countries offering cheap labour by denying workers labour rights and preventing the formation of labour unions. Taking a Delwar or Mahmuda to jail is merely cosmetic. It might appease a fraction but dig deeper and you see that they are like the hapless employees just unlucky enough to be so directly related and so lowly placed in the pecking order. The greed of the MNCs is a given. We shall not waste time on the obvious. Added to that is the likelihood that the government for revenue, the engineers for some easy cash and the local supervisory authorities had agreed to turn a blind eye to illegal construction and use of property for factory purpose. As the situation is so complicated, no one dares to protest. A large portion of revenue comes from these factories. If costs rise and the companies move out, there will be massive unemployment causing political and economic crises that can swing out of control resulting in revolutions, bloody civil wars, terrorist activities and so on. Nobody wants to take that step. Finding greener pastures however for these companies is not hard. In an ideal world, we might have routed the wrong-doers and left them without a choice but to pay the labours their due. Downside is, in an ideal world consumers deprived of cheaper goods would happily pay much higher prices. From what I can see, our moral compasses don’t exactly point north. To afford our lifestyle we had rather put these people in the blind spot, aid the corruption and unwittingly form a link in the chain of the vicious circle.

The author is an avid blogger, food-buff, incorrigible bibliophile and given to hair-splitting analysis of everything under the sun. She is finishing her degree at St. Stephen’s College, Delhi and works part-time as a volunteer for a SWO (Siliguri Welfare organization) in her scenic hometown of Siliguri, Darjeeling. She swears by Oscar Wilde, Ayn Rand, Coldplay, The Big Bang Theory (TBBT) and pizza. Feel free to contact her at owruleth@gmail.com or Twitter.