Eleven years after the deadly collapse of Rana Plaza ushered in the Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh and, later on, its more expansive successor, the International Accord for Health and Safety in the Textile and Garment Industry, garment workers in Bangladesh are less afraid of dying on the job.
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But whether they’re healthier or safer overall? That’s arguable, labor campaigners say. Toiling in the world’s second-largest exporter of apparel after China means living and working in a “climate of fear and insecurity,” said Thulsi Narayanasamy, director of international advocacy at the Worker Rights Consortium, a Washington, D.C. labor rights group.
At no time was this state of precarity rendered more acute than during October and November’s minimum wage protests, which saw tens of thousands of demonstrators pour into the streets in anger after the government set the new floor at 12,500 Bangladeshi taka ($114), far below the 23,000 taka ($210) that they said would stave off starvation and destitution.
“It’s been a terrible time for garment workers, who continue to suffer because of the poverty wages they receive—and this quite literally means they can’t provide food, healthcare or education for their families,” Narayanasamy said. “Worse still, their current wage level is locked in for five years. If inflation continues, workers will get even poorer than they are now.”
Demonstrations quickly descended into violence , stoked by parallel protests by opponents of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, who was facing reelection in January. Protestors smashed windows and vandalized cars, and security forces fired rubber bullets, sound grenades and tear gas shells to break up crowds. Faced with an all-out mutiny, factory bosses threatened to shut down production and whisk away wages by enforcing the “no work, no pay” rule.” By the time December rolled around, four workers were dead, dozens injured and thousands axed from their jobs . Another 100 found themselves behind bars.
Five months later, garment workers are no better off, said Nazma Akter, founder and executive director of Awaj Foundation and president of the Sommilito Garments Sramik Federation. Ask her what the mood in the country is like and her answer would be “helpless.” Despite the furor, many workers aren’t even receiving the updated wage, meaning that they are in a worse position than they were before the protests, she said. And if organizing was challenging before, it’s even harder now.
“The workers have faced severe damage,” Akter said. “The workers whose blood and sweat goes into making profits [for] the largest brands of the world are forced and abused to produce and are just being treated like slaves. And hungry workers will not produce profit.”
‘Baseless’ charges
The risk of false arrest continues to loom over an estimated 40,000 workers through at least 35 criminal charges known as First Information Reports, or FIRs, that suppliers to major international brands filed with the police at the height of the demonstrations but have yet to rescind. It’s these “baseless” blanket complaints that are being used as a “tool of systematic retaliation” to lock up union leaders without evidence, said Christie Miedema, campaign and outreach coordinator at the Clean Clothes Campaign, the garment industry’s largest consortium of labor rights groups.
The Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association, which represents factory owners, did not respond to a request for comment.
H&M Group, Zara owner Inditex and Next are pegged to the most number of “trumped up” legal cases, Miedema said. H&M, which she says is linked to nine cases, has failed to indicate “in any way how they are planning to use their leverage with their suppliers to ensure these cases are withdrawn.” Same with Inditex, whose partner factories have filed nine cases. While the Spanish retailer has urged factories to withdraw active complaints, it has yet to demonstrate how it will confirm their compliance, she said. And if Next’s eight cases have been dropped, it’s “not thanks to Next’s interference, as it has squarely refused to do anything to ensure cases go away,” Miedema added.
“These cases have [a] real effect on workers and organizers and the fact that many of the accused are unnamed allows for these baseless complaints to be used against any worker or unionists,” she said, giving the example of Mohammad Jewel Miya and Mizanur Rahma, two union leaders who were charged with attempted murder even though they weren’t named in any reports or even in the vicinity of the supposed crimes when they happened. “This shows how the threat of unnamed charges hangs over every worker and organizer in Bangladesh.”
Factories may be safer post-Rana Plaza, she said, but the root causes of the tragedy, including wages that are among the world’s lowest, limitations on workers’ right to organize and a dearth of brand interventions where they matter most, still persist.
In its defense, H&M said that it has teams on the ground that engage with both suppliers and trade unionists to mediate when issues involving dismissals are brought to its attention. It added that it recognizes the fundamental rights of freedom of association and collective bargaining, which it has enshrined in global framework agreements with IndustriALL Global Union and Industrifacket Metall.
Inditex said that it believes that a fair and negotiated minimum wage must take into account the collective demands of workers through their legitimate unions, which is why it supported the efforts of the tripartite minimum wage board to arrive at a figure that covers the living costs of workers and their families. Freedom of association is at the center of the global framework agreement that Inditex signed with IndustriALL in 2007, it added.
Next did not respond to a request for comment.
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Fashion diplomacy
In March, Steve Lamar, president and CEO of the American Apparel and Footwear Association (AAFA), a trade group whose roster includes Adidas, H&M and Inditex, wrote a letter to Hasina “restating” its repeated calls to end the “ongoing detention and the continued threat of detention” of workers related to the minimum wage protests by canceling any related FIRs and preventing their future harassment. Lamar also asked Hasina to “investigate and hold accountable” those responsible for the deaths and injuries of workers.
The same month, the Ethical Trading Initiative (ETI), a multi-stakeholder organization that counts Inditex, Marks & Spencer and Next as members, published a statement expressing its concern about the repression of freedom of association through “arrests, ongoing detentions, pending court cases and actions taken against workers in Bangladesh” in the aftermath of the protests. The ETI is “especially concerned by the use of complaints against large groups of workers who are collectively prosecuted for the alleged unlawful activities committed by individuals,” it said, referring to the FIRs. Action taken against alleged perpetrators, the organization said, must be evidence-based and subject to judicial due process.
But Narayanasamy is unimpressed. While the organizations “rightly called” for the withdrawal of the FIRs, they directed their concerns to the government of Bangladesh instead of their members.
“It is the brands that hold the ultimate power to determine the conditions under which they will permit their clothes to be made, and [the] AAFA and ETI know this,” she said. “Brands received direct calls from labor advocates to stop violence and repression against their workers, to support the wage that workers were calling for, to commit to paying higher prices to support the wage increase, but none of them spoke out.”
Narayanasamy said that each case represents an “enormous risk” to workers and unions. If they’re not dropped, police and factories will have free reign to target workers in retaliation for engaging in protest or union activity.
“The chilling effect and broader impact this will have on workers will be unimaginable given how much bravery and commitment it takes every time a worker steps up to collectively struggle for rights at work,” she said. “That brands would let this happen while feigning a commitment to rights is abominable. You can’t passively protect rights that are being trampled on; you either take action or you don’t.”
The AAFA and ETI take issue with Narayanasamy’s framing. Laurent Arnone, the ETI’s senior advisor of apparel and textiles, said that it’s in continued dialogue with Bangladeshi union leaders who inform it of “important issues and risks to workers.” The United Nations Guiding Principles make clear that “whilst business enterprises have the responsibility to respect freedom of association, it is the state’s duty to protect this right,” he added. The organization has also told companies buying from Bangladesh to tell its suppliers that while allegations of criminal damage and violence are the purview of the legal system, “collective intimidation and discrimination of workers and their representatives, more generally, is not an acceptable response.”
Nate Herman, the AAFA’s senior vice president of policy, said that brands are “indeed highly engaged.” They were highly engaged, he said, when more than a dozen of them, including Gap Inc., Patagonia, and Calvin Klein owner PVH Corp., wrote to Hasina in October to settle on a minimum wage that took into account garment workers’ basic needs and inflationary pressures. And they’ve remained highly engaged through the AAFA’s continued pushes to drop any unsubstantiated criminal charges, Herman added.
An inflection point
In an atmosphere fraught with tension and uncertainty, Kalpona Akter, founder and executive director of the Bangladesh Center for Workers Solidarity, can be sure of one thing: If nothing changes, conditions for garment workers will only become more dire. She said that the reason why workers protested en masse was because they had no other avenue left to express their frustration. Now that any of them can be arrested with little provocation, they’re even more fearful about raising their voices in the factories, she said. All that pressure will only continue to build. The question is where will it go?
Akter said that brands need to work with their suppliers to pay the 23,000 taka workers are asking for. (Only Patagonia has publicly backed the amount.) They should also press the Bangladeshi government to revise the minimum wage every two to three years instead of waiting for half a decade. Most of all workers should be free to organize and bargain.
“There should be a discussion table at every factory; there should be a union in every factory,” she said. “Workers get angry because their voices are not listened by anyone. Everyone should pay attention now before things get worse.”
Narayanasamy agreed that this is another inflection point for the industry. International brands could have prevented all the “unconscionable events” surrounding the repression of workers during and after the minimum wage negotiations, she said.
“Brands knew this would happen because they saw the same thing in 2018, during the last minimum wage-setting process,” Narayanasamy said. “They are facing another basic decision now when it comes to using their immense leverage with their suppliers to get them to drop the cases, and it is incredible that so many of them are simply refusing.”
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