DAVE JAMIESON, EMRAN
HOSSAIN and KIM BHASIN
Like millions of
other young women in Bangladesh,
Sumi Abedin forged her place in the modern economy at a sewing machine inside
an urban garment factory.
The ready-made
garment industry now accounts for a whopping 80 percent of Bangladesh's
exports, making the country the third largest exporter of
garments in the world. The explosive growth in business over the past two
decades has helped create more than 3.5 million garment jobs in the country,
particularly for women like Abedin, who, just a generation ago, may have had no
formal position in Bangladesh's
workforce.
Until recently,
Abedin, 24, worked sewing pockets onto pants in the factory known as Tazreen
Fashions, outside Dhaka. She earned meager
wages by global standards -- roughly $55 a month, comparable to what other
garment workers in her country make. This cash was critical for the survival of
her family. Her father works as a rickshaw puller, and his earnings alone did
not cover food and other basic necessities. Their combined income was just
enough to support themselves and Abedin's mother.
But such opportunity
comes with steep costs. Abedin knows people who paid for it with their lives.
Abedin no longer has
a job. Last November, her factory burned to the ground, killing 112 people. She leaped
from the third floor, breaking her right leg and left hand in the process. The
young man who landed beside her died.
As proponents of
expanded global trade are quick to highlight, Bangladesh's stratospheric rise in
the apparel world has helped alleviate the country's grinding poverty. But in
Abedin's case, the boom has taken more than it's given. After losing her job,
she said, she was left with a payment of $150 from her employer, to cover back
pay and severance, and another $1,200, from a fund supported by Li and Fung
Ltd., a retail giant that contracted to have its clothes made inside the doomed
factory. Medical bills have already swallowed about three-quarters of that
money, and her doctor has told her she needs a year to recover before she can
hope to work again.
Along with other
hardships, she carries the knowledge that more factory disasters have happened
since her own and that even more will almost certainly happen in the future.
"We want a safe
workplace," Abedin recently told HuffPost, speaking Bengali. Even before
the fire, "the working conditions were poor in my factory. We were
verbally and physically abused."
Last month, Bangladesh suffered what has been called the
world’s most deadly garment industry disaster -- the collapse of a factory
complex inside the Rana Plaza building in a suburb of Dhaka.
The tragedy, which took the lives of more than 1,100 workers, focused global
attention on a reality that Abedin and other workers said they already knew too
well: The garment trade in Bangladesh
is a dangerous enterprise rife with factory fires and other deadly calamities.
The industry has grown so rapidly that it has outpaced the government’s ability
to monitor and enforce workplace safety standards. Indeed, the growth appears
fueled in part by the government’s willingness to look the other way.
The substandard
working conditions that Abedin and other garment workers have confronted are
the byproduct of a globalization success story. Bangladesh has transformed itself
into one of the world's leading exporters of clothing, generating millions of
jobs that have financed housing, basic nutrition and education for some of the
poorest people on earth. But this refashioning has been engineered through
means that labor advocates portray as fundamentally exploitative, by courting
foreign investors with some of the globe’s cheapest, most disenfranchised
workers.
Bangladesh has proven irresistible to international
clothing brands and retailers, who have found a refuge from the higher costs
associated with stricter enforcement of health, safety and labor laws. Indeed,
until the recent of string of industrial accidents big enough to capture
headlines in the United States
and Europe, Bangladesh
factories had seen little regulation.
"Bangladesh made it possible mainly because of
its cheap labor force," said Mohammad Giasuddin, whose father launched one
of the first modern export of garments in Bangladesh. "And our laborers
are industrious and good at it."
When Giasuddin's
father, Mohammad Reazuddin, sent his first shipment to France in 1977, his effort was lampooned in a
newspaper cartoon that suggested fashion-forward Paris would return the clothes to their
sender. Leading Bangladesh
businessmen mocked the very idea of the country producing garments primarily
for Westerners. But Reazuddin and a small group of factory owners had the
benefit of cheap labor -- the wage of a factory floor worker was about $2 a
month then, Giasuddin recalled -- as well as the backing of the Bangladesh
government.
Plenty of other
countries in Asia and Latin America have
abundant workers willing to work for little money. But hardly any countries
have wage floors quite as low as Bangladesh's, and few have courted
and fostered the garment industry with such strategic coherence.
In the 1980s, the government put a new emphasis on
economic growth through exports and direct foreign investment, particularly
with the establishment of export processing zones, like the ones that are now
home to the country's thousands of garment factories. The government also
allowed for the duty-free import of machinery and raw garment materials.
"The government
and industry leaders made a judgment that they could compete globally in the
garment industry," said Michael Posner, the former U.S. assistant
secretary of state for democracy, human rights and labor under President Barack
Obama. "The infrastructure is weak. The government's enforcement of both
labor laws and safety laws is weak -- or non-existent in many places. And the
sourcing model for big companies has encouraged them to go to places where they
can produce things as cheaply as possible."
The garment industry
would bring needed jobs to the country, putting wages into the pockets of
Bangladeshis struggling to survive through agriculture. Farms had been split
into ever-smaller parcels, while farmers themselves felt increasingly squeezed
by the rising costs of power and fertilizer. Garment jobs were seen as a
crucial source of earnings for the poor.
The factory owners'
greatest asset was a largely untapped pool of labor -- rural women. For
decades, women in predominantly Muslim areas outside of cities had been
relegated to informal, indoor agricultural work that added modestly to their
husbands’ monthly incomes. The new garment factories presented the opportunity
for formal work that was religiously permissible for these women -- a
marginalized and underprivileged class that happened to carry a long tradition
of stitching and weaving. (It's likely that muslin, long a coveted fabric in
European countries, originated in Dhaka
centuries ago.)
With no labor
organizations to contend with, the men who owned the factories could pay their
workers very little, with only small concern for strikes or protests over
working conditions. Even today, most supervisory roles in the factories are
held by men. Women now make up the overwhelming majority of
line workers.
"It was a
classic situation of having all this surplus labor in rural areas," said
Martha Chen, an expert on Bangladesh
at the Harvard Kennedy School.
"You had this huge pool of women who'd never done paid work, so they were
willing to work for nada. There was an extraordinary setup for it."
THE END OF QUOTAS
Even with such an abundance of low-wage labor, the
furious growth of apparel-making in Bangladesh over the past decade
would not have been possible without another element: The scrapping of a
complex system of trade quotas that effectively limited how much clothing any
one developing country could export to the wealthy world.
Exports of garments
to the United States
and other Western countries used to be governed by something known as the Multi
Fibre Arrangement. Enforced by the World Trade Organization, the agreement
specified the number of polo shirts, blue jeans, blazers and other garments
that each developing country could send to the U.S.
and Europe.
The agreement was
meant to function as a kind of aid, extending profits from the worldwide clothing trade to
poor countries like Bangladesh.
But it also set production caps at a time when developed countries feared the
lower production costs of countries like Singapore
and South Korea, according
to Mark Anner, director of the Center for Global Workers’ Rights at Penn State
University.
The poorest
countries, including Bangladesh,
benefited from the arrangement. International companies manufacturing elsewhere
in the region, pressured by quota restrictions in their own countries,
gravitated toward nations like Bangladesh
because of the availability of cheaper labor. Bangladesh was also able to export
to the European Union duty-free and quota-free due to an exemption from the
World Trade Organization.
But that arrangement
came to an end in 2004. Many observers assumed that the change would hurt Bangladesh,
considered less competitive than other developing players at the time. By such
accounts, investment would exit nearly every country and rush into China, which
presented its own low wages along with the largest workforce on the planet and
formidable infrastructure for trade, from modern ports, to highways and rail.
As the thinking went, poor countries like Bangladesh would lose millions of
jobs and wind up even poorer.
“China was under very tight constraints up until
the beginning of 2005,” said Pietra Rivoli, a professor of finance and
international business at Georgetown
University, and author of
the book The Travels of a T-Shirt in the
Global Economy. “Everyone
was wondering if you take the constraints off of China, who's going to lose?“
But the end of the
global quota system wound up proving a great boon for Bangladesh.
Once the quota system was phased out, "it allowed
for tremendous concentration in the industry," said Anner. "It just
allowed companies to pick winners and losers."
China’s apparel industry took off, with the
production of many clothing categories multiplying as much as 1,000 percent
above previous levels, according to Rivoli. Production dipped in South Korea, Taiwan,
the Philippines, Hong Kong and other higher-wage countries formerly
protected by the quotas.
But, over time, other
winners emerged as well -- low-wage nations, such as India,
Pakistan, Vietnam and Bangladesh.
Production in the
apparel industry tends to flow toward lower-wage countries because labor is
such a large part of the process, and each worker requires only a low level of
skill. It also requires basic infrastructure from reliable power supplies to
transport facilities. While the fundamental industrial structure in Bangladesh
isn’t very efficient, it’s better than many of the other countries capable of
providing comparably low wages, said Rivoli.
China's labor costs rose as Bangladesh's
remained near rock-bottom, reinforcing its appeal for global apparel brands.
Back in 1994,
Bangladeshi workers had gained a hard-won minimum wage of roughly $11 per
month, but that level remained in place for more than a decade. In 2006,
workers took to the streets to demand an increase. Police mounted a bloody
crackdown, arresting, beating and even killing workers. The result was a
doubling of the official minimum wage to $22 per month. Against a backdrop of
double-digit inflation, that increase did not go far. Three years ago, Bangladesh
again lifted the minimum wage, this time to about $37 a month. That’s where it
remains today, constituting one of the lowest minimum wages in the world.
"Talk to people
in China or India, and their perspective is that the pay
rates in Bangladesh
are abysmally low," said Alice Tepper Marlin, the head of Social
Accountability International, a non-profit that helps monitor overseas
factories in the garment industry.
"Desperately
poor people are willing to work for wages that are way below the prevalent in
neighboring countries.
"But without the
apparel industry," Tepper Marlin added, "things would be worse."
Indeed, the rise of the garment industry has made many
lives in Bangladesh
less miserable than they were previously, and not just in the growing urban
industrial hubs. Rural areas, too, have benefited from the growth in jobs,
particularly through the remittance of wages from the factories back to the
country, leading to what Chen described as "a revolution of a kind in the
villages.”
CAPTURING THE LEVERS OF POWER
The export boom has given rise to a new uber-wealthy
class of Bangladesh
garment industry businessmen estimated at about 2,000, who collectively now
wield enormous influence over the national economy, policymaking and the media.
A prime example is
Sohel Rana, the owner of the building that crumbled. Before his arrest, he was
a local ruling-party political figure who loomed like a local mafia don, as The New York Times reported.
Despite the obvious structural cracks, Rana had claimed his building would
stand "for a century."
Most
businessmen-turned-politicians in the Bangladesh parliament hail from the
garment industry, partly explaining the government's laissez-faire regulation
of factories. Their coziness with the country's newspaper owners also means
that worker discontent in garment plants goes largely unreported. The Rana Plaza
collapse and its attendant protests were ultimately too large to ignore. Yet
even as the death toll rose to unprecedented numbers, accounts were buried
deeper and deeper inside domestic newspapers.
The industry's fast
rise has led to widespread corruption, evident in scandals like the Hallmark loan scam. In that case, the owner of the
garment-producing Hallmark Group siphoned more than $300 million from the
state-owned Sonali Bank. By the time the scandal became public, Hallmark had
already been formally honored by government officials for outstanding service
to the country.
These industry
captains' connections with government often shield them from consequences in
deadly disasters. After 54 workers were burned alive at a factory overseen by
garment company KTS in 2006, company managers were acquitted of charges of
culpable homicide, even though they admitted in court that they'd locked the
factory gates from the outside after the fire had started to prevent worker
theft.
No one was held to
account after the Spectrum Sweaters factory collapsed in 2005, killing more than 60 workers, even
though the company was in violation of its building permit.
"There's a lot of collusion between the government
and the factory owners and the building owners," said Chen. "There
are lots of layers of really cynical exploitation of these women."
Chen generally
ascribed to the Nicholas Kristof school of thought on
sweatshops -- that they're mostly a good thing, offering what Kristof described
in a controversial column as "an escalator out of poverty."
"They aren't
really desirable, but it's better than what they had," Chen said. "I
can say 'two cheers' for everything but the lack of safety. That's just
egregious."
Many of the workers
themselves, however, have a hard time recognizing the garment boom as a great
fortune, especially when they risk their lives extracting poverty wages from
it.
"The garment business is profitable only for the owners," said Abu
Bakar, a laborer who works in the dye department of a factory in the industrial
zone of Gazipur. "You cannot imagine how we maintain a life on these
earnings. We get nothing in comparison to what the [Bangladesh Garment
Manufacturers and Exporters Association] or the buyers or the owners get. We
toil over eight hours, six days a week, only to make ends meet."
PUSHED TOO FAR
The recent disasters, combined with paltry wages and
substandard working conditions, have crystallized deep resentment among
Bangladeshi laborers, threatening social stability. Angry workers have filled
the streets, calling for the deaths of both negligent factory owners and their
political allies.
American and European
apparel labels are weighing their options, cognizant that their brands are
increasingly vulnerable to public relations debacles when their goods turn up
inside factories that prove to be deadly workplaces.
This represents a new
development in the relationship between the global companies and the factories
that produce their wares in Bangladesh, said Daniel Diermeier, a professor of
managerial economics and decision sciences at Northwestern University, and
author of Reputation Rules: Strategies
for Building Your Company’s Most Valuable Asset. When
retailers first established supplier relationships inside the country, he said,
they were chiefly concerned with finding factories that could make what they
needed on time and at the lowest prices.
“The whole issue of
human labor practices and justice issues were not part of the decision
process.” Diermeier said. “It wasn't on the radar.”
At first, retailers
treated deadly events in Bangladesh
as isolated incidents, Diermeier said. But that has changed in recent years, as
their customers have gained awareness about the provenance of their products.
When public opinion
turned on Nike in the 1990s after revelations of adolescents working in
sweatshops, much of the industry instituted checks for child labor. New
requirements for building standards never made it into those codes.
Now, in the aftermath
of the Rana Plaza disaster, global apparel labels
are devoting substantial energy to protecting their reputations. A group of
major European brands has pledged to abide by a legally binding package of
factory standards aimed at improving workplace safety in Bangladesh.
Walmart, the world’s largest retailer, has declined to participate in that
effort while announcing its own program to boost worker safety.
But labor rights
groups have questioned the efficacy of these efforts. If American and European
retailers come to view the “Made in Bangladesh” label as emblem of
exploitation, that may prompt global brands to pursue a simpler course: They
may leave the country altogether, shifting their orders to factories in other
low-wage countries that -- at least for now -- lack the taint of
headline-capturing industrial catastrophes.
“It’s easy to move,” explained Rivoli. “All you really
need is sewing machines. It's not as if you're building an auto factory.”
If the industry does
uproot, that would be a significant setback for Bangladesh, said Rivoli. In the
traditional pattern of industrial development, the textile industry tends to be
first, followed by the expansion into other industries. Once the industry booms
and the nation advances to more complex endeavors, such as electronics and
automobiles, the apparel industry shrinks, as it did in China. Bangladesh
hasn’t reached that point yet.
Posner said he
believes leaving the country is a mistake for retailers as well. If companies
search the globe for comparably cheap labor, they'll end up in regions where
human rights records or government safety enforcement are just as dubious, such
as Burma.
He said he'd prefer that large apparel players remain in Bangladesh
while committing themselves to making the factories safe and the wages
liveable.
"They're kind of
running out of road," Posner said of the Western brands. "But I can
guarantee you, someone is looking right now."
Many people in Bangladesh now
fear the exit of Western brands, from factory owners down to line workers.
Though the conditions may be oppressive, for many laborers the garment business
provides their only hope of a nominal wage. They would rather see the industry
stay and raise its standards.
Bakar, the dye
worker, understands this trade-off all too well. After several years toiling in
the garment industry without a raise, he quit his job in 2008 in quiet protest.
But after six
hopeless months of looking for work, he was back inside a garment factory in
order to survive. He may feel exploited by the system, but he prefers it to the
alternative.
"Without the garment business,” Bakar said,
“thousands and thousands of poor people would be jobless."
First appeared in The
Huffington Post, May 23, 2013
Dave Jamieson, dave.jamieson@huffingtonpost.com
Emran Hossain, emran.hossain@huffingtonpost.com
Kim Bhasin, Kim.Bhasin@huffingtonpost.com
RAVI NESSMAN, Associated Press, 
