/ 23 July 2007

High price for cheap clothes

Two toddlers sit on a rusting grille platform built on bamboo stilts at the entrance to one of Bangladesh's fastest-growing housing developments. Three feet below them lies a festering mound of rubbish, into which a gushing waste pipe from a nearby factory discharges. Beyond them are rows and rows of windowless, airless, corrugated iron rooms, stacked on top of each other like chicken coops.

Two toddlers sit on a rusting grille platform built on bamboo stilts at the entrance to one of Bangladesh’s fastest-growing housing developments.

Three feet below them lies a festering mound of rubbish, into which a gushing waste pipe from a nearby factory discharges. Beyond them are rows and rows of windowless, airless, corrugated iron rooms, stacked on top of each other like chicken coops.

This is Begunbari in Dhaka, the heart of the city’s industrial district and home to many of its garment workers, including those who make clothes for some of Britain’s best-known high street brands, including Asda, Tesco and Primark.

By day, the rooms are like ovens. At night, the noise from the slum’s estimated 50 000 inhabitants, their screaming babies, radios and televisions is deafening. But the rent is cheap, at 900 takas (R91), which is why they are filled with factory workers, whose monthly earnings are, they say, as little as R100 or just 28 cents an hour.

Over the last 10 years Bangladesh’s clothing industry has boomed, fed by the huge demand for cut-price clothes supplied by supermarkets and discount chains.

An estimated 2,5-million people work in thousands of factories here, but their wages have halved in real terms in recent years, making them one of the cheapest workforces in the world.

Asda, Tesco and Primark have spoken of their commitment to labour rights. All three have signed up to a code of conduct which sets out basic rights for employees, including that they shall not regularly work more than 48 hours a week, that overtime shall be voluntary and not exceed 12 hours a week, and that a “living wage” should be paid. But last month, employees of factories supplying clothes to all three retailers revealed that their wages were so low that, despite working up to 84-hour weeks, they struggled to provide for their families. Many claimed they were regularly forced to work 12-hour days and that working through the night to finish an order was not uncommon. Workers from factories supplying all three companies also said they were refused access to trade unions and claimed that, in the last month, four colleagues had been dismissed for attempting to organise a union.

All of the eight workers interviewed for this report said they were paid well below the R315 a month considered by experts to be the minimum living wage.

One worker claimed she had witnessed the physical and verbal abuse of a colleague and said she felt “threatened and frightened” at work, while another said he had been sacked and had his wages withheld for taking two days off to take his baby daughter to hospital. A third, who folds clothes for all three companies, claimed two colleagues lost their jobs last month for taking three consecutive sick days off. He said he was forced to stand nine hours a day, with only one, hour-long break for lunch.

Parvin (25), a sewing machine operator who makes jeans and trousers said that she had seen a supervisor physically attack a colleague for not meeting her target of making 100 pieces an hour.

“I do things very quickly,” said Parvin, from Begunbari. “A sewing machine operator hadn’t met her target of finishing 100 pieces. It was maybe 80 or 90. The supervisor came over and snatched up the clothes and slapped her and shouted at her. What can she say? If she protested, she would be sacked.”

She earns R257 a month for working from 8am to 8.30pm, a 75-hour week. At least three times a month, she is forced to work through the night, until 4am, and often until 10 or 11pm, she said.

The long hours leave her “very tired and sometimes exhausted” but she fears she might lose her job if she did not work overtime. Besides, her basic wage is not enough to live on, let alone send money home to her three children in her village, so she needs the money.

Nazma Akter, president of the United Garment Workers Federation and general secretary of the Awaj Foundation, a local organisation which fights for workers’ rights, said that long hours, bad working conditions, poverty and the overcrowded and unsanitary conditions in which garment workers are forced to live made them susceptible to a number of illnesses and diseases.

“They get tuberculosis, kidney problems, diarrhoea, problems with their hearing and there are a huge amount of skin diseases caused by the dust and fibres. People here boil water before they drink it, but the garment workers do not have the time to do that. There are also mental health problems brought on by constant stress.”

Last year, after garment workers set fire to 16 factories and ransacked 300 more to demand better pay and conditions, and amid pressure from organisations such as Awaj, the Bangladeshi government agreed to introduce a minimum wage of 1 660 taka (R171) a month. The deadline for the new wage, which is supposed to be based on an eight-hour day, passed a month ago, but according to the National Garment Workers’ Federation, even this meagre target is not being met, with 60% of factories still flouting the rules.

Workers told us they did not want British companies to pull out, but that they wanted better pay and better conditions.

The World Bank says retailers should stop sending mixed messages to suppliers, who are, on the one hand, told to adopt good labour conditions, but on the other face demands for lower prices and faster deliveries. — Â