Only 15 people can fit into the small room on the third floor of a
brick-and-corrugated-tin building in Bangladesh’s capital, Dhaka. More
people listen from a hallway just outside the room. They all work at
Dacca Dyeing, a garment factory that makes clothes for Gap and Target,
among other companies. They want to start a union.
Bangladesh’s garment industry saw two disasters in recent years: the Tazreen fire in November 2012 and the Rana Plaza factory collapse in April of 2013.
International action to reform the industry followed, but so did labor
organizing. Groups of workers, most of them women, huddled in rooms like
this one to talk about taking a public and potentially dangerous step:
Telling the people who run their factories — almost all of them men
— that they intend to unionize.
Shamima Akter, an organizer with the Bangladesh Garment and
Industrial Workers Federation, talks to workers about intimidation
they’re facing because of their labor organizing activity.
Credit:
Bruce Wallace
As the evening call to prayer finishes outside,
Sritee Akter starts her pitch to this group. She’s the general secretary
of the Garment Workers Solidarity Federation. Before that, she was a
garment worker herself.
In 1994 her salary was 250 taka — about
$3 — a month, she tells them. She’s been fighting for workers rights
since then, she says, and has been to jail twice.
“I am a
worker. I am not a leader. I never introduce myself as a leader,” she
says. “I just understand a little more than you. But there are things
you know that I don’t.”
Organizing a union is not
illegal in Bangladesh, but the workers still try to meet in secret. They
moved their meetings here recently because a neighbor at their old spot
started asking questions. Akter warns the workers that if the bosses
find out, they’ll try to pit workers against each other, have them sign
things that can then be used against them, and search for reasons to
fire them. They may get violent, too.
Vertex, a garment factory in Dhaka, Bangladesh, spent $1.2 million to upgrade this factory of 4,500 garment workers.
Credit:
Amy Yee
“One day, they may hit Rahima,” Akter says,
indicating a woman sitting nearby. “Another day it could be someone
else. You should speak up against the abuse, so they won’t dare to hit
another worker again.”
Two years ago, garment workers won
a hard-fought wage increase — more than doubling the minimum wage — to
the equivalent of $68 a month. Akter says unions will fight to double
that again in the next five years. A new labor law
also guarantees longer maternity leaves and profit sharing for workers.
But Akter says only unions can make these promises a reality.
“A union is like an umbrella,” she tells the workers. “We won’t get wet in the rain, and we won’t get hot in the sun.”
After about half an hour, workers start lining up to fill out forms saying they want a union. Akter keeps talking.
The offices of the Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters
Association, or BGMEA, tower above Dhaka. Four years ago, Bangladesh’s
High Court has ruled that the building was built without proper approval
and in an environmentally inappropriate place, and ordered it removed.
It has not been.
Credit:
Bruce Wallace
Unions were outlawed in Bangladesh in 2007 as
part of a military-backed emergency law meant to settle political
upheaval. But there’s been a burst of labor organizing since the new
labor law passed in 2013. About 400 unions have been approved since
then, according to the AFL-CIO’s Solidarity Center in Dhaka. Now unions
cover some 150,000 garment workers, still a tiny fraction of the four
million total. Historically, women, who make up 80 percent of garment
workers, have been underrepresented in leadership.
“Many times those unions are very hierarchical, they’re very male-dominated,” says Sanchita Saxena, who directs the Chowdhury Center for Bangladesh Studies
at UC Berkeley. “Oftentimes the union heads or the union bosses are
professional union workers, so they’ve never worked in the garment
factory themselves.”
Female leadership in unions is
increasing, though. The two most visible garment worker leaders in the
country are women (Nazma and Kalpona Akter — no relation to each other
or to Sritee Akter). The AFL-CIO reports that two-thirds of
factory-level leaders are now women.
And that could be
good news for unions as they try to persuade garment workers to take the
risk of signing up. Organizer Sritee Akter knows how to talk to the
workers on their level. For instance, she uses a metaphor that only
rural Bengalis might understand about holding on to a particularly
slippery species of fish.
Garment workers in Dhaka gather at a "women's cafe" after work to learn about workers' rights and responsibilities.
Credit:
Amy Yee
“Owners are slick like a slippery fish, and do you know what we need to grab slippery fish?” she asks.
“Ashes!” the workers say.
“Ashes. The ashes is our union,” Akter says. “All workers need to be united.”
I
check in a few months after Akter’s meeting with the Dacca Dyeing
company employees. She says the government has turned down their union
application twice, both times claiming they didn’t have signatures from
the required 30 percent of workers.Akter’s not daunted, though. She says that they’ll apply again, and the next time, they’ll have signatures from 70 percent of the workers. As she told the Dacca Dyeing workers at the start, “You can’t just sit there with your head covered. You have to demand your rights.”
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