A Bangladeshi clothing industry worker earns about €30 a month. Former child worker Nazma Akter, who is in Dublin this week, tells Chris Dooley of her campaign to prevent such abuses.
Conditions are slowly improving for some of the hundreds of thousands of workers in the garments industry in Bangladesh. But long hours, low pay, unsanitary conditions, work-related illness and locked factory doors continue to be commonplace experiences for the mostly female workforce.
Child labour remains, but is less prevalent than when Nazma Akter took her first job in a clothes factory in Dhaka aged 11. Now 29, Ms Akter is in Ireland this week to launch an Irish Congress of Trade Unions' campaign to combat the abuse of workers in developing countries.
Ms Akter is a leading trade union activist in Bangladesh and says her country has progressive laws protecting workers' rights, but in many cases these are ignored. She wants aid agencies to channel more resources directly to workers to help them to organise and educate themselves. Her own story is typical workers in the garments sector, which is now Bangladesh's biggest industry and accounts for 75 per cent of its export earnings. She joined her mother in a clothes factory to help support the rest of the family, her father, sister and three brothers.
"I was working every day for 12 to 14 hours, seven a days a week, sometimes until very late at night," she recalls. Her pay was 300 taka (about €5) a month, as well as overtime of up to 150 taka.
Today, a typical clothes factory worker in Bangladesh earns between 1,500 and 2,000 (€33) a month. One of her abiding memories is of looking out of the factory windows at other children going to school. "I felt very bad because I couldn't go. I still feel bad because I would like to be able to do more for the people and I can't speak good English."
As the age of 14, she moved to one of Bangladesh's biggest garments factories, where conditions were intolerable by Western standards. As well as the long hours and low pay, staff had no access to clean drinking water, no maternity leave or other medical benefits, no job security and no right to union representation.
A protest by 800 workers led to further disputes, including a sit-in by staff and then a management lock-out. When the factory re-opened, Ms Akter was one of 80 workers who found herself blacklisted. It was a difficult time.
She went on to become a founder of the Bangladesh Independent Garment Workers' Union Federation (BIGUF). Although BIGUF has been a registered trade union since 1997, she has been beaten "many times" by police for her union activities, and was recently arrested and detained overnight.
Her union has 50,000 members and runs legal aid, adult education, cultural and training programmes, but has had to suspend a health clinic because of lack of funds. Mr Ronan Tynan, of Esperanza Productions, which made a documentary about Ms Akter and the Bangladeshi garments industry last year, says the lack of funding for trade unions in developing countries should be addressed.
"A lot of Irish trade unions have Third World committees and are raising money, but they're giving it to aid agencies instead of giving it to people on the ground."
The Esperanza documentary, Race to the Bottom, also highlights another issue of critical importance to workers in Bangladesh.
New World Trade Organisation rules, due to come into effect at the beginning of 2005, will remove quota protections from the industry in Bangladesh and open the world market to India and China, where workers are paid even less. As bad as the conditions have been in Bangladesh, says Ms Akter, the garments industry has helped to emancipate women by taking out of the home and into the workplace. It now faces collapse under the weight of new competition, with potentially disastrous consequences for workers.
Race to the Bottom was made after Mr Tynan's colleague, Ms Anne Daly, spotted an article in The Irish Times in 2001, about the deaths of 51 workers, mostly women and girls, in a garments factory fire in Bangladesh. The film will have a special screening at Liberty Hall at 6 p.m. today at the launch of the ICTU campaign.