The Obama administration on Thursday decided to cancel trade privileges for Bangladesh over concerns about safety problems and labour rights violations in the country’s garment industry. Although this does not bode well for our industry, it comes as no surprise.
The trouble in the industry has been brewing from early 2010, with widespread labour unrest and demand for a wage increase that had remained static at Tk1,662 since 2006. This happened despite a ban on organised labour and collective bargaining within the industry.
The Tazreen fire and the Savar incident are only symptoms of a much deeper malaise.
These last two incidents only brought the world’s attention to the extremes of sweatshop economics from which we were all benefiting.
The industry and our government were self-absorbed with profits and growth, ignoring fundamental weaknesses in such a model of expansion.
The general mood was “while the going is good, why ‘fix’ it?” Of all the people, even the buyers knew way back in 2010 that such a growth is not sustainable.
Our industry leaders were only too keen to quote from a glowing report of the sector from the consulting firm McKinsey less than six months before Savar, which conspicuously ignored the industry’s fundamental weaknesses and the potential risk of retaliation from consumer groups and the governments that represent them.
The United States Trade Representative on December 21, 2012 sent a letter to Commerce Minister GM Quader stating: “We are beginning to consider options that would affect Bangladesh’s continued eligibility for benefits under the GSP.”
“Unfortunately, we have seen little progress on these issues and, in our view, the worker rights situation in Bangladesh has deteriorated,” the USTR maintained in that letter.
“We continue to have concerns about the ability of newly formed unions to register and of worker associations to freely associate so that they may effectively bargain for wages and safe working conditions."
In addition, we have received credible reports that workers seeking to organise unions have been fired or blacklisted.
“We are also concerned about what many see as a pattern of intimidation against organizations and individuals advocating for worker rights, such as interference with the operations of the Bangladesh Centre for Worker Solidarity, and lack of progress in the investigation of the April 2012 murder of labour activist Aminul Islam,” the letter mentioned.
By the end of 2012, US Ambassador Dan Mozena had been warning Bangladesh of a “perfect storm” brewing over its labour issues as was reported in many newspapers.
The very next month, a McKinsey report in glowing praise of our RMG sector and its near infinite potential headlined in a major daily.
Thus the government and the industry were again lulled into complacency.
It needed an event as tragic as Savar to wake us up. As with many other issues, we would not act until the West takes the moral upper hand, or when it hurts the business.
More often, it then becomes very much a case of too little too late. Nowhere is the proverb more true: “We only listen to what we want to hear.”
