Tools For Action:This tour includes powerful new video footage, scores of photographs, massive amounts of documentation, including sweatshop clothing and most importantly, campaign materials on what we can do to take back our economy and re-make it with a human face. Please contact the office: nlc@nlcnet.org to request a package for your group.
Bangladesh Workers' Tour
September 28 through October 27, 2004
A Positive New Campaign
To help lift tens of millions of workers and their families out of misery
all across the developing world...
and it will only cost us 25 cents.
To win enforceable laws to protect the rights of the human being which are every bit as strong as the legal protections currently afforded corporate trademarks and products in the global economy. If the label is protected, the rights of the 16-year-old girl who made the product should be too!
Tour Participants:
Robina, Factory Worker
Robina is 18 years old and has been working as a sewing operator in the garment factories for the past two years sewing clothing for Wal-Mart and other U.S. companies. She was fired from the last factory she worked at after she was seen attending a meeting with people from the U.S.
Robina earns 1,700 taka a month, which comes to $6.75 a week and just 14 cents an hour. In the last month, Robina has been forced to work four 19-hour all-night shifts from 8:00 a.m. straight through to 3:00 a.m., after which the workers slept on the factory floor. Her typical work shift is from 8:00 a.m. to 10:00 p.m., six or seven days a week.
Robina never had the chance to go to school, but with help from her friends, she has learned to sign her name. She lives with seven other people in a single room, sleeping on the floor. Typically she gets just five hours of sleep a night.
Robina works 12 to 14 hours a day sewing clothing for the largest company in the world, and yet her wages are so low she cannot even afford to purchase a toothbrush and toothpaste, and must clean her teeth with her finger, using ashes from the fire.
Maksuda, Factory Worker
Maksuda is 19 years old and has worked in the garment factories since she was 11. When she first started, as a helper in 1996, she earned just 2 cents an hour and 99 cents a week. Currently Maksuda, who also frequently sews Wal-Mart garments, is earning $8.34 a week, or 17 cents an hour. Maksuda is a single mother with a two-year-old daughter. The factory at which she was working during her pregnancy cheated Maksuda of her legal right to maternity leave at full pay. Her typical work schedule is from 8:00 a.m. to 9:00 or 10:00 p.m., working six or seven days a week. It takes her 25 minutes to walk home at night, and it is only after she feeds her child, and washes and prepares their clothing for the next day that she can go to bed, usually around midnight. Like Robina, she gets up at 5:00 every morning. Both women have told us, "We have no life. We live only to work."
In the wake of the devastating floods, Maksuda's one-room house is still under two feet of filthy water and sewage. She has lost most of her possessions.
These young women are very brave to travel to the U.S. We are not yet publicly mentioning their names since they could be fired, or even threatened. They have the full support of their families, and of the local human, women's and worker rights organizations who accompany the women in their struggle for their rights. They know that they will be speaking for all their sisters and brothers in Bangladesh, and indeed, for workers across the developing world.
Ms. Sk Nazma, president of the Bangladesh Center for Worker Solidarity (BCWS)
Herself a child worker, Sk Nazma started out as a helper in the garment factories when she was 10 years old. Eventually she attempted to organize one of the first unions in the garment sector-an effort that was met with mass firings, a lock-out and violent repression by factory management. BCWS's offices are a beehive of activity, overflowing with workers who come seeking help and training.
Right now, the BCWS, the National Garment Workers Federation (NGWF) and our other partners in Bangladesh are working around the clock to help the over-500,000 garment workers in the Dhaka area alone, who have lost their homes in this year's tragic floods. Many of the workers' homes are still under two to six feet of water (really more of a thick, sickening muck of sewage, garbage and mud.) Clean drinking water and food are rare, and disease is spreading rapidly. The emergency work of the NGWF and BCWS-distributing desperately needed food, water purification tablets and other necessities-is literally saving scores of lives. (Thanks to NLC member support in response to the request for flood relief donations, and a generous contribution from Anita Roddick, the NLC has been able to forward $22,000 in emergency aid to Bangladesh.)
Recently, the BCWS and NGWF won a major victory for the more than 1.8 million garment workers in Bangladesh, 85 percent of them women, when the government in Bangladesh along with 18 of the largest apparel companies in the world, finally agreed to respect women workers' right to three months maternity leave with full pay. The government is now saying they will extend the legal paid leave to four months.
Mr. Rafiq Alam Mr Rafiq Alam, former communications director for the Institute for Integrated Rural Development, one of the most effective development NGOs in the world, helping to empower people to escape poverty through community projects, is now also working with the National Labor Committee. Mr. Alam, a skilled researcher and expert on labor rights conditions in Bangladesh, is also bi-lingual and will act as the delegation's translator. Mr. Alam has been an integral part of many recent major worker rights victories in Bangladesh, including the maternity leave campaign and relief efforts to help flood victims.
Charles Kernaghan, National Labor Committee
Charles Kernaghan, director of the National Labor Committee, and NLC senior associate Barbara Briggs will lead the tour.
This Tour will launch a very positive campaign to help lift millions of garment workers out of misery: "25 Cents More"
We will document that if the giant corporations would only agree to pay 25 cents more per garment, we could lift 1.8 million Bangladeshi garment workers and their families out of misery and at least into poverty. And the same could be true for the nearly 40 million garment workers all across the developing world.
If the corporations refuse to pay 25 cents more, we will ask concerned consumers to intervene. Together, we will pay the 25 cents, and in the process we will remake our economy with a human face.
For example, paying just 25 cents more per garment made in Bangladesh would add 20 cents an hour, or $1.60 a day, to the workers' base wage-which is exactly what the women say they would need to climb out of misery and at least into poverty. The workers know Bangladesh is a very poor country, and they are willing to work very hard, but they say if they could only win this very modest demand for 20 cents more per hour, it would have such an enormous positive impact on the lives of their families. Most importantly, it would mean better, more nutritious food. Given that there are 1.8 million garment workers in the country, we would be putting into Bangladesh:
In fact, this $898 million is eight times more than all U.S. aid to Bangladesh combined. Better yet, it would go directly into the pockets of the workers.
The rights of the human being certainly deserve at least as much legal protection as is currently afforded to corporate trademarks and products in the global economy.
It is wrong that corporations have demanded, and won, all sorts of enforceable laws, backed up by sanctions, to protect their trademarks and products. And yet, when you ask these very same corporations, "Can't we also protect the basic rights of the 16-year-old who makes the products?" the companies respond, "No. That would be an impediment to free trade."
We want fair trade! During the tour, the National Labor Committee, together with USWA, UFCW and other organizations will release draft legislative language to end child labor and sweatshop abuses in the global economy. This draft language can serve as a roadmap to get the debate started on how to end sweatshop abuses and the Race to the Bottom. The lawyers who helped draft the language believe that when such a bill is eventually passed, it will be seen as one of the three great pieces of labor legislation in the last 100 years. It took 25 years before the language of the New Deal was turned into reality. The same could be true of the struggle to end child labor and sweatshop abuses. But the most important thing is to begin the debate. The people have the right to be at the table and part of this debate.
The Global Economy has no Clothes
The corporations would like us to view the global economy as we do the universe. It exists. It is enormous, and it is governed by immutable natural laws. Even if we don't thoroughly understand all these laws, we have no choice but to go along with the status quo. We are, after all, only small individuals who are helpless in the face of the giant global economy.
This is wrong! We can end poverty for tens of millions of workers in the global economy, simply by paying 25 cents more, and we can win legal protections to defend the rights of the human being which are at least as strong as those currently afforded corporate trademarks and products.
Perhaps more than any other segment of our society, young people can lead the way. Many of the workers around the world who make our CD players, sporting goods, computers, sneakers and clothing, are the same age as high school and university students.
More than ever, we need a positive message and agenda in the face of the worldwide lifting of textile and apparel quotas in 2005, which will lead to the closing of one third to one half of all garment factories in the world, throwing tens of millions of desperately poor women out on the street with nothing, as more and more work shifts to China, India and Vietnam. In the process, wages which are already well below subsistence level will fall even further, and respect for fundamental human and worker rights will be similarly rolled back. Left unchecked, the Wal-Mart model of slashing wages, benefits and human rights will dominate the global economy.
As a people, we can take back our economy and remake it with a human face.
UNIVERSITIES ON BOARD:
Some of the universities that have already invited the Bangladesh Workers' Tour to speak include: Boston College; Denison University; DePaul University; Harvard; College of Holy Cross; St. Joseph's University; University of Dayton; Marquette University; St. Michael's College; Yale University; Smith College; University of Massachusetts; Xavier University, and the University of Wisconsin, among others.
The National Labor Committee is also working with the Sisters of St. Francis of Assisi, United Steelworkers of America; the Jesuits New York Province; Workmen's Circle; United Food and Commercial Workers; Marianist Social Justice Collaborative; Detroit Catholic Pastoral Alliance and Anita Roddick to organize the tour.
We also want to thank Senator Byron Dorgan and Representatives Marcy Kaptur, Bernie Sanders, Dennis Kucinich, Sherrod Brown, Lane Evans and George Miller for their invaluable assistance in securing U.S. visas for the Bangladeshi workers.