Blood, sweat and tears

In a globalised capitalist system workers pay with their lives.  In a capitalist system, competitors have no choice but to grow. When markets are mature and margins thin, it is the weakest link in the chain that comes under the greatest strain. Our economies thrive on competition and consumption.

 Bangladesh has been lauded for its economic growth. But in effect the country is simply winning a race that only leads to the bottom. Continuing to compete on its poverty. Clothing and fashion brands are locked in a struggle where they need increasingly cheaper locations to make the garments – and shorter turn-around times.

These factories are based in the developing world. Most of them are making “commodities”, or apparel that is essentially the same. They compete on price. In order to grow their profits, brands keep pushing factory owners – who pass on that pressure to hapless workers, whose desperate poverty leaves them little choice in the matter.

Bangladesh is dependent on its apparel industry – it employs almost 4million workers and accounts for more than 80% of the country’s exports. It simply cannot afford to lose the business big brands send its way. And the reason they do it is only because Bangladesh remains by some distance the cheapest place on the planet to get a ready-made garment stitched. The astonishingly low cost that Bangladesh offers (20p an hour) at the expense of workers’ welfare is the foremost reason for its apparel industry’s much vaunted “success”. Bangladesh’s “competitiveness” in the apparel trade essentially boils down to desperate poverty, which means workers have to accept a choice between paltry wages – which keep them below the poverty line – and nothing at all.

Any labour movement to raise workers’ wages is met with either the threat of unemployment or brute force. Both have proved to be highly effective. In 2012, a leader of the Bangladesh Centre for Worker Solidarity was tortured and murdered. Similarly, worker strikes in the past have been met with harassment, including death threats.

The Bangladeshi government knows full well that its foreign exchange is only guaranteed by worker poverty and the existence of a large network of sub-contractors functioning under the surface where workers toil away in subhuman conditions. The Bangladeshi government is unlikely to risk losing all its business by giving workers a fair wage and the International Labor Organization long ago lost all its teeth along with its spine. The plight of Bangladeshi workers is not going to get better through Corporate Social Responsibility initiatives. Big brands are loathe to commit to any relationship beyond a few consignments, which makes them wary of investing anything in a particular factory. They are faced with a much more powerful imperative: increased profits.

This pressure to reduce costs through worker mistreatment isn’t unique to Bangladesh. In 2012, 289 workers died in a fire at a garment factory in Karachi.

Adding salt to the wound, Primark announced significant rises in profitability.

Adapted from here