Nov 22, 2013
Anjuara suffers from constant pain. She is too injured to work and unable to pay the rent. Yet this is not the worst of her suffering following the November 24, 2012, Tazreen Fashions garment factory fire in Bangladesh.
“The most painful thing is that I haven’t been able to lift up my 3-year-old baby girl in my lap for the past year because of the severe pain in my hand and back,” Anjuara said, tears in her eyes.
Over the past year, Anjuara’s medical bills have added up to nearly $3,900—a fortune in a country where the average yearly income is $770, according to the United Nations. The compensation she received in the wake of the tragedy, $1,282.05 from the Bangladesh Garment Manufacturing and Exporting Association (BGMEA), did not come close to covering these costs. So she sold her few valuable possessions, such as her television and the small plot of land she owned in her village. She also went through her savings.
Yet she is far from well and may never be able to work. She is regularly in pain and cannot sit for long periods. Anjuara sustained two broken vertebrae and a broken shoulder when she made her escape from the blaze that killed 112 of her fellow garment workers and injured thousands more. Today, she is unable to lift heavy items.
“I haven’t been able to pay rent for five months,” Anjuara, 30, said. She lives with her husband and two daughters in Savar, just outside the Bangladesh capital, Dhaka. “I could not buy new dresses for my children last Eid and could not cook any food for them.” She owes more than $750 in loans and has no idea how she will pay them back.
“Sometimes I feel it would be better if I would have died in that fire,” Anjuara said, crying.
Her husband, Azahar, is a van driver. Anjuara said, “before this accident, we could save money for our children’s future. But now, because I can’t do any work, it is tough to maintain a family on only my husband’s income. Most of the time, my husband has to do the household work as I can not do heavy work at a stretch.”
Anjuara is stunned and saddened by the silence from the factory owner, international buyers and the government, none of whom have stepped up to assist Tazreen victims and their families. The Tazreen fire broke out on the first floor, where material was stored in the open, rather than in a fireproof room. The stairwells were locked, preventing workers from escaping the blaze, and managers uniformly tried to prevent workers from leaving when the fire alarm sounded.
“The Bangladesh government does not want us to remain alive. If the government wanted us alive, then we would get some financial support,’ Anjuara said. “We at least got condolences from the government. Our factory owner did not even express condolences to us.”
Anjuara, who came to Dhaka 12 years ago in search of a job with plans for a better life, has this hope.
“My wish is that no garment worker has to face any accident like the Tazreen fire.”
Nov 21, 2013
Aferza, 25, received no compensation after being seriously injured in the Tazreen Fashions factory fire and suffers from constant pain. Credit: Solidarity Center
To mark the one-year anniversary of the deadly Tazreen Fashions factory fire in Bangladesh, the Solidarity Center is highlighting stories of survivors and their families.
Aferza, 25, left her village in 2010 for Dhaka, the Bangladesh capital, to escape poverty. She planned to help support her family and educate her children with the money she earned.
On November 24, 2012, she was working as a sewing operator on the fourth floor of the Tazreen Fashions Ltd., garment factory when a fire swept through the building. Like nearly all workers who escaped the blaze, she was forced to jump from a window because the building had no fire escapes. Her husband found her lying unconscious among dead bodies near the burning building.
Her skull was fractured and a broken chest bone punctured her lung. Now, she says, “I am unable to take a glass of water on my own. I cannot sit or lie down for very long. I feel intolerable pain in my whole body and cry constantly.”
Unable to work, she sold the small plot of land she owned in her home village to help pay for medical expenses and food for her family. She spent the compensation she received from the Bangladesh Garments Manufacturing and Exporting Association (BGMEA) and Caritas, a private, Jesuit-run organization, for her medical treatment. “Living here with my husband and children, I cannot contribute to the maintenance of my family,” she says. “My husband is a rickshaw puller whose poor income cannot cover all these costs. Almost all of his earnings are spent on the cost of my medicine.”
As a result, she said, “I starve with my kids and cannot buy medicine for me.”
Some 112 workers died in the Tazreen blaze, which began in a first-floor warehouse of the multistory building. Like other Tazreen garment workers who recounted their experiences to Solidarity Center staff, Aferza says the production manager told them to remain at their work stations, despite the ringing fire alarm. She remembers the lights going out after the fire alarm and falling on the floor as panicked workers ran toward the windows. A co-worker helped her up to a window, where she jumped to the ground.
Even as she suffers from relentless physical pain, Aferza has also been psychologically wounded, fearful of tall buildings and crowds.
With no compensation from the government, the international buyers or the factory owner—and no way to go to work again—Aferza is depending upon loans for her medical treatment. “I have nothing,” she says. “I don’t know how I will survive in the coming days.
“My only dream is now to have food three times in a day, get better treatment and educate my children.”
Nov 19, 2013
A year after the deadly factory fire that killed 112 garment workers at Tazreen Fashions Ltd. in Bangladesh, survivors and the families of those killed and injured say they have been forgotten by the factory owner, international buyers and the government.
In interviews with Solidarity Center staff in Dhaka, the Bangladesh capital, many survivors said they were so injured in the blaze and escape from the building that they are unable to work again. Yet the compensation they received after the disaster—if they received any assistance at all—was not sufficient to cover initial medical bills, let alone pay for the expensive, ongoing care many need. Some were the sole breadwinners and, without the ability to work and with no financial assistance to see them through their recoveries, their families often go hungry, they cannot afford to send their children to school and many even risk losing their homes.
“I am not able to work and I don’t think that I will be able to work anymore,” said Shahanaz Begum. “Now, my life seems worthless.”
Like nearly all Tazreen garment workers who made it out of the burning multistory building alive on November 24, 2012, Shahanaz survived by jumping through a window. Windows—most of them barred—were the only exit because the factory had no fire escapes and staircases were locked or led to the burning storage room on the first floor. And like all survivors with whom the Solidarity Center spoke, Shahanaz said a factory manager told her she could not leave. She left anyway, searching through the smoke and darkness for a way out until she was forced to jump.
Now, Shahanaz said, “I cannot see through my right eye. I have problems in my spinal cord and can’t even walk properly. I cannot sit properly as my left leg was broken, my right leg is filled with blood clots and I cannot lift heavy weights.”
Shahanaz’s daughter, Tahera, also worked at Tazreen and suffers debiltating physical and emotional trauma. Shahanaz’s husband married a second wife after the disaster and now provides her with little financial support. As a result, she no longer takes her medicine because she cannot afford it. And she is unable to pay her rent. The compensation she received from the Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers Employers Association and two private organizations was used up paying for the extensive treatment she required in four separate hospitals.
According to news reports, Tazreen Fashions earned $36 million annually supplying garments to major buyers in the West. Yet the burning material that engulfed the building was not properly stored in a fireproof facility. Stairwells were locked, fire escapes nonexistent and no safety equipment was available to fight the blaze. Tazreen garment workers know the fire was preventable—yet so far, no one has been held accountable. And the garment workers who survived, and the families of those who did not, say they have been abandoned. As Anjuara, a Tazreen survivor said, the Bangladesh government has not compensated victims, but it offered condolences. “Our factory owner did not even express condolences to us,” she said.
After the Tazreen tragedy last year, ABC News summed up the situation: “Bangladesh has become a favorite of many American retailers, drawn by the cheapest labor in the world, as low as 21 cents an hour, producing clothes in crowded conditions that would be illegal in the U.S. In the past five years, more than 700 Bangladeshi garment workers have died in factory fires.”
In a country, a region and an industry where death on the job has become routine, all those involved along the garment supply chain continued business as usual after the Tazreen disaster. Since Tazreen, Solidarity Center staff has tracked 51 garment factory fire incidents, with some two dozen workers killed and more than 700 people—most of them women—injured.
Only after the Rana Plaza building collapsed outside Dhaka in late April, killing more than 1,200 garment workers, have concrete steps been taken to address deadly factory working conditions. Nearly 100 clothing brands have signed on to the Accord on Building and Fire Safety, a new and binding agreement that covers 1,800 factories in Bangladesh, mandates that both brands and the companies they source from fix building and fire hazards and ensures unions are a key part of this process. In another step forward, the government has allowed 60 unions to register—and if the unions are not resisted by employers, they will have the ability to improve the safety and health of vulnerable and impoverished workers who cannot fight alone for their rights.
But none of these moves help the Tazreen survivors. “Leading a better life is not only the hope of rich people but also the poor people like us,” said Morsheda, 25, a sewing machine operator at Tazreen, who is too injured to work and whose husband’s meager income in a garment factory cannot support them. “Garment owners have much money, they have the capability to run so many garment factories, they have nothing to lose. But we poor have lost everything.”
Oct 24, 2013
Today marks the six-month anniversary of the Rana Plaza building collapse in Bangladesh, which killed more than 1,200 garment workers, primarily women, and injured 2,500 more.
In the wake of this catastrophe, several steps have been taken to address workplace safety at the country’s thousands of garment factories: Some 100 major corporations have signed on to the Bangladesh Accord on Building and Fire Safety, a binding agreement that commits brands and the companies they source from to addressing building and fire hazards and ensuring unions are a key part of this process; and the Bangladesh government has moved toward allowing registration of unions at garment factories.
But on the factory floor, garment workers are reporting a torrent of employer resistance when they seek to form a union to ensure they have a collective voice to fight for workplace rights like job safety and health. Workers who spoke recently with Solidarity Center staff in Gazipur, Bangladesh, described the difficulties they face when seeking a union, even though forming a union would allow them to address deadly working conditions, such as those that led to the Rana Plaza disaster, where a multistory building pancaked in on workers.
Workers are the best monitors of conditions in their factories because they are on the shop floor every day, and many of those at Rana Plaza factories have told the Solidarity Center that they were threatened with the loss of their meager wages if they did not go back to their machines. If they had had a union, they could have had the strength to resist being forced into a death trap.
Workers also told Solidarity Center staff that at the center of what they want from their employers boils down to this: “respectful treatment.”
They know that with respect, all the rest—clean drinking water, sufficient wages to support their families, unlocked fire escapes—will follow.
Sep 12, 2013
Tim Ryan, Solidarity Center Asia Region Director, sends us this report from the AFL-CIO quadrennial convention in Los Angeles.
In a dramatic demonstration of how deadly the global supply chain really is, Scott Nova, director of the Worker Rights Consortium (WRC), opened a panel on worker rights in Bangladesh with this observation: “Of the four deadliest factory disasters in history, three of those four happened in the last 12 months.” He cited the Baldia factory fire in Pakistan, which killed 347 workers, the Tazreen Fashions fire, which killed 112 workers, and the Rana Plaza building collapse, in which more than 1,200 workers lost their lives. To find another industrial disaster of that proportion, you have to go back to the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire in New York in 1911. This was a pretty shocking thought to me and underscored how the global garment supply chain is increasingly dangerous to workers and why they need to redouble their efforts protect their rights.
Nova gave his remarks at the panel discussion, Bangladesh Fire and Safety Accord: A New Standard in Global Framework Agreements? Some 30 participants attended the workshop, which presented a truly new approach to framework agreements and protecting worker rights. Ben Davis, international director of the United Steelworkers (USW) moderated the panel, which included Nova; Kalpona Akter, director of Bangladesh Center for Worker Solidarity (BCWS); Owen Herrnstadt, international director of the International Association of Machinsts (IAM); and Garrett Strain, international campaign organizer for United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS).
Nova outlined the Accord on Building and Fire Safety, a new and binding agreement that 87 clothing brands have signed. The accord covers 1,800 factories in Bangladesh, mandates that both brands and the companies they source from fix building and fire hazards and ensures unions are a key part of this process.
“Workers’ justice starts for me with workers’ safety,” Akter said, and called the accord important for workers to provide activists the political space to organize and to interact with company managers to improve conditions. She also emphasized that although Bangladesh labor law is “decent” compared with some other countries, the law is not enforced. If the accord works, she said, “This could be a historical turning point.”
“Why are U.S. unions interested in the accord?” asked Owen Herrnstadt. “First, workers all over the world deserve safer workplaces,” he said. The IAM, an affiliate of the global union, IndustriALL, is bringing together workers from many industries, including the garment sector and is looking for “innovative tools to change corporate behavior.” Herrnstadt called the accord “one of the most significant breakthroughs,” one that is “radically different” and that needs to be emulated.
Strain discussed a delegation he led to Bangladesh with six USAS student activists to find ways to coordinate public campaigns in the United States with Bangladeshi labor union activists on the ground. In the coming weeks, USAS will encourage a Global Day of Action at the six-month anniversary of Rana Plaza on October 24. November 24 is the one-year anniversary since the Tazreen fire, and USAS is encouraging more actions on that day.
Most important, all the panelists encouraged the support of the democratic, independent unions in Bangladesh, which now have a chance to organize unions for the first time in the past 20 years.
