Nov 22, 2013
![C-_Users_Tula_Desktop_Bangladesh.Tazreen](http://www.solidaritycenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/C-_Users_Tula_Desktop_Bangladesh.Tazreen3-300x300.jpg)
Morsheda is forced to send her son to live with relatives because she can no longer support him after being injured in the Tazreen Fashions factory fire. Credit: Solidarity Center
Morsheda could not travel to her home village in Bangladesh for the recent Eid holiday because she could not afford the trip. Her 9-year-old son, who lives in the village with his grandmother, told neighbors there that he does not have parents because if he did, they would be with him for the holiday
“You cannot imagine how very painful it is for parents to hear such words from their child,” she said.
Since sustaining severe injuries in the November 24, 2012, Tazreen Fashions garment factory fire, Morsheda, 25, has been too disabled to work. Without funds for her son’s education, she sent him to live with her relatives.
Morsheda has lost the use of her right hand, so badly damaged during her flight from the blaze that swept through the multistory factory that she can only prepare meals with the help of her sister. To get out of the factory, Morsheda, like nearly every Tazreen survivor, was forced to jump from a window to safety after she and co-workers found the stairwell exits locked. They escaped even though their manager had ordered them back to work when the fire alarm sounded. Her right eye was gashed as a result of her fall, and she still has difficulty seeing from it.
“My whole body is swollen when I wake up from sleep,” she said. “Every night I feel pain in my right leg and my waist.”
Her husband, also a garment factory worker, is not paid enough to buy the medicine she needs. “With his income, it is tough to buy medicine, to run a family, to pay for my son’s educational expenses, to pay back loans, etc.,” she said. The little money Morsheda received in compensation for her injuries was quickly spent on her medical care.
Morsheda believes that the factory owner, the brands and the government have forgotten her and the thousands of other Tazreen garment workers now too injured to support themselves and their families. Morsheda says she needs real assistance if she and her family are to survive.
Morsheda and her husband came to Dhaka, the Bangladesh capital, several years ago in search of jobs. With two incomes, the couple could pay for their son’s education. But now, out of school and missing an education, they fear their child will face a bleak future, one that likely will continue the cycle of poverty.
“Leading a better life is not only the hope of rich people but also the poor people like us,” Morsheda said, crying. “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.”
Nov 22, 2013
When someone knocks on her door, Anjuma knows a debt collector is likely on the other side. But ever since she escaped with severe injuries from the disastrous fire at the Tazreen Fashions factory where she worked as a cleaner, she has had no money to pay her bills.
“People become the prisoners of jail, but I became a prisoner of the world,” Anjuma, 45, said with a blank look. When the fire broke out, killing 112 workers at Tazreen, on the outskirts of Dhaka, Bangladesh, Anjuma jumped out a fourth-floor window onto a nearby roof. But her leg was sliced by a metal rod, and the debilitating injuries she sustained have made it impossible for her to work again. Faruk, a fellow worker who helped her escape, died in the consuming blaze. Anjuma also lost three cousins at Tazreen, one of whom was never found.
“My husband is a rickshaw puller but he is very old and not able to work more,” Anjuma said. She has three sons and a daughter. Among them, only one takes care of her. But he earns little, and has gone into debt as well, trying to help her. She has so many medical expenses, she cannot afford rent or food, and her landlord twice locked her out of the house for not paying rent. She’s now seven months behind in payments to her landlord.
Anjuma received no compensation for her injuries. Not from her factory employer. Not from the Western brands whose clothes were made at Tazreen. And not from the government. Each week, she travels to a hospital for treatment and finds it difficult even to pay for the transportation.
Since the Tazreen disaster, Anjuma often feels dizzy. She has difficulty walking and is weak because “days pass by without food.” She recently passed out from blood clots in her nose and chest. Once, Anjuma stitched beautiful kantha (handcrafted material). Now, she can no longer do fine needlework because she cannot see well.
As a survivor of the Tazreen fire, Anjuma wants the government to help her with medical expenses so she can again earn a wage and pay her bills. Anjuma does not know how she will manage her medical treatment expenses, pay her debt or support her household. But she does know this: She will never again utter the words, “garment factory.”
Nov 21, 2013
![BangladeshTazreen](http://www.solidaritycenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/BangladeshTazreen-255x300.jpg)
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.”
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.