Current Magazine

with its huge supply of cheap labor and infrastructure, so foreign
companies stay in the face of intensifying criticism of
unsafe and exploitative working conditions.
Those criticisms reached fever pitch in April when the Rana
Plaza complex just outside Dhaka collapsed, killing more than
1,130 people, mostly garment workers who had been told to
return to work despite visible cracks in the structure.
But there is little sign that foreign companies have withdrawn
business from Bangladesh. Garment exports rose strongly in
June and are up 13 percent over the year, government data
show. It’s hard to beat Bangladesh’s labor costs, which are falling
in real terms and, adjusted for the cost of living, are 27
percent below nearest rival Cambodia,
according to Center for American Progress/Workers
Rights Consortium data.
The world’s largest fashion retailers,
Inditex SA, owner of the Zara chain, and
H&M, are the biggest customers in Bangladesh.
Europe buys about 60 percent
of its apparel exports while the United
States buys less than 25 percent.
After the Rana Plaza disaster, 70
European firms have signed a pact
to better monitor and improve safety
standards at the factories where they
outsource, and U.S. firms have followed
suit with their own accord. But
clothing retailers have signed pacts before
to little avail.
Parul ate lunch at 1:30 p.m., sitting
on the floor in the women’s canteen.
The factory supplies no food and all the
tables and chairs were taken. Forty-five
minutes later, she was back at work.
By afternoon, the garment workers were tiring. For the
next six hours, Parul worked on, pausing only for some water.
Tamiz Uddin Ahmed, the factory’s chief executive officer,
takes pride in supplying clean drinking water. He ferries it to
work in his Toyota. “We collect the water from a deep well,
put it in a jar and bring to the factory every day,” he said.
A doctor and two nurses are available during working
hours and visits are free, a company official said. Parul has
only visited the factory doctor once. She feared management
might deduct money from her salary, though she does not
know whether they have. She can’t read.
The Aplus offices closed at 5 pm but the first batches of
garment workers didn’t finish until 7 p.m. Parul was asked to
stop sewing and help a fellow worker by carrying away the
stitched items for the final hour.
She didn’t leave work until 8:00 pm. It was dark outside.
Still, she felt it was a lucky day. Her eldest daughter, Jesmin,
would be waiting for her at home with her two nieces. There
would a family dinner of gourd, pulse and rice.
Home is a tiny room in a tin-shed shanty in the glitzy Pallabi
Extension area on the northern outskirts of Dhaka, about
1 kilometer and a half from the factory. The shanty has three
rows, each containing six rooms, each housing four to six
people. About 30 residents on each row share two toilets,
one bathroom and two stoves with gas connection.
Parul was 14 years old and destitute
when she first came to Dhaka with
her two sisters and brother in 1988. A
flood had swept away her family’s small
plots of land and all their possessions
in Barisal district, some 250 kilometers
southwest from the capital.
She took a job in a garment factory
for a monthly salary of Tk 150 and
married a dye worker a year later. Her
career coincided with the explosive
growth of the ready-made garment
business in Bangladesh. Her brother
also is a dye worker and lives in Dhaka
with his family, while her younger sister
is a housemaid in Saudi Arabia.
All was well until her husband had an
affair. “When he left us, I was out of work
because of illness,” said Parul. “My second
daughter took a job in an embroidery
shop and that was how we had to
live — almost every day, half-fed.”
Jesmin is Parul’s best hope for a better future. She has completed
the equivalent of a bachelor’s degree in English at the
madrasa and is promised a teaching job. If she gets it, Parul
said her family will move to a better house.
The only bed in the small room can hold three people at
best. The others must sleep on the cement floor. The plates,
glasses, cooking pots and drinking jars are placed beneath the
bed to keep some space open to dine, sleep, pray and play
the board game Ludo in their leisure time, if there is any.
The table has an old Royal brand TV. The rest of the furniture
consists of a plastic chair and two drums for keeping rice and
other food items. Parul can’t afford the monthly TV satellite
connection fee of Tk 300 ($3.75), or nearly two days wages.
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