The Bangladesh Today (26-02-2018)

EDITORIAL
MoNday,
FEbruary 26, 2018
4
Acting Editor & Publisher : Jobaer Alam
Telephone: +8802-9104683-84, Fax: 9127103
e-mail: editor@thebangladeshtoday.com
Monday, February 26, 2018
boosting workers’
productivity
Arecent ILO report emphasised that 20 to
35 per cent of the labour force in
Bangladesh engage in at least 50 hours of
work per week. This is reflective of the tenacity
of the workers in this country. The contribution
of workers is a very big input in the production
processes. Higher output and its benefits are the
results of a motivated work-force ready to work
for long periods. From all of these perspectives,
Bangladesh is a country that has been blessed
with a large work force and also their diligence.
However, in today's world, economic progress
is not only having a huge number of willing
workers although this can be an advantage in
lowering wage costs. Only having an abundance
of workers does not guarantee competitiveness
specially in the vital export-oriented industries.
Bangladeshi entrepreneurs will also need to
increase the ' productivity' of their workers to
retain and expand market shares in the fierce
international competition. Greater quality
output from trained workers do translate into
more competitiveness. The significance of this
crucial factor must be adequately grasped by
our entrepreneurs specially in the readymade
garments (RMG) sector which is the country's
biggest foreign currency earner.
It is seen that workers in India and China
produce more in lesser time and produce better
quality apparels in comparison to their
counterparts in Bangladeshi readymade
garments (RMG) industries. Thus, the owners
of such industries in those countries have
become more competitive in terms of producing
more, producing more with less time and also
making higher quality goods. This has been
possible because the operators of these
industries in those countries took pains to
improve the productivity of their workers.
It seems that Bangladeshi entrepreneurs in
general are lagging behind in both
understanding these productivity issues and
training up their workers adequately to these
ends . It is not that all industries have been
oblivious to this need. Some foreign owned and
operated enterprises as well as ones of local
origin are taking care to increase workers'
productivity. But it is imperative for such
practices to spread across the gamut of
industries in the country.
Workers in different sectors in Bangladesh
should be taken into confidence and explained
how their higher productivity and efficiency in
all respects are the prerequisites to meeting
their demands for higher wages and other
benefits. They should then be obliged to agree to
a participatory framework in which
management would attempt to systematically
improve their productivity and efficiency
linking any rise in income for the workers to
attaining of the productivity goals. Government,
on its part, ought to much increase the number
of training and skill centres and run them either
free or at nominal costs for those who would
train in them. In many countries of the world,
government makes a major contribution in
training up potential workers for both
supplying the work-force and to increase the
productive capacities of workers.
Wages and productivity are coterminous and
need to be made mutually reinforcing for selfsustaining
growth. It is here that the trade union
and the employers should come to an
understanding for the sake of mutual benefit.
The trade unions need to be persuaded to realize
the importance of developing a work culture
among the workers and be alert to new methods
and processes that would mean larger
productivity and eventually more income and
employment. The search should be for an
'efficiency wage' based on the notion that there
is a relationship between relative wage levels
and workers' productivity.
The Bengali spirit rose in revolt in
anticipation of their mother tongue
being delegated to a secondary and
non-effective position in the newly born
state of Pakistan. It ignited the historical
inferno of the Bangla Language
Movement.
Gradually the movement took up
momentum and people from all walks of
life in the erstwhile East Pakistan got
involved till it reached its climax in 1952.
From then onwards there was no going
back. Bangla is not the only language in the
world which was and still is being
threatened by other domineering language
and culture nor will it be the last one. But it
is the first language which got established
as the rightful language of a people
through bloodshed. We could fight the
outside threat to our beloved mother
language in the fifties through sixties. We
were united against the open threat from
an easily identifiable alien enemy.
Times have changed; a lot of water has
flown down the Ganges and the Padma.
Now our beloved Bangla is again under
dire threat. But now the threat is so deep
inside our minds that to fight it is not as
easy, because now the threat is from
within our own homes. Now the enemy of
our language has infiltrated into the minds
of our people from all walks of life; the
formative young students, the matured
homemakers, the senior retirees, all are
prey. Once again we must fight for our
beloved Bangla language. This time the
battle is on the home ground and the
opponent is not an alien but our own
people. How many of our English medium
NAWAZ got squeezed - again -
domestically, the boys got squeezed
internationally and between those
two confusing, seemingly unconnected
things:
Let's start with the Nawaz stuff. For
better or worse, no one has to pretend any
longer that the specific chain of events is
predictable or that it does not primarily
have something to do with the boys.
Because to argue either of that would imply
someone could have predicted an on-time
Senate election minus PML-N candidates.
The timing has been slick, the execution so
precise that you almost have to marvel at it.
First came the Balochistan ruse. Easy
enough to explain, small enough to
disregard, the coup-inside-the-assembly
lulled folk into thinking the danger had
been absorbed, a bullet dodged.
Phew. So that's what they had in mind.
OK, let's get on with the business of the rest
of the elections. It drew the PML-N into its
next mistake: nominating halfway decent,
relatively senatorial candidates. The boys
haven't ventured down this path, walked
us all this way, only to let Nawaz win the
next election and saunter back into power.
If the N-League had a clue what was
coming next, they would have gone with
Gullu Butt-types as candidates. Y'know,
the kind who would go to the mattresses
for the Sharifs.
But the PML-N made its move,
nominated mostly goody-goody types, the
nomination process closed, the ball left the
N-League's court and, bam! Suddenly,
Nawaz is no longer N-League president
and, suddenly, the N-League doesn't have
any Senate candidates. The whiplashinducing
turnaround has also forced a
When France's National Assembly
passed a rule last month
banning members of
parliament from wearing or displaying
religious symbols, many shrugged that it
was in keeping with the country's long
tradition of strict state secularism.
Instead, the ban - or rather the radical
thinking behind it - has become a major
obstacle to peacefully integrating
immigrant communities.
In supporting the new ban, former
prime minister Manuel Valls insisted it
was the natural continuation of a long
tradition of church and state separation
in France. Valls' view represents the
consensus view of French political and
cultural elites. It is also demonstrably
false.
Through modern French political
history, including after the 1905 law
establishing the separation of church and
state, members of the French National
Assembly have displayed religious
symbols. Indeed, through much of that
history, it never occurred to anyone that
this could contradict secularism in any
way.
Prominent post-war French political
figures included Roman Catholic priests,
who sat in parliament in their traditional
cassock. Abb Pierre, a Franciscan monk
who topped polls for the most admired
public figure in France for his
humanitarian work for decades until his
death in 2007, started out in public life as
a member of the National Assembly and
never parted from his religious garb. So
did Father Flix Kir, who was never far
from centre stage in French political life
Power of Language
educated population are able to read and
write Bangla proficiently is not a casual
matter to be laughed away. We have won
the war of independence through
bloodshed. We do not want to lose the
bloodless battle of languages. That Bangla
will not lose due to advent of computer
technology, is assured by the creation of
the Bangla keyboard, which has ensured
that Bangla language can stay abreast with
world technology. Now very appropriately
Bangladesh has the proponent of the
Bangla keyboard 'Bijoy' as the ICT
minister. Number of speakers empowers
language: In these modern times,
language is not just a carrier for the spoken
and written words; it also states the power
position of a particular language in the
world community of languages, usually
depending on the number of native and
Farah Naz SaTTar
cyrIL aLMEIda
foreign speakers of a language. In that
sense, Bangla is a powerful language with
250 million native and 300 million total
speakers worldwide, it is one of the most
spoken languages, ranked seventh in the
world.
People empower language: When
natives of one language choose to speak in
another language, they consciously or
unconsciously empower the language they
choose over their own mother tongue. This
Number of speakers empowers language: In these
modern times, language is not just a carrier for the
spoken and written words; it also states the power
position of a particular language in the world
community of languages, usually depending on the
number of native and foreign speakers of a
language. In that sense, bangla is a powerful
language with 250 million native and 300 million
total speakers worldwide, it is one of the most
spoken languages, ranked seventh in the world.
has far reaching and long term effect for
both the language that is chosen and the
one that is forsaken. It gradually erodes the
importance of their own language in their
national life, eventually disempowering it
in comparison to the other language.
Gradual erosion of importance of a
language happens like this. One would say
that no sane person would do it to their
a double squeeze
marvellous inversion. If the N-League
cancels the Senate election in Punjab or
tries to delay the overall Senate election by
fighting it out in the courts, it will be the N-
League that is fighting democratic
continuity.
And if the N-League elects its own
candidates as independents, the N-League
will have to wait and see which side of the
aisle the incoming senators choose. You
almost have to marvel at it. But it still
doesn't make the ultimate problem go
away. Predicting the specific chain of
events may no longer be possible -
predicting an on-time Senate election
minus N-League candidates would have
been beyond magic, it would have been
sorcery - but the final impasse is the same.
The boys haven't ventured down this
path, walked us all this way, only to let
Nawaz win the next election and saunter
back into power. But Nawaz hasn't come
all this way, put up mystifying defiance and
arrived at the threshold of a commonsense
defying fourth win, just to chuck it all
away. You don't have to be a Senate
for more than two decades. Syed
Benaisse Bu Alam, a representative of
then-French Algeria, sat in traditional
Berber robes and turban, claiming the
garb as a symbol of his Muslim faith. And
yet he was elected four times to the vicepresidency
of the National Assembly.
The 1905 law ended public subsidies
for religious institutions, but instituted
no legal or cultural rule against public
expression of religious values. So, why
are we now told differently?
The answer is obvious: Over the past
few decades, millions of people of
Muslim faith or Muslim background
immigrated to France. It is only then that
this novel understanding of secularism
emerged. The myth that state secularism
has always mandated such rigid
interpretations is convenient: If there are
problems with French Muslims in
France, they can be blamed on their
reluctance to embrace the sacred rule of
secularism.
Measuring French anti-Muslim bias is
candidate to know a collision is inevitable.
If the boys won't back down and Nawaz
can't back down - that leaves just one
option: Which brings us to this FATF
business. Forget the specifics of what it
entails and when and how. The experts
may eventually tell us or, more likely,
events will. But already it is apparent that
FATF is happening because of the US,
more specifically the Trump
administration. Committed to a military
Suddenly, Nawaz is no longer N-League president
and, suddenly, the N-League doesn't have any
Senate candidates. The whiplash-inducing
turnaround has also forced a marvellous inversion.
If the N-League cancels the Senate election in
Punjab or tries to delay the overall Senate election
by fighting it out in the courts, it will be the N-
League that is fighting democratic continuity.
strategy in Afghanistan and determined to
raise the cost on Pakistan for defiance, the
Trump approach comes down to asking:
What are the Haqqanis worth to you,
Pakistan? What is the LeT worth to you?
What is Jaish worth to you? The answer to
those questions is unknown to you and me
and everyone else. Other than you knowwho,
of course. But for democratic
purposes, it may be enough to know that
the questions are being asked. Because the
Trump administration is trying to get at
the boys to force them to answer those
questions.
You can see where this is going. If in the
PaScaL-EMMaNuEL Gobry
hard, in part because it is tricky to
separate it from other forms of bias, and
in part because of a strong French taboo
against social studies of religion. In 2015,
however, researchers from Institut
Montaigne, a centrist think-tank, and
one of the very few French institutions to
care about the question, found a clever
way to measure anti-Muslim bias and
isolate it from racial or xenophobic bias,
by applying to job openings with fake
resumes from fictional applicants. The
personas they created for the
applications were all Lebanese; only the
applicant's first name credibly signalled
his or her religious affiliation. Differences
in response rates to these applications
could therefore be plausibly ascribed to
anti-religious, as opposed to ethnic or
xenophobic bias. The results are eyeopening:
Catholic applicants were twice
as likely to get a call-back as Muslim
applicants when CVs were identical in
every respect except religious affiliation.
A 2013 poll by Harris Interactive -
own mother tongue. But it is done by
people who are not only sane but also of
high intellect and education. For only the
educated have knowledge of language
other than their tongue. It can be said that
they give priority to a foreign language
either to acquire higher knowledge or
position or simply without much deep
thought given to its consequence. It all
happens rather unobtrusively and so
unaggressively in the globalised world of
today that it raises not much dissent nor
attracts much attention.
Culture is the battle ground of
languages: No army crashes in to either
break down the barricades of a language or
mow down the people who speak it. The
danger comes in another form and shape,
the surreptitious attack is not directly on
the language but on the culture, heritage,
education system, literature, music and
cinema of a nation. The battle for the
hearts and minds of the people is fought
on an innovative ground by uprooting old
values and embedding new ones into the
soil. Eventually the people themselves
fight the battle of the outsider in their own
country against their own people. It
happens when the people of one culture
prefers the music, cinema, drama, news,
fashion, food, ideas, etc. of another culture
above that of their own, consciously or
unconsciously. In a globalised world it is
natural for cultures, values and tastes to
merge but not at the cost of losing touch
.with one's own heritage.
Language empowers people: We won't
be wrong if we say that it is very prestigious
in Bangladesh to have fluency in English.
‘Secular’ is French for ‘anti-Muslim’
Measuring French anti-Muslim bias is hard, in part because
it is tricky to separate it from other forms of bias, and in part
because of a strong French taboo against social studies of
religion. In 2015, however, researchers from Institut
Montaigne, a centrist think-tank, and one of the very few
French institutions to care about the question, found a clever
way to measure anti-Muslim bias and isolate it from racial or
xenophobic bias, by applying to job openings with fake.
domestic arena the boys won't back down
and Nawaz can't back down, leaving only
the C-option - the external dimension
means the Trump administration would
jump all over the C-option if it is activated.
FATF as a demonstration of the
inventiveness and eagerness of the US can
only mean a coup in Pakistan would give
the US a straight run at Pakistan. It would
strip away the pretence and it could strip
away the hesitation and the need to
carefully ratchet up pressure on Pakistan.
So, did FATF just save democracy in
Pakistan? There lies the illusion democratic
types can be misled by. The convoluted,
theoretical version is the enemy's enemy is
a friend. That somehow a beneficial alliance
can be cobbled together. The more
pedestrian, realistic explanation is the
desperation of the weak: the boys under
serious external pressure may open up
political space domestically for the civilians.
But for all the wailing and hysteria when the
US turns the screws, there is another side.
Sure, the US is definitely probing and
pushing and raising the costs on Pakistan.
The US wants to know what the Haqqanis,
LeT and Jaish are worth to us. But there are
two other questions; questions few want to
admit that Pakistan - the boys, essentially -
has been asking of the US. The questions:
What is Afghanistan worth to you,
America? And what is your relationship
with us - Pakistan, a nuclear state - worth to
you? The answers to those questions have
never been good. At least not good in a
democracy-chasing sense that our major
political parties, right and left, have
desperately wanted the answers to be.
Source : Dawn
before the Charlie Hebdo and November
2015 terrorist attacks, before the refugee
wave, which further inflamed tensions -
on French people's views on religious
communities gave astonishing results:
73 per cent of respondents said they had
a negative view of Islam, 90 per cent said
wearing the Islamic headscarf was
"incompatible with life in French
society", and 63 per cent thought praying
five times a day was also incompatible. If
French people's problem with Islam was
about secularism, Roman Catholic nuns
who wear a veil should also be deemed
"incompatible". And yet a majority of
respondents in the same poll had a
favourable opinion of Catholicism.
The phenomenon is largely
unconscious, but in practice, the
revisionist French dogma of secularism
translates into institutionalised bigotry.
The all-too predictable result of this
hypocrisy is a vicious cycle of mutual
radicalisation.
Since the mid-2000s, the proportion of
Muslim women electing to wear the
Islamic veil has markedly increased,
according to work by the French
sociologist Raphael Liogier. No mystery
there: The infamous bill banning the
Islamic headscarf in schools passed in
2004. The bill's goal was to dampen
public expressions of Islam by turning
schools into safe spaces, and it has
achieved the opposite. And yet no
noteworthy figure in French politics
contemplates reversing or even relaxing
it.
Source : Gulf News