BETWEEN 1980 AND 2000, more than 150 garment firms from around the world moved to Bangladesh. The poverty-stricken country—still reeling from a horrific war of independence and repeated coups—was making a name for itself as a rising star in the global garment trade. Regulations were lax, child labor common. And there seemed to be an inexhaustible supply of women, children, and young men ready to work. The industry boomed, fueling an annual economic growth rate that sometimes reached 6 percent. By 2010, four million workers were making clothing in Bangladesh. Local elites and global corporations reaped huge profits.1
Twelve-year-old Kalpona Akter and her ten-year-old brother began working at the end of the 1980s. After their parents fell ill, they had to find ways to put food on the table for five siblings. Shifts at their Dhaka garment factory often lasted twenty hours, Akter recalls, and when there were large orders, they worked around the clock, sleeping on the factory floor. Once they worked for three straight weeks. Brief bathroom and food breaks were their only relief.
After the bloody 1970 war for independence from Pakistan, government structures in the new country were designed to benefit people who had invested in the garment trade. Clothing manufacturers dominated both major political parties, Akter says. So, although power shifted back and forth between them, garment workers found few friends in government at any time. Trade union leaders were arrested, imprisoned, kidnapped, tortured, and even murdered because Bangladesh had a special position to preserve: as the cheapest place on earth to produce clothing.2
Bangladeshi garment workers earned less than one-third the wages of their Indian and Pakistani counterparts, one-fifth of what Chinese workers earned, and less than a tenth of what some garment workers were paid in Thailand. Bangladesh has, since the 1980s, been the threat that hangs over the heads of garment workers the world over, says Cambodian union leader Ath Thorn. “If you keep asking for a higher wage, the factory will close and move to Bangladesh,” his members have been told anytime they ask for raises.3
It took an unbearable tragedy, a twenty-first-century Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, to make Bangladeshi workers finally, painfully, visible to the world. On April 24, 2013, the twenty-first-century garment industry was literally shaken to the ground when vibrations from a thousand sewing machines opened cracks in the Savar building in Dhaka and it collapsed, killing 1,134 workers. Families lost loved ones—often their only breadwinners. Thousands of survivors suffered life-changing injuries.4
Photos of bodies wrapped in cloth and dazed survivors staggering from the rubble were beamed round the world. Young workers lost arms and legs. Crushed spines left many paralyzed. Traumatic memories of being caught under the rubble haunted survivors who came out otherwise intact. The garment workers of Bangladesh had finally captured the attention of the world.
As she watched, Kalpona Akter said: “I don’t care if it’s direct contract or subcontract or whatever excuse you want to make. If I find your label there, it’s your responsibility. That’s my word and I will make you pay.”5
Akter was in Washington, DC, when Rana Plaza collapsed, but she hurried home. A few days later, she stood with her feet buried by dust in a vast rubble field. Scraps of brightly colored fabric shivered in the hot wind: purples, blues, and pinks, shreds of the beautiful traditional clothing worn by Bangladeshi women. “I had to go,” she whispers. “I couldn’t resist my need.”
She found it difficult to breathe, both because the air was still filled with grit from the collapse and because she felt her heart swelling in her chest. Still, Akter did what she always does after a disaster takes the lives of garment workers. She sorted through the debris to try to find labels. “This is how we figure out and disclose the supply chain,” she says. “Otherwise, it is so complicated that you don’t even know who is buying the clothes made at each factory.”6
Akter plunged her fingers into the pulverized brick and chalky dust, feeling around until she found a package of labels a few inches down. “I was pulling a label up and then I saw that it said ‘Made with Love.’” She is silent for a moment as she tells this story. Then anger twists her voice. “It says “Made with Love’ and thousands died under that building.” In a bitter irony, the labels she found were for children’s clothes. The biggest buyer at Rana Plaza was the American chain the Children’s Place.
“This Children’s Place for a long time denied any compensation to the workers,” she says. So Akter traveled to its corporate headquarters in New Jersey to demand reparations for the injured and for the families of workers who were killed. She brought several survivors. No executive would meet with them. Instead, she says, “they arrested me and the Rana Plaza survivors who were with us.”
When the Savar building fell, Akter says, she was still suffering nightmares and other symptoms of post-traumatic stress from witnessing a terrible fire at Dhaka’s Tazreen factory, five months earlier. That fire erupted on November 24, 2012. As at Triangle, as always, the doors were locked, she says bitterly, “to prevent workers from stealing.”
When Akter arrived on the scene, she saw “thousands of people crying and screaming.” The fire trucks ran out of water and she watched people dragging full buckets from their homes, which they threw, futilely, at the flames. Dhaka’s garment factories are built at the center of worker neighborhoods, Akter explains. So “parents and siblings knew right away and they started running. I had to hold one mother. She was crying. She wanted to jump into the fire and find her daughter.”
As the flames weakened and the night cooled, Akter moved closer to the building where she “met another mom.” She drops her eyes. Her voice grows soft. “This mom lost her only son there. His name was Kolash. He was eighteen or twenty.”
Kolash had called his mom as soon as the fire started, Akter says. Though they lived outside the city, the mother quickly found a bus and rode through the night toward her son. From the moment Kolash called, his mom never let him off the phone. “The whole time she was on the bus,” Akter says, “the whole time she stood outside the burning factory.”
The grieving mother recounted the conversation to Akter:
“Son, try your best to find the places where people are escaping.”
“OK, Mom, I’m trying but I can’t find any place.”
“Find a window. Break the window and jump.”
“Mom, I can’t find any way out. It’s dark. There’s smoke. There’s fire in the building.”
“Go to the bathroom, wet your shirt in the sink. Bury your face in the wet cloth so you can breathe. I am coming to you.”
The son made his way to the bathroom but there was no water. “The last call, the son said, ‘Mom, there is no way I can survive. I am opening my shirt and tying it around my waist. You can find my body seeing this.” When light broke the next morning, Akter says, “mom was crying in front of me. She found the body just the way her son said.” Akter’s eyes fill with tears as she tells the story. “So this is basically the pain, these tears. It’s hard to live with these memories.”
Akter went home briefly at 2:30 a.m. that night to surf the Internet and try to figure out which company owned Tazreen. When morning came, she returned to the factory, armed with the knowledge that it was run by a company called the Tuba Group. “They own many garment factories,” she says. “Tazreen was just one.”
Akter stood in the smoky dawn light, watching as 112 bodies were carried out and laid in rows. “The area was surrounded by police and army, security and intelligence.” She told them she was a journalist. “They weren’t letting people get close to the site, but I forced my way in. There was so much pain in the air. People were looking at the bodies. And you could smell the burnt flesh. The families were crying. They were looking for their beloved ones. But they could not find them because many of the bodies had burned to ash.” Some had no faces. “So families were trying to recognize their beloveds looking for bangles or a nose pin. Whatever was left.”
When the police recognized Akter, they asked her to make a statement, to tell the crowd that the fire was over, to give them a definite death toll. She refused. She didn’t yet know for sure how many had died and she would not pretend that she did. Akter had no interest in calming anyone. She felt choked by her own grief and anger.
Akter ran to the factory with a camera and forced her way inside. The aisles were piled high with fabric that had fed the fire and blocked exits. “There was still flame I could feel on my face,” she said. She started rummaging through the ruins for labels. “That was why I was on the inside. I wanted to make sure there were no bodies. And I wanted to find out what brands were being sewn there.” She found labels for Walmart, Sears, and a German brand called KiK.
Akter tried to tear labels from fabric but she didn’t have the strength. Furiously, she looked for a scissor, then started cutting out labels and stuffing them in her pockets. She took pictures of clothing. She searched the office and found paperwork and invoices, evidence of who the buyers were. “So at least these brands had no legitimacy when they denied that they were there.” On the fifth floor, she found baby shirts and Disney labels and broke down.
In the office, she found pamphlets from the organization she leads—the Bangladesh Center for Worker Solidarity. “That means these workers had at some point come to our center and picked these up or another worker gave them out trying to organize. Management must have found out and took them away.”
By a shattered plate-glass window, Akter says, she saw hundreds of sandals. “Workers had broken the glass and jumped.” She thought of the sound bodies make when they hit pavement after a fall. Then she saw a door open to the roof. She climbed up. Below her lay the building’s bamboo scaffolding, hanging broken and limp. Some had made it down before the scaffolding came apart. Akter walked through the building again, taking pictures of everything: the locked doors on the sewing and cutting floors, the piled sandals, the ruptured scaffolding. Then she went home and tried to escape the nightmare images.
Soon after, Akter sent Walmart executives the labels she had found in the embers of Tazreen, demanding compensation for families of the dead and wounded. Walmart would not budge. “Even after we sent the labels, they told us, ‘We were not there.’ Then we sent pictures of their products and documents showing that they were the buyers. They said, ‘We weren’t there.’ When we sent a picture of me and the labels together, standing with ashes in my hand, they said, ‘Well, we were there but it was a subcontractor. It’s not our responsibility.’ Go to hell! My workers are making clothes for you to sell. You make the profit. That’s all we need to know.”
Fire has been omnipresent in the lives of Bangladeshi garment workers. They are haunted by it. Almost every garment worker has had personal experience with a factory fire or knows someone who was burned. Factories operate without water, working fire extinguishers, or fire escapes. Doors are locked, exits blocked by piles of fabric. In some factories, barred, sealed windows prevent workers from taking even a breath of air.7
There were twenty-five garment factory fires in Bangladesh in 2012, the year of Tazreen. There were sixty more between 2013 and the spring of 2015, Akter says, causing thirty-one deaths and nine hundred injuries. And since worker neighborhoods ring garment factories, many of these fires have spread to the tin, straw, and cardboard shanties where workers live, destroying homes, leaving thousands homeless, burning their few belongings—clothing, photographs, or worse—pets and loved ones. Akter herself lived through a factory fire when she was fourteen—with eight hundred workers behind locked doors. “I still have nightmares,” she says, “maybe because I’ve seen it again and again.”8
Kalpona Akter is done with excuses. She has been blacklisted by factory owners and arrested by her own government, charged with a murder she most certainly did not commit. (Only international pressure won her vindication and release.) She has been held for a week in handcuffs underneath a desk in Dhaka’s eighteenth-century Central Jail. And she lost her friend and fellow organizer Aminul Islam to police torture.
She has felt the flames, smelled wet smoke, and breathed in the scent of fire and death. She has held sobbing mothers in her arms and tracked down damning evidence. She knows who is responsible for the regularly occurring factory disasters that have taken the lives of thousands of young Bangladeshi workers, and she is no longer willing to let them hide behind their complex and fragmented global value chains. “We don’t want to know how complicated your supply chain is,” she says. “There’s a worker and a clothing company. I don’t want to know who is in between.”
Multinational clothing corporations must be held accountable, Akter believes. There’s a moral bottom line—life and death, burned and crushed limbs. She intends to draw that moral red line on our clothes by traveling the world, speaking out, fighting for safer workplace conditions, and sparking pangs of consumer conscience until everybody understands.
The women Akter represents are as angry as she is. By 2017, Bangladeshi garment workers had been fighting for twelve years. Their rebellion began after a 2005 garment factory collapse that trapped 450 workers, killing 64 and injuring 80 more. Over the next year, waves of strikes spread from the Ashulia factory district across the country’s production zones.
Despite a fiercely patriarchal culture, hundreds of thousands of young women took to the streets, refusing to listen to elders and imams who urged them to stay indoors. They chained factory doors shut. They sat in. They blocked highways and ports. And in bursts of anger, some women poured gasoline over factory floors and burned their workplaces.
Kalpona Akter and Nazma Akhter condemned these burnings. “We never condone vandalism. Never.” But there was a catharsis some found in setting fires, turning the element that has caused garment workers so much pain back on the products that bring profit to their bosses.9
They made themselves heard. European and US consumers and unions pressed the Bangladeshi government and global clothing brands to fix building foundations and equip factories with fire exits, clean drinking water, and proper ventilation. The Bangladeshi government increased the minimum wage in 2006 and again in 2010 and 2013. Increases came again in 2017. A few negligent factory owners were indicted. Bangladeshi officials, on the defensive after Rana Plaza, swore they would make their factories safe.
Two hundred and twenty clothing brands and retailers, holding contracts with 1,600 Bangladeshi factories employing two million workers, signed the Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh. Bangladeshi activists agree that it has saved an unknowable number of lives, and could do more if all the hazards identified in inspections were repaired. Still, the accord was only a paper agreement. To enforce it, and to extend it beyond 2018, there would have to be continued pressure. And there was.10