IN THE MONTHS AFTER RANA PLAZA, Bangladesh garment workers continued to push for victim compensation and a living wage. Fifty thousand workers led by Nazma Akhter shut down six hundred factories, demanding a raise from $38 to $100 per month. They had not had a raise in three years. “We are not asking for mercy,” said Akhter. “Our labor moves this economy.” They also demanded compensation for Rana Plaza and Tazreen victims, and criminal charges against their owners. In an export zone outside Dhaka, ten thousand women went rogue and vandalized factories.1
In December 2013, the government conceded, raising the minimum wage from $34 to $68 per month. For the first time in the era of fast fashion, Bangladesh was no longer at the bottom. Some reports put Sri Lanka and the Philippines lower. Two months later, Tazreen’s owner, Delwar Hossain, was arrested and jailed.2
The taste of victory quickly turned sour, however, when Tuba stopped paying its employees. Months dragged on with no one receiving pay. As it grew closer to the Eid holiday, the workers ran out of patience. Eid marks the end of Ramadan—a month of daytime fasting for observant Muslims. It is also a flash point for labor unrest in Bangladesh. To help them pay for expensive holiday feasts, employers traditionally give workers Eid bonuses. The previous year, Tuba failed to do that. Angry workers stormed Tuba’s offices, holding the boss hostage for eighteen hours until he promised to pay bonuses to nine hundred workers.
As Eid 2014 approached, things were worse. Never mind bonuses. Tuba workers had not been paid in months. Desperate, they turned to Moshrefa Mishu, president of the Garment Workers Unity Forum and a well-known figure in Dhaka radical politics for thirty-five years. The workers liked her fierceness. “The government, the owners, the corporations, they are serious, sure,” she said. “But we are fighting for our lives.”3
Mishu’s dissident career began when she was a sixteen-year-old university student protesting military dictators and Islamic fundamentalism. “I fought at the same time for women’s emancipation, a democratic society, and against fascist religious forces,” she says. Still, “my heart belongs to the garment workers. I had been with them for twenty years” when the Tuba workers came calling. “They knew they could trust me,” she says.
Mishu’s decades of activism had earned her the enmity of leaders in both of Bangladesh’s major political parties—the Awami League and the Islamist Bangladesh National Party. She was even more reviled by the Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association (BGMEA). As a result, Mishu had been arrested and imprisoned numerous times.
In 2011, she was held for five months after leading a massive garment workers’ protest. “They came to arrest me at midnight,” she says. “They were very aggressive. I live with my mother. She was seventy-five and she was crying. ‘Why are you arresting my daughter?’ They said: ‘She is troubling us. She instigates the workers.’
“It was December. It was freezing and I didn’t have a warm coat, so I became sick.” Mishu is asthmatic. She told them, “I need inhalers.” They denied her request and she says she almost died. She was given medical care only after international supporters in Korea, England, and Germany pressed the Bangladeshi government.
While she was in the hospital, Mishu’s captors tried to buy her off, she says. A representative of government came to visit. “‘Why are you involved with poor workers?’ he asked. ‘Why are you wasting your life? Why don’t you join the government? We don’t want to see you in the streets,’ they told me. ‘We want to see you in Parliament.’” Her interrogator leaned in close. “‘It’s a long time you are fighting for these poor garment workers. Don’t you get tired? You are a big dignitary from Dhaka University. Why don’t you do something serious? You could have a nice quiet life.’”
Mishu was unrepentant. “I told them, I don’t like this government. It is corrupt, not for workers, and not democratic.” Her visitor shifted from cajoling to threats. “If you don’t stop, it will be tough for you. The government is very angry with you. You are working to increase wages, but these are ignorant people. You are wasting your time.” They began to beat her.
She was again saved by foreign intervention, this time by Korean labor and human rights groups.
Mishu has never backed down. She says she can’t. “I see the distress of workers and I cannot tolerate it. I feel too sad. I fight for justice because I am thinking not just of their humanity but my own. I fight for the empowerment of women and workers because that is my commitment to my country.”4
In the summer of 2014, Mishu and the Tuba workers fought hard. But the Tuba Group refused to pay anything while their chief languished in prison. The standoff left the workers “very unsafe,” Mishu says. “Landlords were angry. They told the workers if you don’t pay before Eid we will kick you out.”
So the protests ratcheted up. On July 9, 2014, five hundred workers blocked roads leading to Dhaka’s largest garment factories. Crowds of women in blue, pink, yellow, and fuchsia saris formed human chains, refusing to move, even when company truck drivers threatened to run them down. Police used water cannons. Ten women suffered broken bones and injury to internal organs. Company guards threatened to rape the women right there in the street.
The workers had to strike, Mishu says. It was their only weapon. The demands were clear: they wanted Delwar Hossain tried for negligent homicide, three months of back pay with overtime, compensation for families of those killed and injured at Tazreen, psychological care for survivors, and an end to short-term employment contracts. They wanted to be regular employees with benefits. Tuba refused.
Hundreds of workers marched to the garment manufacturers’ association and demanded their wages—immediately. BGMEA officers promised that workers would be paid. When Eid began, no money had come. So 1,300 women and 30 male Tuba employees occupied their factory. And they took a hostage: Delwar Hossain’s mother-in-law, who was in the building when they locked its doors.
Mishu offered to negotiate with government officials and factory owners but talks quickly broke down. The workers settled in. “The occupation was very peaceful,” Mishu recalls, “but nothing changed. So, we realized, we had no choice. We had to go on hunger strike.” On July 28, 2014, sixteen hundred workers began a “satyagrahic [soul force] fast.”
After just two days without food, 112 workers fell ill; 14 were hospitalized. These were not people who ever had a lot to eat, Mishu explains. They were too poor. And they were hungrier than usual because many had been living on one meal a day during Ramadan. They physically could not afford to fast, but still they did. No one wanted to give in.
Worried that the state and employers would soon unleash violence, Mishu reached out to middle-class women’s and student groups, faculty at Dhaka University, progressive lawyers, and human rights activists. “So many people expressed their solidarity with us,” Mishu recalls. “The teachers marched. They staged a hunger strike in the street.” Women’s groups linked arms to block entrance to the city’s press club. Lawyers formed a human chain on the steps of the Bangladesh High Court. Garment workers from across the city sat in at BGMEA headquarters.
When police beat protesting workers, Mishu reached out to international groups: Clean Clothes Campaign, United Students Against Sweatshops, and Asia Floor Wage. Front Line Defenders sent observers to report human rights violations. Across Dhaka, red and white posters of Delawar Hossain were plastered on walls. “The Butcher of Bangladesh Garment Workers,” the posters called him, alluding to Hossain’s namesake, the infamous “Butcher of Hindus,” then on trial for slaughtering Bangladeshi civilians during the 1970 war of independence.
On the third day of the fast, the garment manufacturers association promised workers two months’ back pay within ten days. The workers were not in a compromising mood. The hunger strike would continue, Mishu told Bangladeshi authorities, until “all workers of the Tuba Group get their wages, bonuses, overtime, and allowances.”
The inevitable crackdown came a few days later. Hossain was released on bail, and almost immediately the fasting workers were locked inside the factory. On August 6, police stormed in, attacking weakened hunger strikers with batons and tear gas. Two hundred workers were driven into the street. Mishu and other strike leaders were arrested. The cry went up for a national strike. International supporters protested and Mishu was released. But police cut off water to the occupiers and shot rubber bullets into the factory windows. It was only a matter of time.
Surprising everyone, Tuba announced defeat and said workers would be paid back wages and overtime. The occupation ended. A week later, the Tuba Group closed all five of its factories. One thousand workers lost their jobs. Protests began again. Workers marched to demand reinstatement. They sued in court and won, but the factories remained closed.
In the summer of 2015, Mishu and thousands of garment workers were still marching for a living wage. Like their counterparts around the world, the women were also protesting land expropriations and the polluting of waterways around Dhaka by foreign corporations. Mishu explained in her speeches how these issues are intertwined. It was too much for the government.
In July, police stopped Mishu as she was addressing a rally and placed her under house arrest so she could no longer “inflame workers.” She refused their orders to remain silent. “I tell workers: The garment owners are united. They are the owners of the media. They are the owners of the banks. They are the government. So if you, the workers, are not united, you cannot change anything. You will not even get your regular pay.”
Mishu does not expect the danger to abate anytime soon. When I first interviewed her in the fall of 2015, she was nursing a broken arm, smashed by police clubs—the price, she says, of being a revolutionary. In 2016, Human Rights Watch declared a crisis in Bangladesh. Government forces were kidnapping, torturing, and imprisoning scores of dissidents. Mishu shrugs. “That’s a given.”
On September 10, 2016, a fire at the Tampico Foils Company took the lives of thirty-four workers. Yet again the streets of Dhaka were filled with protesters. They demanded indictment of the factory owners and compensation from the global corporations they supplied.
“The government, owners, and corporations don’t like democratic people,” Mishu says. “They don’t like militant people. Courageous people, they really don’t like. They want them to be quiet. And they want workers’ leaders to be pocket leaders. They like their pocket leaders. They like pocket organizations. But we are not pocket leaders and this is not a pocket revolution. We will continue to fight.”
We spoke by phone while she was under house arrest. The line went dead, clicked, then reconnected. Mishu said: “I am sure the government is listening.” She paused. I asked if she was frightened, if she was being careful. “Sure, sure,” she said hoarsely. “Ha. Ha.”
Kalpona Akter has no intention of stopping, either. She has too many new projects. One is teaching workers how to organize using social media. Many garment workers have smartphones, Akter says. “We are poor, but we are close to China so smartphones are not expensive.” The Bangladesh Center for Worker Solidarity is showing them how to use those phones to learn their legal rights and track garment union struggles globally. Organizers also show workers how to set up Facebook pages to draw workers into new unions.
Akter also has a team researching how many calories a day Bangladeshi garment workers consume. People can argue about what constitutes a living wage, she says, but everyone knows that people need about 2,000–2,500 calories a day to live in good health. “People with jobs shouldn’t be hungry,” she says. From the Philippines to Pasadena, I heard the same.
Rampant hunger among Bangladeshi garment workers may help explain a rash of ghost sightings, says Akter. Workers have been fainting in factories. When awakened, they say they were haunted by dead friends or family. Akter believes that malnutrition and post-traumatic stress disorder are what really haunts Bangladeshi factories. Workers have seen so much death and destruction, she says sadly. They need treatment. So Bangladeshi unions are demanding that employers and labels pay for trauma counseling.
Another reason for the faintings, she believes, may be exposure to toxic chemicals used in making clothing, especially sneakers. “There are tons of chemicals that don’t have any visibility or smell. In a factory without fresh air, that can be very dangerous. If a chemical reaction happens and workers are fainting, they may think they saw a ghost. But what they don’t see is the most harmful.” Akter describes garment workers’ exposure to toxic dyes, glues, and fumes as “silent killing.” To fight that, she and her colleagues are “researching the long-term effects of breathing and touching and maybe drinking chemicals in factory water.”
Her last project is fighting violence against women. Bangladeshi women workers are faced with violence at every turn, Akter says. There is “violence when women try to organize and become leaders. They get beaten inside the factory and outside by hired goons.” Then there is state violence, “when they make a human chain to block the factory and get beaten by police.”
The most widespread kind of violence is the most difficult to tackle, says Akter, because of the social stigma. “There is a huge incidence of sexual violence but nobody talks about it because it is a cultural taboo. We’ve been taught not to talk about it. If you get raped or touched inappropriately by men, don’t talk about it or you are the bad one.”
So Akter and her colleagues have created drop-in centers across Dhaka and eight-week discussion groups for women workers. From New York to Dhaka, Phnom Penh to Cape Town, the new global labor movement has revived consciousness-raising groups. “Even with all these new very strong women leaders in our movement,” Akter says, “it is not easy to talk about gender-based violence. Even the leaders are not comfortable talking about it.”
The discussion groups really help, Akter says. After long weeks in the factory, workers want company, solidarity, a little bit of fun. Food. Music. Only after they unwind, says Akter, do they begin to feel comfortable enough to talk.
“The first meeting, everybody says they haven’t heard of any sexual violence. In the second meeting, they are still shy. At the third meeting, someone might say, ‘OK, I heard this happened to my coworker.’ By the fourth meeting, finally one of the workers is brave. And she says: ‘I was raped on the shop floor by a foreman or an owner or the owner’s son who says I can’t keep my job if I don’t give in.’ We are now breaking the ice. Once we have evidence, we will try to pass a bill that makes sexual harassment at work a crime.” Rape is already illegal in Bangladesh, she says, but most women workers are afraid to file charges.
Akter is part of a group of women unionists around the world pressuring major clothing labels to write “zero tolerance for sexual violence or sexual harassment in the workplace” into their codes of conduct. And they are working to pass an ILO convention banning gender-based workplace violence. If it passes the ILO, garment workers will press the Bangladeshi Parliament to ratify it. “It’s a huge chunk of work. And it will take a huge chunk of money,” Akter says. That’s one reason she travels incessantly. Financial support comes mostly from abroad. Canada’s public sector unions have been particularly generous.
By the beginning of 2017, a decade of activism had pushed some companies who make clothing in Bangladesh to weigh in on the side of workers. Dhaka garment workers were again demanding a wage increase—to $201 a month, an amount they say would allow them a decent subsistence. The manufacturers refused to talk, instead shutting down fifty-five factories, laying off fifteen hundred people. Protesters again filled the streets. Seven hundred workers were arrested.
Fourteen were detained for months. H&M led accord signatories in sending a joint letter to Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, urging their release and calling on her to create a tripartite wage board through which workers, government officials, and manufacturers could negotiate. The letter embarrassed the Bangladeshi leader. On January 17, she addressed the World Economic Forum in Switzerland, assuring the gathered bankers, heads of state, and corporate leaders that her government was “committed to ensure . . . labor rights, workplace safety, and environmental standards in the [garment] industry.” Perhaps the wheel was finally turning.
All of this has taken decades of work. “I am like an alcoholic for work,” Akter says. “I can never stop.” Fortunately, she sees younger women picking up the torch. “Many women say that I’m an inspiration to them but I know there are many more inspiring women out there.” She hopes the new workers’ centers will give women “safe space to find and inspire each other.”