Take back our rights

May 1st, celebrated around the world as May Day or International Workers’ Day. In Bangladesh, thousands of workers marched through central Dhaka earlier today to demand safety at work following last week’s factory collapse where more than 400 people died, mostly female garment workers. Hundreds of more workers remain missing, buried in the ruble. The collapse of the building is now being described as the deadliest accident in the history of the garment industry.

Western clothes companies linked to the Rana Plaza factory so far include The Children’s Place, Cato Corp., Joe Fresh, Papaya Denim, “Free Style Baby,” Benetton, the Irish company Primark’s Denim Co. and Cedarwood State, and others.

Charlie Kernaghan talking:

There have also been reports of apparently two pregnant women who are still in the rubble, one of whom has apparently given birth. It’s understood that those two women are now dead. They couldn’t get them out. And the child—at least one child was born. Because they didn’t have maternity leave, they were forced to work. The child is also dead.
And I think the trade union movement in Bangladesh, their May Day today, after two or three decades of these phony codes of conduct and the miserable working conditions and the unsafe working conditions and the starvation wages of 12 cents an hour to 22 cents an hour, the workers are marching for their rights, so that they can have collective bargaining, they can have unions. Nothing is going to change in Bangladesh until the workers have the right to organize. And it would be amazing if our government had the guts to stand up and say, “The workers in Bangladesh have suffered enough. They deserve the internationally recognized worker rights to freedom of association, the right to organize a union and to bargain collectively.”

If that doesn’t happen, these deaths are just going to continue and continue and continue. They’re torturing these young women. Eighty percent of the workers in the garment industry are young women. They’re torturing these people.
the companies, the corporations, they’re hiding behind these phony codes of conduct that are meaningless. They’re just paper. What the workers want are legal rights.

And just as an aside, when they found—we found dogs and cats were being killed in China for fur collars in the Burlington Coat Factory company. They were putting nice fur collars on their jackets, and the fur came from dogs—killing dogs and cats in China. The U.S. Congress went berserk and passed a bill that nobody is going to kill dogs and cats on our watch. You can’t import dog fur or cat fur to the U.S. You can’t export it. You can’t sell it. So, there’s a precedent there. Our Congress had a backbone to protect dogs and cats. We need the same backbone to protect the rights of workers.

We have—there’s no reason in the world why the American people and the people in the United—Europe and U.K. and Australia or in Canada—there’s no reason that we can’t stand up and say, “If we can protect dogs and cats, we sure as heck can protect the rights of human beings,” and we give these workers the rights—not setting wages, wages set in Bangladesh or they’re set in Cambodia or Vietnam or anywhere, but workers will have their internationally recognized worker rights so that they can organize a union and protect themselves. And Barack Obama, or then-Senator Barack Obama, endorsed this. So did Hillary Clinton. So did Joe Biden. We had about 27 members in the Senate. We had up to 170 members in the House—until the corporations found out what we were doing with the Decent Working Conditions and Fair Competition Act. Nothing is going to change until there’s laws. The codes of conduct are so ridiculous. And it’s—people should be embarrassed talking about these codes of conduct. We need laws.

One of the companies whose labels were found in the ruins of the collapsed building in Bangladesh that housed five garment factories was Joe Fresh, which is a brand of clothes sold by the Canadian firm Loblaw and found in U.S. stores like J.C. Penney.

Joe Fresh label also said that there is nothing they can do in Bangladesh because they’re not allowed to pressure Bangladesh. They can’t make up decisions for Bangladesh. It’s completely a lie, because the corporation, the Joe Fresh label, is protected, so they can demand that their label is protected in Bangladesh. And so, if they can protect the label, they can protect the workers, as well. So, the fact that they’re innocent and they don’t have any leverage is untrue. They have plenty of leverage; they just don’t use it.

It’s not just—it’s not just Joe Fresh, of course. It was Cato. It was Primark in the U.K. It was just a whole slew of labels, from Spain, from Italy—I mean, high-end, high-end clothing. This group, this five factories, produced seven million garments a year. This was a big operation. And only now—I mean, the place, you can’t get into the crumbled factory, but eventually all of these labels are going to come out, and these companies are going to be held accountable.

We have an economy where, since the Great Recession started in December of 2007, we still are almost three million jobs short of what we were in 2007 in December. We’re going backwards. We’re losing jobs. It’s going to be until 2017 until we get back to the level of jobs we had—it was 138 million jobs—back in 2007. So, I think the American people know that the middle class is being destroyed. The average CEO makes 380 times the average worker. They’re going after the unions. They’re trying to kill and strangle unions, which are the basis that we need to survive with. And so, what they’re saying is the workers, they need to have their right to organize. They have to have a level playing field. And this—it’s just a situation that—you know, it’s devastating right now. The union workers make $10,000 more a year, 27 percent more a year, than non-union workers do. And that’s why these right-to-work states—Michigan now, Indiana—they are going to go after the labor movement to try to just kill it.

And this is going to be the fight for our lives now. We need to take back our country, take back our economy, take back our values. Labor Secretary Rice recently said we have never seen—the American people have this shared experience, these shared values, but we have never seen the conditions so radically poor and bad for working people. Something has to give. We have to be set for a movement, a big social movement, to take back our country and to take back our rights. And if the unions go under, we are finished, because they are the bedrock that’s keeping us alive.

it’s not our job to set wages around the world. That’s up to the people in their individual countries. But what we can do is we can demand that if you want to bring the products into the United States, that these workers must have their legal rights. They must have the right to organize, to bargain collectively, to have a collective contract, to have decent working conditions, no child labor. The whole world agrees with this. So, if you want to bring your products from Bangladesh—the way we can help the Bangladeshi workers, if they want to bring their garments in from Bangladesh to the United States, we’ll welcome it. We want those garments. But you’re not bringing those garments in if they’re made by children or, you know, the workers who are denied their rights. We have these stupid codes of conduct for the last 30 years. It’s the biggest scam going. So we need to stand up and just say, “You can bring anything you want into the United States, but you’re not bringing it in if it was made by children or the workers are denied their right to organize.” The lift that would give to the Bangladeshi labor movement would be enormous.

Right now—you know, we found documents in a garbage dump for Nike, and it was children’s sweatshirts. And the sweatshirts sold for $22.99. This was in the Dominican Republic, and we bought it in Macy’s in New York City. Do you know what the workers got paid to make that sweatshirt? Eight cents. So, the workers’ wages in the Dominican Republic were three-tenths of 1 percent [0.3 percent] of the retail price. This is what’s going on. They’re just crushing people and sucking really the blood out of people. Eight cents to make their garment. What would happen if they tripled it to 24 cents? That would be less than 1 percent of the retail price for the garment. In other words, there’s plenty of room here. But this is the science of exploitation and misery. And we have to stand up and push back against these corporations.

And the American people now are really suffering. And, you know, it could go either way. Either people are just going to be so frightened that they’re going to keep quiet, or there’s going to be some sort of an explosion. The middle class is being destroyed. And we have to fight for our own middle class just as we fight for people in Bangladesh or in Honduras, where workers are getting, you know, miserably—have miserable conditions in Lear—in a Lear factory, which produces auto parts. All over the world, this is going on.

— Source democracynow.org

Charlie Kernaghan, director of the Institute for Global Labour and Human Rights.