Charles Kernaghan talking:
On December 14th, 2010, just three months shy of the hundredth anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York, a fire broke out at the Hameem factory in Bangladesh on the outskirts of Dhaka. It was an 11-story building. It was lunchtime. There were workers in the cafeteria on the 11th floor, and they started to smell smoke. They didn’t panic. They did just what the workers did at Triangle: they started to go towards the exit. The workers tried to get out the exit, and the flames were so great and the smoke was so dense that they had to retreat. They ran through the cafeteria to the other side of the building, the west side, and they tried to go out the fire exits, and the exit doors were locked. They were trapped.
Those workers jumped off the top of the building from the 11th floor. They leapt off the building for the same reason, so that their parents could have their bodies and they could be mourned correctly and they could be buried correctly. Workers on the ground thought these were bales of clothing that were being thrown out the windows.
It’s word for word the exact same thing. At the Triangle factory, the exit door was locked. The exit door was locked at Hameem, a hundred years later at the factory fire at Hameem in Bangladesh. And do you know what the workers told us? They said that, often, management locks the exit gates during a fire so that the garments can’t be stolen. Twenty-nine workers were killed. Over a hundred workers were injured, 36 of them seriously and were hospitalized. The management paid the families of the deceased workers $2,080 as compensation. That’s what a life is worth in the developing world now.
This is going on, still, in the global economy today. Not one change. In fact, it gets worse. In Triangle they made 14 cents an hour. But when you adjust that for inflation, that 14 cents an hour in 1911 is worth $3.18 today. The workers at the Hameem factory in Bangladesh on the outskirts of Dhaka, they’re making, at the top wage, 28 cents an hour. That means that their earning, their wages in Bangladesh today, are one-tenth of what wages were in the United States 100 years ago. We are racing to the bottom.
it’s eerily similar to the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. And the workers in Triangle were working 14 hours a day. At the Hameem factory in Bangladesh, they work 12 to 14 hours a day, but they work seven days a week. The Triangle workers got one day a week off.
The owner of the factory, a very powerful man, he just—after the fire, he said that it was sabotage on the part of the workers. He owns a newspaper, and he owns a television station. So, without the slightest bit of evidence, he just says it was sabotage.
And so, so different from the Triangle factory, there’s been no investigation. There’s been—nothing comes out of it. The workers have just died. In Bangladesh, the workers—last summer, we were there in July—they went out on protests for a wage increase. They were begging, demanding for 35 cents an hour. Imagine that, Walmart and Gap and the rest of the companies. They were begging, demanding, marching.
In this particular factory, it was Gap children’s, toddler’s pants that were being sewn in the factory. They accounted for 50 percent of the production. Four hundred thousand pairs of Gap pants were burned in the fire. So, Gap was a major player. So was Phillips-Van Heusen and JCPenney, some Abercrombie & Fitch and a little bit of Target. But what—so these were all the major labels produced there.
Bangladesh right now exports $4 billion worth of apparel to the United States each year, and they’re the third-largest exporter. Ninety-seven percent of all garments are made offshore now. So, in other words, what we’ve done is we’ve taken the sweatshops from, you know, 1911, and we’ve just moved them to Bangladesh.
Now, when the workers in Bangladesh started to fight back—there’s three-and-a-half million workers, garment workers, 80 percent of them young women. When they fought back and they demanded a 35-cent-an-hour wage, which any corporation could easily pay, they were attacked by the police. They were beaten, they were clubbed, they were shot at with rubber bullets, they were hosed down with these very powerful water cannons, which just swept the women off the streets. And they put a dye in the water so they could be arrested later on, so they couldn’t get the dye off their clothing or their bodies. And this is—we are racing so fast backwards in the global economy that right now these workers, don’t stand a chance.
That struggle in Bangladesh with three-and-a-half million garment workers, 80 percent of them young women, that may have been the largest social justice struggle in the history of the world on the part of women, but no one even knew about it. It’s out of sight, it’s out of mind. And this is going on in China. It’s going on in Vietnam.
we’re calling for legislation that would say to the U.S. companies, because we can only deal here with the United States, that you can make your products anywhere in the world—we believe in fair trade—but if that product is made by a child or if it’s made by a young woman forced to work 15 hours a day, seven days a week, who’s stripped of their rights and paid pennies an hour and doesn’t have the right to organize, that product will not be able to enter the United States, and that product won’t be sold in the United States, and that product won’t be exported from the United States. And so, we’ve introduced some legislation in the Congress—in the 110th Congress we introduced it. We ended up getting 175 co-sponsors in the House and 26 in the Senate, including at that time Senator Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden. And then it just ran out of steam. The companies saw what we were doing and moved in, and the thing was shut down. But if we don’t take some control over the global economy, we’re all going to be working for $3.18 an hour, without a doubt, with no benefits. I mean, we’re going downhill so fast, it’s remarkable.
STEVE FRASER talking:
you have industrial autocracy. You have what you had back at the time of the fire, where there’s—where you’re employed at will, and the sanctity of private property allows the employer to treat you in any way he chooses to, whether that’s about firing and hiring, whether it’s about the rate at which you work, the amount at which you work, what he pays you, the hours of work. And it means you have no voice, no voice in all of those circumstances that determine your fate. So it’s a fundamental democratic right and human right. Collective bargaining has been understood that way through a good part of the 20th century because of the Triangle fire and what followed it. And we can’t lose it. It’s too precious.
Charles Kernaghan talking:
the American people have to understand that this economy also belongs to the American people and not just the corporations. So, right now the corporations have all the laws they need to protect their products. They have intellectual property rights and copyright laws, so if you make a knockoff of Barbie Doll or something like that or Microsoft, you’re going to go to jail. You’re never going to work again. You’ll go to prison. They’ll shut you down. But when we said to the companies, we said, “Look, you have laws to protect, you know, your products,” they said, “Yes, we need a level playing field on the global economy.” So we said, “OK, can’t we have similar laws to protect the rights of the human beings, the 16-year-old woman in Indonesia who make Barbie Doll? Can’t we protect her rights, as well?” They said, “No, that would be an impediment to free trade.” So the American people allow corporations to have laws to protect their trademarks and their products, but we can’t have laws to protect the rights of human beings. Until that changes, until there’s legislation, we’re going to just be in this race to the bottom.
Discussion:
Charles Kernaghan, director of the Institute for Global Labour and Human Rights (formerly the National Labor Committee).
Annelise Orleck, professor at Darmouth College and author of the book Common Sense and a Little Fire: Working Class Women’s Activism in the 20th Century U.S.
Steve Fraser, author, editor and labor historian. His many publications include the award-winning book Labor Will Rule: Sidney Hillman and the Rise of American Labor. The book won the Philip Taft Prize for the best book in labor history. Fraser currently teaches at New York University.
– from democracynow.org