Tragedies never to be Repeated
It was my husband's last working day before Eid. He went to the factory the night before and was supposed to come back at 7 am in the morning with his Eid bonus. At around 6 am, I heard a huge bang and felt intense tremors in my home. I thought it was an earthquake and ran out of the house. Suddenly, I noticed my husband's office is on fire and a few minutes later, I saw some men carrying my husband's dead body,” says Nigar Sultana, wife of Md Anisur Rahman, who was killed instantly by the explosion at Tampaco Foils, a packaging factory at Tongi BISIC area.
Twenty four factory workers were killed by the fire accident-- one of the deadliest fire accidents this year that again revealed the bleak, exploitative working condition in Bangladeshi factories. According to a study by Solidarity Centre, a labour rights organisation, at least 10 fire incidents have been reported in Bangladeshi garment factories alone in 2016.
Fire incidents, building collapse, explosion and chemical accidents have been killing hundreds of workers in Bangladesh every year. In the last fourteen years at least two thousand workers have been killed and at least ten thousand workers injured in these disasters. In 2012, fire at Tazreen Fashion Factory killed 117 workers, many of whom could not be rescued as all the gates of the factory were found locked from the outside. More than 200 workers were injured and lost their livelihood in that incident. Still, many of these victims and their relatives have not any compensation.
Bangladesh's indifference to workers' rights was exposed again when Rana Plaza, an eight storeyed building with faulty design, collapsed killing around twelve hundred workers and injuring at least two thousand. The commercial building housed banks, shops and also a garment factory and to run the factory, two diesel generators were installed illegally. Experts said that vibration from these heavy generators created cracks on the wall of the building which were ignored by the owners and it has been reported that workers were forced to work inside the ramshackle cracked building against their will. If we could take any lesson from Tazreen tragedy, we could have saved thousands of lives. However, due to sheer negligence, Rana Plaza tragedy, which is considered as the deadliest garment factory accident in history and deadliest accidental structural failure in modern history, has made Bangladesh one of the most unsafe places for workers.
American presidential candidate Donald Trump was severely criticised by the US media and citizens for purchasing garment product from Bangladesh. Every year, before Eid festivals, workers from different industries can be seen protesting on the streets in demand of their due salary and Eid bonus.
Besides salary, in many factories workers are simply treated like slaves. The Tazreen tragedy revealed that workers during working hours used to be locked from the outside, the Rana Plaza collapse revealed that workers were forced to work in a building which was showing symptoms of sudden collapse for several months, and the recent Tampaco Foils explosion revealed that the factory owner had installed gas line booster illegally in the factory to increase production without thinking about the safety of the workers.
However, as these industries create the lifeline for Bangladesh's economy, owners of these industries have been reported to accumulate huge amounts of wealth on the toil of these workers. Bangladesh earns 22 billion US$ alone from garment exports every year and the owners of these garment factories are some of the richest citizens of the country. One of them, Syed Makbul Hussain, chairman of Tampaco Foils has spent crores of taka to purchase land for his personal burial site at Banani grave yard, on the other hand, six burnt dead bodies of the unfortunate workers have to be buried as unidentified (Daily Prothom Alo, September 17, 2016).
Millions of workers are working in more than five thousand garment factories in Bangladesh. Around 4,000 of them are members of the Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association (BGMEA) that make clothes for international brands and employ about 3.5 million workers (The Daily Star, April 24, 2014). International brands who are regular buyers of Bangladeshi products should enhance their compliance supervision so that workers' rights and safety can be ensured properly in their workplaces.
Comments