Asian Muslim Women

Globalization and Local Realities

Huma Ahmed-Ghosh

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781438457765
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This book resists the homogenization of Muslim women by detailing the diversity in their lives and by challenging the dominant paradigm of Arabized Islam as the sole interpreter of the faith. Though much has been written on the Middle East, there is a huge gap in research on Asia, which has two-thirds of the world's Muslim population. These essays reveal that the lives of Muslim women are impacted not only by Islam but also by local politics, class, religion, and ethnicity. Through ethnographic research and other methodologies, the contributors describe how economic globalization, construction of sexualities, and diasporic expectations shape women's lives. The book focuses on women's negotiations and resistances to global, national, and local patriarchies in an attempt to empower themselves.

Part I

Globalization and Transnationalism

The Muslim Woman and Public Space

1

“Just 6P on a T-shirt, or 12P on a pair of jeans”

Bangladeshi Garment Workers Fight for a Livable Wage

Shelley Feldman

Introduction

Women’s employment often is associated with women’s improved living standards, increases in family health, children’s education, and the promise of improved economic security. What role has export garment manufacturing in Bangladesh played in realizing these promises of neoliberal reform and women’s greater access to employment over the past quarter-century? How have Bangladeshi women fared from their improved access to employment in low-wage export garment manufacturing? This paper offers a brief reflection on the position of female garment workers since the early 1980s through the lens of recent mobilizations for increased wages. The discussion is embedded in the promises of development and neoliberal reform to show that despite growing labor activism and awareness of worker interests, especially those of women workers, the state and garment manufacturers have failed to secure a living wage and improved working conditions for workers in the readymade garment (RMG) sector.1

From Import Substitution to Export-Led Growth and the Rise of a Female Labor Force

In 1982, Bangladesh inaugurated a New Industrialization Policy (NIP) corresponding to International Monetary Fund and World Bank initiatives that sought to refocus economic initiatives from import substitution to export-led growth. These led the Bangladesh Government (GoB) to establish an exportprocessing zone in Chittagong, the country’s major port city, and stimulated investment in the capital city, Dhaka, by encouraging the rapid expansion of production, through the creation of bonded warehouses, precisely at the moment that a number of changes were reshaping production and trade regimes in the Asian region. Three changes are noteworthy: the rising cost of production in East Asia; the rise in ethnic violence in Sri Lanka directing investors to seek more secure production sites in South Asia; and, most significantly, the institutionalization of the Multi-fiber Agreement (MFA) limiting export increases to only six percent per year from a developing country to the industrialized north.2 Affecting major garment exporters at the time, this led to investments in Bangladesh by Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwanese entrepreneurs (Feldman 1992, 2009; Kabeer and Mahmud 2004).

While initial investments took the form of joint ventures, most firms continued to benefit from Korean technology and training but increasingly took the form of private, limited owned companies culminating in the opening of about fifty factories employing a few thousand people, mostly rural women, by the 1980s (Feldman 1992, 1993; Kabeer and Mahmud 2004; Paul-Mazumdar 2002).

To lure venture capital and encourage Bangladeshi investment in the RMG sector, the GoB set in place tax holidays, income tax rebates, and other infrastructural benefits, including credit access and trade reform. They also streamlined customs clearance procedures for imports as well as exports, and granted the industry the duty-free import of capital goods and a tax at source of only 0.25 percent. Such facilities were especially attractive to RMG producers of high import content since initially all of the fabric, thread, buttons, and even packaging materials were imported! The GoB also established an export promotion board and recognized the Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association (BGMEA) that helped to consolidate a burgeoning class of industrial entrepreneurs.

To facilitate moving quickly into this sector, the GoB authorized bonded warehouses, which are effectively single-factory EPZs, to enable entrepreneurs to open factories without requiring them to locate in an export-processing zone (EPZ)3 or wait for the construction of new zones. This permitted entrepreneurs to build or rent production space and initiate production almost immediately, even in buildings that were under construction (Feldman 1993).4 With the passage of the Industrial Relations Ordinance the GoB also put a ban on trade union activity at any factory producing for export, including those that would remain outside the zone. The formal ban on union representation has been removed although unions in RMG manufacturing remain extremely weak and a consistent lack in the enforcement of labor laws and contracts continues (Faruque 2009).

These structural adjustment requirements, as well as changes in national policy such as the NIP, brought a substantial increase in the volume and composition of the country’s exports, moving production away from traditional items such as jute and jute products toward low-end, ready-made garments. In 1981–1982, for example, garments comprised only one percent of total exports, but, since 2001–2002, RMG has comprised more than 75 percent of the total (Saxena 2010). By 2010 (based on 2007 figures) Bangladesh ranked fourth among garment apparel exporting countries, at more than $10 million (Mirda 2010), with earnings expected to rise by 30 percent to $16.25 billion by June 2011 (Reuters 2010). The World Bank claims Bangladesh will be “second only to China” by 2012 (World Bank 2012). Murshid (2009, 14) and his colleagues confirm this expansion noting that Bangladesh’s integration into the global economy is through the exponential growth of capacity, exports, and employment in RMG, where the country accounted for about two percent of a $10.7 billion textile and clothing market worldwide in 2007–2008 that reached $12.4 billion in 2009.5 From the United States alone, export earnings in 1990 were $0.4 billion, increasing to $2.5 billion by 2005; earnings from the European Union increased from 1.2 billion euros in 1996 to 3.7 billion euros in 2005 (Tait 2003; Haider 2007).

These increases reflect the shift in production from low-end shirts to trousers, jackets, T-shirts, and sweaters; a change that suggests the emerging confidence and competitiveness of sector entrepreneurs. The BGMEA boasts that more than 80 percent of those employed in member factories are women, most of whom are from relatively poor households. In touting these figures, they also claim to have contributed significantly to relieving the country’s high unemployment burden and to transforming the lives of both rural and, more recently, urban women. These claims, coupled with the country’s dependence on the sector to sustain export earnings, signal the criticality of the low wage RMG sector in development policy formation. Since the end of the MFA, low wages support BGMEA’s claim of the threat of Chinese competition despite China’s continuing move up the value change that has increased rather than decreased the demand for Bangladeshi garment exports. Estimates reveal that close to 4,500 units remain in RMG production with employment estimated at 4.2 million people (Murshid et al. 2009, 14; Muhammad 2011). Importantly, as many entrepreneurs either came from or continue as government bureaucrats and politicians, they have a significant voice in shaping development policy where the claim that the sector is “too big to fail” continues to justify conditions of production in the sector.

The Failed Promise and Emergent Worker Consciousness

Despite claims about the importance of RMG for the Bangladesh’s export earnings, little improvement has been made in the conditions of work over the last three decades. While defined as unskilled, the first generation of women workers were among the more educated among rural women with kin or village relationships with the factory owners who employed them. Such personal networks provided the emerging industrial elite a way to secure labor in a context where women represented less than four percent of the formally full-time employed (Feldman 1992). Perhaps not coincidently, the UN Decade for Women and the donor community promoted arguments centered on notions of gender equity and women’s empowerment to support expanding women’s opportunities through their increasing control over resources. Reinforced by a growing Bangladesh civil society and strong NGO community, this ideological trope bolstered the efforts of the Zia and Ershad regimes to open the economy and ensure Bangladesh’s access to bilateral and multilateral resources (Feldman 2001; Shehabuddin 2008).

Early generations of workers often secured employment in cities where they had little familiarity and thus were considered compliant and unlikely to participate in trade unions (Kabeer and Mahmud 2004a). Today, even as rural women continue to be a significant proportion of RMG workers, second- and third-generation poor urban women comprise an increasing proportion of this labor force (Feldman 2013). The strikes of 2006 and July 2010 indicate that increasing numbers of women workers are now open to organizing, despite the fear of personal as well as generalized retribution and the loss of income. This is a shift from their earlier behavior where many first-generation RMG workers recognized that they were breaking normative expectations as Muslim women and negotiated their employment by constructing new ways to express and legitimate patriarchal expectations (Feldman 2001, 2009). As their numbers increased, they began to recognize that they were creating new roles for all women by building new relations with other women workers (Feldman 1993, 2013). Evidence confirms that RMG employment alters women’s personal lives, such as their increased capacity to negotiate and exercise voice in decision making that includes decisions about when and whom they marry (Amin et al. 1998; Naved et al. 2001; Kabeer and Mahmud 2004). Such changes shift the view that working women cast shame on their families to an understanding of women’s employment as a resource to be negotiated as part of marriage decision making (Kabeer and Mahmud 2004b; Feldman 2009). Yet, as Kabeer and Mahmud (2004) emphasize, women workers do not see work in the garment industry as an option for sustainable livelihoods.

Ongoing Contestation and Worker Demands

Early strikes and walkouts at individual factories in the 1990s often were in response to accidents and fires in which workers were killed or badly injured, or in instances where women were personally hurt or singled out and beaten. But, by 2000, strikes and walkouts became more frequent, and in 2006 protests became more generalized across the sector, as when workers challenged the arrest of three workers employed at the FS Sweater Factory when they cut off water and power supplies and locked workers in the factory. In a number of cases, such as the unrest in May and June of that year, protests took the form of wildcat strikes that led to the closing of hundreds of factories. These protests often turned violent when workers were killed or police and journalists were injured by police or private security forces who battled with strikers, or when the government engaged the army to “restore order.”

In November 2009, workers at the Nippon garment factory were dismissed without receiving salary and benefits for their last month of work. A subsequent protest led to police opening fire, killing three workers and wounding fifty others (ITUC 2010b). This protest caught the attention of a large civil society base in Bangladesh as well as interest from abroad. As Guy Ryder, ITUC general secretary proclaimed: “The fact that police opened fire against striking workers is totally unacceptable. … As Bangladesh has ratified ILO Conventions 87 and 98 on the right [of] freedom of association and the right to collective bargaining, it should ensure that workers can go on strike without fearing for their lives!” (ITUC 2010). Again, in June 2010, more than 50,000 garment workers organized in Ashulia that forced the closing of at least 100 factories when protests over low wages turned deadly. Police fired tear gas shells and rubber bullets to disperse a sea of workers, turning the key industrial zone into a battlefield and disrupting traffic on the Dhaka-Tangail highway (Financial Express 2010). The growing coordination among workers across factories, and the increased use of police force presage what was to come in the months that led up to worker responses to the Government’s announcement of the new minimum wage in 2011.

While garnering widespread attention, these explosive moments are positioned against the backdrop of routine struggles for back pay, a living wage, and improved working conditions as well as demands for appropriate facilities (toilets and improved building safety) and compliance with worker safety laws. Together, these struggles reveal a growing worker consciousness and collective identification, particularly concerning the lack of formal contracts, irregularities in pay and benefits, entitlement to maternity leave, and noncompliance with overtime rules and allowances. They also reveal the growing significance of the Garment Workers Unity Forum (GWUF), a labor rights organization of RMG workers that was founded in 1995 under the leadership of Mushrefa Mishu.

Following the formation of the GWUF and regular protests throughout the 2000s, the government formed a Minimum Wage Board comprised of business, union, and worker representatives charged with setting a minimum monthly wage of Taka 1662.50 (US$24) acknowledging that low labor costs reflect not only low wage rates but also low non-wage benefits and poor working conditions (Hossain 2010). As Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina noted in response to questions in Parliament, RMGs wages are “insufficient and inhuman” (New Age 2010). As Sharan Burrow, General Secretary of the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) also made plainly clear (ITUC 2010a):

The new minimum wage of 21 US cents per hour is not enough to live on, with workers putting in extremely long hours in difficult working conditions but still unable to make ends meet. It is an absolute disgrace that this industry, worth $12bn a year, treats its workforce with such contempt. The government should stop the harassment of those defending the fundamental rights to a living wage and to union representation, and help push the multinational companies which control the global garment industry to ensure their workers get a fair deal.

The Minimum Wage Board was a crucial referent for organizing in 2010 as wages for RMG workers continued to be among the world’s lowest: US$0.15 an hour compared to US$0.30 in Nepal, US$0.35 in India, US$0.35 in China, US$0.45 in Sri Lanka, and US$16 in the United States. Even by South Asian standards, the average hourly wage in Bangladesh is 42 percent, 50 percent, and 33 percent of those in Nepal, India, and Sri Lanka, respectively, making Bangladeshi labor cheaper than in China or India by five to 20 percent (Khundker 2002, 31). But, RMG sector wages are lower, not only in comparison to other competitor countries, but also in comparison to most other domestic industries where the average monthly wage among skilled RMG factory workers was 1.4 to 2 times lower than that of similar factory workers in textiles and in other sectors (Statistical Yearbook of Bangladesh, 1998 in Rashid 2006). Moreover, UNIDO data reveal only a modest 11.5 percent increase in annual wages in the apparel industry over the period 1981–1992, from US$305.7 to US$340.9, i.e., an average annual increase of about one percent (Rashid 2006, 15). The Vienna-based labor rights group, the ITUC, confirms that Bangladeshi garment workers are so poorly paid that they are unable to buy food and arrange shelter on their monthly earnings (J. Burke 2010). But, notwithstanding the GoB acknowledging that RMG wages are “inhuman,” they have failed to implement and monitor labor standards; this, despite the increasing willingness of workers to take collective action. Burrow concurs: “We are calling on the government to match its w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part I. Globalization and Transnationalism: The Muslim Woman and Public Space
• Part II. Muslim Women: Lived Realities, Resistance, and the State
• Part III. Women’s Voices and Agency: Challenging and Reclaiming Islam
• Contributors
• Index
• Back Cover