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  Cheap Labor in Bangladesh: Blood in the Supply Chain

Cheap Labor in Bangladesh Blood in the Supply Chain

By Nils Klawitter

Part 2: Part II:Sacrificing safety for profit 

Boehm is permitted to monitor 25 major suppliers' plants in the country. In fact, about twice that many Bangladeshi factories supply the German group, and are forced to compete for the business. Boehm doesn't know the exact number. Her authority within the group seems limited.

In early June she joined other European customers of Spectrum Sweater at a roundtable discussion in Dhaka. The event had been organized a month earlier as part of the Business Social Compliance Initiative (BSCI). The brainchild of Europe's Foreign Trade Association (FTA), the initiative was launched to improve standards at garment suppliers. Its members include retail groups such as KarstadtQuelle, Metro and Zara. After the accident, the Spanish company talked up BSCI as though it were a guarantee of immunity. In point of fact, the initiative had yet to be launched in Bangladesh at the time. By the end of October 2005, the relief fund promised by BSCI had yet to materialize. A BSCI spokesperson stressed, however, that "finalization" was imminent. Also instrumental in organizing the roundtable in Dhaka was Christian von Mitzlaff. The 44-year-old political scientist first came to Bangladesh 11 years ago. He was building cyclone shelters in coastal regions for the Red Cross that were intended to provide safe havens during flooding. But hardly anyone used them. Mitzlaff soon realized why: The inhabitants considered animals and household items more valuable than themselves.

Mitzlaff subsequently set up a company to monitor social standards in the garment- making segment and, in a 1996 study commissioned by the International Labor Organization, reported that child labor made up 43 percent of the Bangladeshi industry's workforce. Thanks to pressure from the United States, says Mitzlaff, the percentage of workers under 14 is now virtually zero.

Booming business

If enough important people attend a meeting, Annisul Huq, President of the Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association (BGMEA), also deigns to appear. In Bangladesh, where clothing accounts for 75 percent of total exports, he enjoys more power than most government ministers. Soon after this discussion began, Huq defended Sayed Shahriyar, describing him as "a good example of a responsible owner." After all, Huq insisted, he rushed to the scene immediately when he heard of the collapse. Then he redirected attention back to himself and his organization: "We have 4,000 members, control two million workers in about 3,000 factories and formulate political goals. Everything revolves around the BGMEA."

Huq, 52, sits at his desk on the ninth floor of a modern office complex in Dhaka. Until recently, he was known as the "Lord of the Quotas." Without support from the BGMEA, no factory owner was able to sell abroad. Now, after the WTO Agreement on Textiles and Clothing expired in January of this year, Bangladeshis fear that Chinese competition will squeeze them out of the market. But the latest statistics suggest the opposite. Even China cannot undercut hourly wages of five to ten U.S. cents.

"The sky's the limit now," says Huq, who has been in this business for 20 years. Carefully packed Calvin Klein shirts adorn his gleaming showroom. He employs some 7,000 people "in seven or eight factories." He doesn't know the exact figure - after all, he explains, he has to attend to the real estate division, software firms and photo labs in his group as well.

Huq used to be a TV entertainer. And it shows. Child labor? "Eliminated long ago," he maintains with a smile. In any case, that's what the government's 48 inspectors are for, he insists.

But their number has not risen since the country achieved independence in 1971. And that - at least according to Mitzlaff - is a problem.

Ramshackle buildings are evidently news to Huq. He urges visitors to take a good look around: "Many of the new factories look like five-star hotels." Indeed, these do exist - in a subsidized export zone on the northern outskirts of Dhaka: palatial bunkers accommodating thousands of workers each. Equipped with fire alarms, emergency exits and medical facilities, they are paraded to western guests as the country's future.

"The pressure is relentless"

Visitors are less welcome, though, when the new factories are being built. The dozens of women hauling stones to the cement mixer for a dollar a day under the watchful gaze of stick-wielding foremen might just spoil the fairy tale.

A Bengali purchaser - his elegant, cosmopolitan Dhaka office just a stone's throw from Shahriyar's barbed-wired fortress - says the corporations afford themselves a few showcase factories and allow these to be monitored.

The vast bulk of the merchandise, however, is produced elsewhere. In the workshops found on nearly every corner of the capital city. In derelict houses where women gasp for air behind barred windows.

According to the purchaser from Dhaka, major companies such as Germany's Metro or the U.S. retail giant Wal-Mart cooperate with up to 200 different suppliers - and pit them against one another. "Manufacturers were selling jeans for about $6 three years ago. Today they are lucky to get half. The pressure is relentless."

Spectrum Sweater Ltd., as BGMEA director Huq maintains, was an absolute exception. But that is an illusion. And when that veil is lifted, it reveals the drama of a country that has been trying to sew, knit and dye a path out of poverty for 30 years, while sinking into ever grimmer destitution in the process.

It exposes the reality of outcasts languishing in the backfield of globalization, a place where few rules apply, although its players - perhaps out of fear of China - are rarely slow to cite them.

When spectators began demanding a level playing field, the western garment manufacturers simply appointed themselves as the referees. They invented phrases such as "social accountability" and "social auditing" - not necessarily to enforce rules of fair play, but to keep the fans off their backs and fix the outcome. Bangladesh certainly won't be celebrating any victories soon: Today half of its citizens still subsist on less than one dollar a day.

A list is prominently displayed in Aminul Haque's office. It is a roster of accidents that have occurred in the country's garment industry. Over the past 15 years, 295 workers have been killed in fires alone. And no less than 2,782 injured. Haque is General Secretary of the country's garment-making union NGWF. He too took part in the roundtable discussion. His organization's quarters: two windowless rooms at the end of a long, dark corridor in Dhaka.

Haque is maintaining a record of the accident in Savar. It reads like a mass obituary: Three months before the building caved in, a female worker died after her shawl was caught in an exposed power cable. Fifteen days before the collapse, incorrectly mixed chemicals turned a dye machine operator into an invalid. Survivors of the disaster itself claimed to have watched a crack gradually widen in the wall between the factory's two sections.

Padlocked toilets

As Haque knows, his country will remain the globalized world's garment factory for the foreseeable future. Bangladesh boasts ideal conditions: Bribery is so rampant that the corruption investigators at Transparency International placed the country at the bottom of their rankings. Bangladesh is Muslim, but not fundamentalist. It is poor and well acquainted with feudal structures and foremen who brandish cudgels. The workers are "docile and compliant," says Ghassan Arab. His Düsseldorf-based company Multiline numbers among the world's largest producers of T-shirts.

Arab's merchandise, too, was found in the factory's ruins, although he claims to have traded with the plant that is still standing. Recently, people have turned to touting the benefits of the garment industry. They argue that it improves the social standing of women and even helps children escape the poverty trap.

It is a strange kind of liberation that starts at 8 a.m. every day and often ends past midnight. But that is the lot of Fatima, a 12-year-old seamstress who works for Raza Knit, a company based south of Dhaka, in Chanmari. Fatima lives in a slum, in one of the bast huts that - supported by frail poles - hangs lop-sided above foul-smelling water dyed purple by the factories. Once Fatima dreamed of becoming a teacher, but she left school after fourth grade to earn 1,200 taka a month, the equivalent of €15.

A sign on the building proudly proclaims that the factory is "100% export oriented." Its customers include Germany's Metro group, which had T-shirts produced here for $1.066 each at the beginning of 2005 "and then squeezed the price by another 20 percent," the owner fumes. Some 40 percent of the workers are children. During a visit by DER SPIEGEL, a foreman kicked a boy - aged about 11 - out of range of the camera's viewfinder. The toilet is padlocked. Emergency exits are nowhere to be seen.

Metro spokesman Jürgen Homeyer told a reporter that Raza Knit was supplying a subcontractor. Metro, he said, had yet to uncover child labor at any of its factories. For Astrid Bade, it's "the best chance the children in Bangladesh have." Bade is the product manager for knitwear at Cologne-based Bluhm, whose sweaters were in the machines when the floor gave way. A low-priced sweater costs some $5 to produce. Bluhm can then sell it for around €20.

Astrid Bade happened to be at Bluhm's agency in Dhaka on the day of the accident. She opted not to travel to the site. "I'm always glad to get out of there," she says.