Responding to articles in the media on Bangladesh and the terrible building collapse and worker deaths, our organisation wants to point out that trade action against Bangladesh will only add to the problems in the country.
When the quota system was abandoned years ago because of reports of child labour abuses, which were indeed taking place, factories closed across the country, the young workers and their mothers were put onto the street thus crimes of all sorts increased. It was not as if the young people had a choice of going to school or there was other work for the mothers… not at all.
The EU should not automatically dump additional burdens on Bangladesh but should keep its contractual promises otherwise how can industry re-organize itself.
It is the business moguls in complicity with a yielding government that has brought about the problem of inadequate and indeed dangerous work places and the abysmally low wages, which latter is because of that phenomenon of the EPZ – economic processing zone.
Possibly, these zones that offer highly subsidised rents and no regulation over pay nor standards did have a start-up value in the earliest of days when Bangladesh went industrial, but those aggressively lenient terms should have been replaced by the norms of manufacturing where a firm met its own expenses and thus, had to cost its goods accordingly. Those goods would still bring a competitive price, but not ridiculously so!
Decent factories are operating outside those zones.
How can the Dhaka government improve safety standards when it is held captive by big finance? The power lies at the top with the money. Independent unions need to be allowed in the EPZs, with full rights, and not company unions.
EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton and Trade Commissioner Karel de Gucht need to be aware of these needs and stop pointing in wrong directions. They are part of the problem.
Still developing countries that are engaged in competing against each other in industrial production should pause in those efforts and learn to work together to get a better deal from markets – and stop sacrificing their working peoples under policies subjugating their human needs for a decent life.
Tony Henderson, chairman, Humanist Association of Hong Kong
