Editorial
Minimum wages for garment workers
Even as the three-month deadline expires on September 12, the minimum wage commission has not been able to decide on new wages for garment workers. According to a 10-point tripartite agreement signed on June 12, the provisions were supposed to be implemented within three months.
The minimum wage has been the major issue since the very beginning, but numerous garment factories do not abide by the stipulations of the agreement. According to a survey of 100 factories conducted by a women’s rights group, only a miniscule portion of their sample abided by the most lenient conditions.
The commerce ministry, as reported in this paper on Monday, has notified the labour ministry of its concern regarding the stalemate at the wage commission. The current gross minimum wage fixed over a decade ago stands at Tk 930.
While the labour ministry itself is considering a gross minimum wage at Tk 2,190, factory owners have declared their inability to pay anything over Tk 1,500. A former president of the garment manufacturers and exporters association, Annisul Huq, as the report quoted, has also stated that the factory owners would not be responsible for paying wages over their stipulated mark. Labour unions and organisations demand that the gross salary of an unskilled worker should be well above the Tk 2,000 mark in order to be acceptable.
There should not be any debate that the current minimum wage is direly inadequate for an individual to survive. We also question the sincerity of the factory owners in helping the wage commission to reach a consensus through negotiations. Their current stance clarifies quite unambiguously that regardless of what the commission declares, the factory owners would not pay over what they deem appropriate.
We also question the factory owners’ willingness to ensure the welfare of their workers, whom they expect to live on Tk 1,500 per month while the due benefits of those workers are grossly violated, to the extent that an overwhelming proportion of garment workers do not even receive their regular wages within the first week of the month, let alone due overtime.
We point out that Bangladesh, despite being the third largest exporter to the US, is only seventh in terms of money earned. This only shows that the factory owners are not capable of bargaining with their buyers, and instead choose to make up their margin by exploiting their workers, whose interest they should strive to safeguard.
While we recognise the importance of the ready made garment sector, we strongly oppose the exploitation of the garment workers numbering about two million with 90 per cent of them women. We stress that the commission should not give in to the pressures of different interested quarters. We expect the wage commission to discharge its responsibility judiciously and impartially.
Land grabbing intensifies
drainage problem
While civic woes of Dhaka are endless, water logging and faulty system of rain water drainage must be cited as a top one. After any heavy rainfall the streets are temporarily turned into shallow water bodies and homes in low-lying areas are inundated, normal life becomes impossible. The poor people and small traders suffer even more. The scene in the city yesterday was dismal. What to speak of Fakirer Pool and Hossaini Dalan Road, even parts of Manik Mia Avenue went under ankle-deep water.
Drainage system of Dhaka was never ideal but over the last few years the problem has been accentuated, primarily due to rapacity of land grabbers and greed and corruption of the people in the government agencies concerned. The lowlands have been illegally filled up inviting environmental disaster. The normal outlets and repositories for rain water have been filled up. The khals (channels) in and around the city are being encroached upon and filled up one after another despite protest by environmentalists and conscious citizenry. Belatedly an attempt was made to re-excavate a few important channels and last year the authorities said they would re-excavate 13 khals before this year’s monsoon. Evidently the re-excavation work did not go smoothly.
As we reported sometime ago in this newspaper, we are to brace ourselves for worse kind of water logging because encroachment of lowlands is continuing. In the name of development Savar, Ashulia and areas in the eastern fringe are continuously being filled up which leads to water logging even after a moderate shower. Our report quoted urban experts saying that encroachment on natural water reservoirs, Katasur khal, Segunbagicha khal Shahjahanpur khal, Mahakhali khal and Kalyanpur khal is the major cause of water logging. While the khals were occupied by the poor people and the government’s bulldozer was somewhat able to do its job but the government seemed to leave undisturbed the rich and mighty land grabbers of the lowlands of Savar and Ashulia and their housing projects and it was only after the court’s intervention that the filling work was officially stopped but it is going on covertly, thanks to corrupt officials. While drainage is blocked due to illegal occupations, the storm sewerage lines and surface drains of WASA and the DCC are not functioning due to absence of cleaning.
The periodic woes of city dwellers prove that development is not in perspective. As environmentalists keep saying, sustainability must be a basic mantra of all development activities. But sustainability will always remain a neglected factor if the powerful land grabbers cannot be tamed.
FACT & FICTION
Right signals, wrong signals
True that mindless agitations in any society stands in the way of any significant investment – local or foreign. But it is equally true that the absence of strong civil society movements for the democratic rights of the citizens, particularly to have their say in the development process, can well jeopardise national interests
Nurul Kabir
The fact that the boss of the Board of Investment (BoI), Mahmudur Rahman, has withdrawn the defamation suit filed earlier against five trustees of the Centre for Policy Dialogue (CPD) is good news.
The defamation suit was lodged, and warrants of arrest issued, against reputable persons like CPD trustees on August 9, following a series of public debates on foreign direct investment between the BoI boss and the CPD people, in which the former questioned the latter’s patriotism for putting forward analysis of certain economic data that did not quite match the government’s conclusions. Many of us found the BoI’s ‘legal’ action ominous, particularly from the point of view of the democratic rights of the citizens to take an approach, in analysing matters of public interest, different from that of the government’s without their patriotism being questioned. The withdrawal of the defamation charges amounts to a victory of the democratic concept that endorses the citizens’ right to dissent. Mahmudur Rahman genuinely deserves appreciation for abandoning his initial idea of using the court system to harass the dissenters.
But the way the ‘negotiation’ was initiated between the contending parties in question remains a matter of serous concern for many an independently thinking citizen. It was the local diplomatic missions of the United States of America and the United Kingdom, the axis of political establishments which is widely accused of poking its nose into the domestic affairs of almost every country on earth, and obviously for its own interests, that had reportedly taken the trouble to facilitate the negotiation!
When thousands of Bangladeshis feel uncomfortable with the fact that the mainstream politicians across the divide frequently lodge complaints against each other with the Western missions operating here, and that some missions happily make public statements on purely domestic issues in breach of the universally codified norms of diplomacy, the Anglo-American negotiation between the BoI and the CPD will definitely make the right-thinking sections of the society worry about the missions’ palpably increasing influence on the ‘civil society organisations’ — the organisations that are supposed/expected to remain independent.
However, while we do not exactly know as to what kind of ‘negotiation’ they started rolling, a joint statement signed by BoI’s executive vice-chairman and CPD’s executive director on September 7 said that both the sides ‘agree that there has been a misunderstanding’, and that they ‘regret any inconvenience caused’ to each other in the process of the debates, and that they have now decided ‘to move forward’. But troubling questions remain, in the first instance, as to what ‘misunderstanding’ they have had as regards the nature of, and required preconditions for, FDI in Bangladesh, what kind of ‘inconvenience’ they caused each other, and in what direction they now have forged the understanding to move forward regarding this matter of serious public interest. The queries will hopefully be answered in the days to come.
Meanwhile, we have noticed certain identical ‘concerns’ expressed by a World Bank official, the local US mission chief, and the CPD’s executive director on, what they call, the ‘wrong signals’ that our people have started sending to the foreign companies aspiring to make financial investments in Bangladesh. Their immediate point of reference is the recent Phulbari uprising against Asia Energy.
The American ambassador in Dhaka, Patricia A Butenis, reportedly told a local business gathering on September 6 that the Phulbari type of ‘civil unrest’ against ‘any foreign company’ will stand in the way of FDI inflow, and observed that ‘any verbal or physical attacks on foreign investments will damage Bangladesh’s reputation’.
Earlier, on September 4, ‘an official’ of the World Bank told the AFP that the ‘government’s handling of the Asia Energy affair would cause investor concern’, and that ‘what happened with Asia Energy will have an [adverse] impact on companies thinking of investing (in Bangladesh)’.
Debapriya Bhattacharya, CPD’s executive director, reportedly expressed similar concerns while talking to the AFP the same day. ‘… the companies will think twice about investing in Bangladesh. If we cannot utilise the investment and if it leaves the country, it may give negative publicity to the (country’s) climate of foreign investment,’ said Bhattacharya.
True that mindless agitations in any society stands in the way of any significant investment – local or foreign. But it is equally true that the absence of strong civil society movements for the democratic rights of the citizens, particularly to have their say in the development process, can well jeopardise national interests. This is more so when a lumpen elite, across the political divide, rules a country in league with the endlessly voracious vested interests of the transnational companies.
The Phulbari uprising is an example of a genuine civil society movement, which grew from within our society without any cooperation of mainstream political parties, to protect the immediate democratic interests of the thousands of local people facing the dangerous threats of eviction, loss of livelihood, environmental disasters, et cetera, in the face of the planned open-pit system of coal-mining by Asia Energy. Besides, the Phulbari uprising, which eventually forced the government to say ‘no’ to Asia Energy, has sent loud signals to the transnational companies, to the effect that the people of Bangladesh welcome foreign investments only if they genuinely promise mutual benefits, and that the people will successfully resist the moves of selfish foreign investments that are insensitive to the people’s interests — economic and environmental. These are the right signals that the Phulbari has sent across the world — the signals that the subsequent governments have measurably failed to send so far, of course for the obvious reason of their vested interests – both political and financial.
Notably, it is the government/s that had been sending the anti-people, and therefore wrong, signals to potential foreign investors, by way of continued cooperation with Asia Energy, even after the BoI boss made a public confession only the other day that Bangladesh’s agreement with the company is a ‘suicidal one’ and that ‘those who signed the agreement with Asia Energy should have been hanged’.
Those who signed the suicidal contract have so far been able to escape the public wrath, while five Phulbari persons were killed by police firing in the process of resisting the contract. The dead, already elevated in the public mind to the position of martyrs for national interests, will hopefully continue to haunt the crudely avaricious sections of the foreign investors who want to make money here without considering the welfare of our people.
But the US mission in Dhaka finds the Phulbari uprising a wrong signal and wants the people of this country not even to make ‘any verbal attacks on foreign investments’! The anonymous World Bank official, on the other hand, is worried about the possible adverse impact on those foreign companies ‘thinking of investing’ in the country. And along with them the CPD boss has expressed concern over the situation, saying that the ‘companies would think twice about investing in Bangladesh’.
While the CPD’s argument for the need of foreign investment is absolutely valid, his apprehension of investments leaving the country seems inconsistent with the nature of capital, or in other words, the laws of economics. Capital flows to the places where there are genuine possibilities of maximising profit. Bangladesh, in that sense, remains a lucrative place for foreign investment, particularly compared to its South Asian neighbours. A recent report, prepared jointly by the World Bank and International Finance Corporation, says that ‘Bangladesh is the third easiest country in which to do business in South Asia’, preceded only by the Maldives and Pakistan.
Bangladesh seems to have appeared too liberal a host for private foreign investments to earn appreciation from those worried about the country’s public interests! It is therefore important to make the foreign companies ‘think twice’ before jumping in to invest in the country with the false hope that they will make money at their will, without taking into consideration the interests of the people of Bangladesh. Long live Phulbari.
The CPD, the country’s most notable private sector think-tank consisting of competent economists and researchers, has no reason not to understand these issues. We only hope that the civil society organisations like CPD will ‘move forward’ by way of causing some ‘inconvenience’, instead of regretting that, to the government negotiators of foreign investments, who permit projects like Asia Energy, even after realising that their approval is ‘suicidal’ as regards national interests.
In that case, many of our civil society organisations will, however, need to make serious efforts to get rid of their ‘Achilles’ heel’ — dependency on certain kinds of foreign funds for conducting their ‘independent’ researches.
nurulkabir@newagebd.com
MAIN PAGE | TOP
|
|
