By Liana
Foxvog, National Organizer of SweatFree Communities

On Wednesday concerned consumers visited an
estimated sixty Walmart stores in the US, Canada and the UK to call on the
mega-retailer to help free Bangladeshi labor leaders Kalpona Akter and Babul
Akhter.

There is widespread agreement in business schools, newspaper opinion pages and in the discourse of development professionals: these hand-stitched soccer ball workers are “the lucky ones” in Pakistan, since they are producing for export and the buyers are mainly rich-country brands.  My research in the late 1980s in Indonesia proved the conventional wisdom wrong – workers making expensive sports shoes for export were getting cheated even when the minimum wage was 86 cents a day and beaten or demeaned for making production mistakes.  The ILRF study demonstrates how to rebut the mainstream – rosier – view of Germany’s largest newspaper: “...sporting goods industry [has created] a rare oasis of wellbeing in Sialkot” with double the national average annual income ($650/yr).  Interviews with

Workers in the Bangladesh garment industry are paid 20 cents an hour and often face hazardous working conditions that have lead to the death of several workers.  Recently the government-appointed wage board raised the minimum wage for Bangladesh workers in the garment industry to $43 USD a month. Some labor unions accepted this while others were not satisfied because they had originally called for a wage of $72 USD a month. As a result, disappointed labor unions organized protests in Dhaka, the Bangladeshi capital, to voice their discontent. Prices for goods are on the rise and the pitiful wages they earn is not enough to live decently. Unfortunately, the protests turned violent and the police responded with tear gas and rubber bullets.

With regard to labor flexibility practices, workers don’t really have a choice; either they work without benefits or not work at all. If labor flexibilization continues, Central Americans would be forced to work with labor violations and without benefits or not work at all. The Regional Campaign against Labor Flexibility composed of labor organizations in Panama, Honduras, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua have been fighting for labor rights in their countries in the form of a Regional Coalition for five years, with  many more years advocating at a national level in their respective countries.