Bangladesh garment workers earn an average of $43 a month. Last year clothing exports earned the country $19 billion, 78 percent of its total exports.
Like others around the world, they face health and safety threats from dyes, formaldehyde, fiber dust and pesticide residue; damage to eyesight and hearing; and routine conditions, such as the unceasing noise and vibration of machinery, which promote neuromuscular and psychological disabilities. Willi was 17 when she began working in a garment factory in Thailand for $5 a day. She sewed tiny pieces—a collar, cuff or bow—onto baby clothes for export. “When the fine dust comes out, I couldn’t breathe, and the noise hurt my ears. Even now I can’t hear a rain shower,” she says. “They don’t give ear protection. No masks. I just couldn’t breathe.” In poorly ventilated factories around the world, workers like Willi inhale cotton dust that causes fatal byssinosis—brown lung disease. In India, as many as a third of textile workers, many of them children, suffer acute respiratory illnesses.
The garment industry’s tangle of contractors, sub-contractors and sub-sub-contractors allows manufacturers and sellers to plead ignorance. When news broke that its Faded Glory brand had been manufactured in the Tazreen factory, Wal-Mart claimed it wasn’t in control of its supply line. But it and the other corporations that produced goods there—Disney, Sears and Sean Combs’ Enyce label—are quite capable of tracking the sources of their products when it’s in their interest to do so.
With China’s wages surging, and even India’s at double Bangladesh’s, Dhaka is not motivated to crack down—even though implementing safety standards would add only 10 cents to the cost of a T-shirt, the Worker Rights Consortium estimates.
Like others around the world, they face health and safety threats from dyes, formaldehyde, fiber dust and pesticide residue; damage to eyesight and hearing; and routine conditions, such as the unceasing noise and vibration of machinery, which promote neuromuscular and psychological disabilities. Willi was 17 when she began working in a garment factory in Thailand for $5 a day. She sewed tiny pieces—a collar, cuff or bow—onto baby clothes for export. “When the fine dust comes out, I couldn’t breathe, and the noise hurt my ears. Even now I can’t hear a rain shower,” she says. “They don’t give ear protection. No masks. I just couldn’t breathe.” In poorly ventilated factories around the world, workers like Willi inhale cotton dust that causes fatal byssinosis—brown lung disease. In India, as many as a third of textile workers, many of them children, suffer acute respiratory illnesses.
The garment industry’s tangle of contractors, sub-contractors and sub-sub-contractors allows manufacturers and sellers to plead ignorance. When news broke that its Faded Glory brand had been manufactured in the Tazreen factory, Wal-Mart claimed it wasn’t in control of its supply line. But it and the other corporations that produced goods there—Disney, Sears and Sean Combs’ Enyce label—are quite capable of tracking the sources of their products when it’s in their interest to do so.
With China’s wages surging, and even India’s at double Bangladesh’s, Dhaka is not motivated to crack down—even though implementing safety standards would add only 10 cents to the cost of a T-shirt, the Worker Rights Consortium estimates.
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