Friday, August 08, 2014

Sweatshop exploitation continues

 For two weeks, 1,600 workers at factories owned by Tuba Group have been on strike and occupying their workplaces because they haven’t been paid since mid-May. Hundreds of the workers are on hunger strike, and because many of them had been unable to feed themselves properly before the strike through lack of money, a large number have collapsed or been hospitalised.

The extent of repression of Bangladeshi workers and the callousness displayed by factory owners and the government mean that workers are forced to make extreme sacrifices to make their point: for some, this may be a hunger strike to the death. On several occasions over the last two weeks, police and government and employer thugs have attacked protests in support of the strikes and on Wednesday they entered one of the occupied factories, beating and arresting union officials and activists.

  Tuba Group's owner happens to be the same man who owned Tazreen where a factory fire in November 2012, died 130 workers after management locked the exits. So indeed  labour conditions for textiles workers had to be improved as a matter of life and death.

Tuba Group has been making clothes for big western corporations like Walmart and during the World Cup completed an order of Fifa-endorsed clothing for European companies.

From here

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