Within days, the companies paid them $235,000 in wages owed, handing the organizers a rare victory.
Next Step: Minimum Industry Wage
New
protests across Bangladesh are forcing yet more changes. Strikes
effectively shut down most of the garment factories for much of last
week -- as workers rallied to demand better wages and working conditions.
Days
ago Bangladesh officials finally gave in and announced that the minimum
wage would be raised for the first time since 2010. Persson, the
H&M CEO, also agreed to support an increase in the Bangladesh minimum wage.
These
incremental changes are not enough, says Muhammad Yunus, founder of the
micro-credit Grameen Bank in Bangladesh and Nobel Peace Prize winner,
who argues that a global approach is needed.
"I propose that foreign buyers jointly fix a minimum international wage for the industry,"
he wrote in the Guardian recently. "This might be about 50 cents an
hour, twice the level typically found in Bangladesh. This minimum wage
would be an integral part of reforming the industry, which would help to
prevent future tragedies. We have to make international companies
understand that while the workers are physically in Bangladesh, they are
contributing their labour to the businesses: they are stakeholders.
Physical separation should not be grounds to ignore the wellbeing of
this labour."
Yunus also suggested raising the final retail price
of an item by 50 cents. "Would a consumer in a shopping mall feel upset
if they were asked to pay $35.50 instead of $35? My answer is no, they
won't even notice," he said.
(Incidentally most U.S. retail
chains have not signed on to the Accord on Fire and Building Safety in
Bangladesh. Instead, following the Rana Plaza collapse, Walmart and
other companies announced their own voluntary monitoring systems and
safety programs, which some activists say was little more than a public
relations campaign. "It's not surprising, and the timing is fishy,"
said Brian Finnegan, global worker rights coordinator at the AFL-CIO.
"The whole point of what we're doing is to make it binding and
enforceable.")
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