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Bangladesh: Women Textile Workers Battle Bosses
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- 19 September 2012 271 hits
There’s no better reason why the working class needs an international party than the current struggle in Bangladesh where textile workers — 80 percent women — are waging a militant fight against the full force of the Bangladeshi government, local factory owners and international clothing retailers.
The workers make $35 a month, working 12- to 16-hour days, six days a week — barely a dollar a day. European and U.S. companies like Wal-Mart, H&M, Marks & Spencer, Carrefour, Tommy Hilfiger and American Eagle have flocked to Bangladesh to take advantage of the world’s lowest-paid and poorest workers.
Even Pakistani bosses, who pay workers $50/month, are relocating their factories there. “Labor costs in Bangladesh are cheaper and the workers tend to be more efficient,” said a former textile minister. Electricity costs are lower and, unlike Pakistan, fewer work-days are lost to electricity outages, increasing profits as much as 30 percent. Although China remains number one in global apparel exports (with Bangladesh now second), a recent BBC program reported Chinese manufacturers increasingly moving to Bangladesh. One Chinese textile boss declared that “her” workers, at $500/month, were costing too much; Bangladesh would swell her profits.
Class War
But these bosses and global brands, forever pursuing cheap labor, are discovering that workers will not take all this lying down. They are fighting back.
Bangladeshi textile workers are demanding wage increases and better, safer working conditions, sparking militant strikes and street protests. In July, a half-million Bangladeshi workers shut down all 350 factories in an industrial zone in Dhaka, the capital. The uprising, sparked by the torture and assassination of Aminul Islam, a well-known union organizer, badly hurt business owners and their international retail clients
Karl-Johan Persson, CEO of H&M, Sweden’s vast clothing retailer — needing to stabilize the situation and fearful of even more violent upheavals — urged Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina to increase the minimum wage. He offered to pay more for his garments, 25 percent of which come from Bangladesh.
Hasina’s government, clearly siding with the country’s 5,000 garment bosses who are major political donors, has resisted raising the minimum wage and addressing labor-rights issues. The powerful president of the Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association, Shafiul Islam Mohiuddin, said it was “factory owners who were being victimized in some conspiracy,” and “there was no logic for increasing the wages of the workers.”
Two-thirds of Parliament members belong to the country’s three biggest business associations. Thirty factory bosses hold 10% of Parliamentary seats. They’re buying newspapers and TV stations whose news often emphasizes the disruptions caused by protests, not the appalling conditions for workers.
Rulers’ All-out Armed Attacks
The government has used the full power of the state against the militancy of women workers in Bangladesh to intimidate them and crack down on protests. The battle lines are clearly drawn and the government is pulling no punches.
Ranking officers from the military, the police and intelligence agencies command specially created agencies to monitor garment workers and collect intelligence on activists. The Riot Police charge into demonstrators, beating them with clubs. They fire rubber bullets, turn on powerful water cannons and use tear gas to disperse protestors.
The Rapid Action Battalion, a new paramilitary force, carries out vigilante attacks known as “crossfire” killings, and intimidates workers while patrolling factory floors. Before Aminul Islam was found tortured and murdered in April, he reported being threatened by the Rapid Action Battalion.
His assassination, which is still “under investigation,” has spawned an international campaign by labor activists demanding justice in his case and a process in which workers, government and local and international textile bosses can negotiate wages and working conditions.
Even Hillary Clinton, visiting Dhaka in May — the first visit by a U.S. Secretary of State in nine years — has called for a “fair wage.” The Obama administration’s concern over labor rebellion underscores Bangladesh’s geo-political importance as a regional ally in southern Asia and a U.S. foreign policy “pivot” to the Asia Pacific. Clinton’s visit is expected to lead to joint military exercises and exchanges involving counterterrorism and security.
U.S. companies like energy giants Chevron and ConocoPhillips, have huge investments in Bangladesh. Chevron supplies half the country’s natural gas, while ConocoPhillips has recently signed agreements to explore for gas and oil reserves in the Bay of Bengal.
‘Fair Wage’ Impossible Under Capitalism
Given that U.S. and British banks and international lending agencies hold the purse strings, the Bangladeshi government, under pressure to stabilize the country, may well offer what they would call a “fair wage” to the textile workers.
What would that mean? Would these bosses be prepared to pay enough so the women — many of whom are their families’ sole breadwinners — rise out of abject poverty, work 8-hour days, get holiday pay, health care and schooling for their children? Expecting bosses to give up their profits and negotiate even this kind of increase is fanciful. Presenting it as a solution, as the labor activists are doing, is misleading these workers about capitalism’s true nature. Under this system, production is solely for the bosses’ profit, not to benefit workers, whose exploitation is the source of those profits.
Any loss capitalists may take paying more to one set of workers will be passed on to other workers. H&M will pay its workers in Europe and the U.S. less, and raise the price of its goods — or surf the world for a cheaper labor force as the Pakistani bosses have done. Sixty thousand workers in Pakistan have lost their jobs since textile manufacturers moved to Bangladesh and neither they nor the Pakistani government plan to compensate workers for job losses.
PLP declares that for workers to be free in one place workers need to be free everywhere. And that means fighting for a communist society where production is based on the needs of the working class. Workers in Bangladesh need to turn their fight for an illusory “fair” wage into a fight for communism, joining PLP to build an international working-class party: one class, one party, one fight.
Marikana, South Africa, September 19 — Strikes by thousands of miners have spread across the northern mining areas. They’re reacting to the August 16 police massacre at the Lonmin platinum mine and supporting the 3,000 miners who wildcatted on August 8. The striking rock drillers have now won an increase from $500/month to $1385/month.
However, the walkout still includes 15,000 gold miners, six other Anglo-American platinum mines, the world’s top producer, and chrome miners. There have also been protests at Eskon Holdings, producers of 90 percent of the country’s energy.
On September 12, 3,000 miners marched to the original mine at Marikana. Their strike has cost the bosses a half billion dollars in lost output (Chicago Tribune, 9/17).
The sellout National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) signed an agreement with Lonmin, which is meaningless since the strikers rejected the paltry 16 percent “increase” and are holding out for their original demand: a doubling and tripling of wages to $1,500 a month (Reuters, 9/17). The NUM is allied with the governing African National Congress (ANC) which the striking minors quit to join the militant Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union.
Cops raided a striking miners’ hostel, seizing spears, machetes and other weapons and arrested 38. The cops later dispersed protesters with rubber bullets and tear gas. When the cops dragged off a pro-miners speaker expelled by the ANC, miners pelted them with stones.
The Wall Street Journal reported (9/13) that the military was put on alert because they feared soldiers who had struck in 2009 for higher wages may support the miners. The Journal also reported (9/17) that 800 miners had suffered deaths last year.
This massive miners’ rebellion has exposed the fact that racist apartheid still rules South Africa, under a capitalism enforced by a tiny black elite allied with the white-owned corporations. The law the ANC government used to indict the strikers was passed under the old apartheid system. And the massacre mirrored all the brutalities of the past Nazi regime.
The miners have set a striking example for the international working class, of the need to take up arms to fight the capitalist ruling classes’ state apparatus arrayed against them. What is needed is communist leadership to turn this class war into a war for communist revolution. This is what the Progressive Labor Party is fighting for around the world.
Once again, a study claims to have discovered a genetic basis for a complex social outcome — in this case, why students succeed or fail in school. Published in the July issue of Developmental Psychology, the journal of the American Psychological Association, this “gene discovery” by lead author Kevin Beaver, a criminology professor at Florida State University, follows a long and racist tradition of attributing genetic causes to alcoholism, intelligence, unemployment, criminality, and even the fear of snakes.
Throughout the history of class society, the ruling class has used religion or pseudo-science to cast exploitation, oppression and injustice as inevitable. The field of genetics, in particular, has been repeatedly hijacked by slave-owners, captains of industry, and Germany’s Third Reich. It’s not surprising that this despicable ideology has emerged once again, this time by capitalists who promote education reform.
True social scientists know that both human behavior and social organization are driven by infinitely complex factors. Beaver, however, claims to have discovered genes (the molecular units of DNA) related to “impulsivity” and “violent tendencies” and thereby “influence” whether an individual will graduate from high school and go on to college.
To create the illusion of legitimacy for their findings, the study gives the genes technical-sounding names: DAT1, DRD2, and DRD4. (By avoiding the more obviously outrageous claim that genes “determine” an outcome, researchers leave themselves an escape route if and when future critics show there is no correlation between such genes and the designated outcomes.
Racism: Bosses’ Tool
The bosses’ use of prestigious journals and big-name academics to legitimize Nazi ideology is nothing new. In 1969, Berkeley Professor Arthur Jensen was invited to submit an article to the Harvard Educational Review to prove that black children fail in schools because of their genes. In the early 1970s, William Shockley, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, claimed that the color of people’s skin could tell you how smart they were.
In 1994, Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray followed suit with The Bell Curve, a best-selling package of racist propaganda, distortions, and lies. Wherever these racist pseudo-scientists showed up to speak, the Progressive Labor Party led thousands of students and faculty to shout them down and prevent them from spreading their poison.
Although racists tend to hide after being attacked in mass struggles, their falsehoods remain alive today. Chief among them is the concept that genes define individual abilities and tendencies. This bogus claim hides the real cause of inequality under capitalism: racist and sexist discrimination. If people’s genes stop them from becoming aeronautical engineers or pediatricians, rotten public schools get a free pass. Using genes to blame the victims is a doubly racist assault on black and Latino children, since it justifies spending less on segregated schools while painting the children as innately unintelligent.
The fundamental illusion may be that genes determine any traits at all. What Genes Can’t Do (2003), by the cell biologist turned philosophy professor, Lenny Moss, shows that the concept of a “gene” is used to mean different things, and that there is no one-to-one correspondence between genes and traits. Indeed, geneticists like Richard Lewontin (The Triple Helix, 2000) have demonstrated that even the concept of a “trait” is ambiguous.
Thus “genes” for “traits” is a double house of cards, though most biologists cling to these illusory fictions. Their field rewards them for doing so. Top academic publications favor conclusions that hide the fact that the profit system decides who is allowed to succeed or fail.
Bosses Attack Students and Teachers
The implications of this academic bias are lethal. Like ancient rulers who used the Bible to trap slaves into accepting their subjugation as part of a larger plan, today’s capitalists use pseudo-science to veil the racist neglect that pervades education. Failed students are portrayed as hopelessly handicapped and beyond help. It is a small step from there to consign such “flawed” segments of the population to joblessness, poverty, and ultimately elimination.
Teachers, often with leadership by members of PLP, have joined with parents and their students in fighting against further cutbacks in school funding and for smaller class sizes. They are also confronting ruling-class schemes to blame teachers for the failures of the bosses’ schools.
These fights must be sharpened to defend black and Latino students from the hopeless feeling that they are doomed to unemployment and prison. While any victories in reform struggles are limited and temporary under capitalism, an unrelenting fight against racism and sexism will help create the working-class unity we need to build toward communist revolution.
Only when the world’s workers — under the leadership of the communist PLP — seize power from the capitalists through revolution, will we rid ourselves of false science, miseducation, racism, sexism, and imperialist war. We need to become millions and millions. Join us.
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The Rulers’ Bind
The capitalist ruling class has a contradiction on its hands. On the one hand, it needs to slash spending on schools and other services even more to free up funds for its widening imperialist wars. On the other, the schools are so bad that the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) is complaining that high school graduates are ill-equipped to serve as the bosses’ cannon fodder. In a March 2012 report for the CFR by Joel Klein (former head of New York City’s public schools) and Condoleezza Rice (former Secretary of State under George W. Bush), they warn that the horror that passes for schooling in the U.S. is robbing the ruling class of its needed military might. They don’t care that millions of our children suffer from miseducation. Their sole concern is that the U.S. imperialists’ control of critical resources is in jeopardy.
The strike of 30,000 school teachers and education workers in Chicago is the necessary response to the attacks that students, teachers and parents have been facing for years. It’s significant that the strike is happening in Chicago, which is the Ground Zero for fascist “educational reform.” That has the full support of the democrats and AFT president Randi Weingarten. The charter school movement, school closings, increased testing and “data driven” teaching, the new evaluation measures, and the budget cuts have all been forced on the mostly black and Latino school population. This is clearly racist. But the working class is pushing back against these attacks in a way that we haven’t seen in 25 years.
“School Reform” Is about Control, Not Education!
These endless changes forced down the throats of students and teachers nationwide are more about disciplining us than education. Obama and Duncan’s Race to the Top and the drive towards standardized curriculum and testing is part of the bosses move to win the hearts and minds of our students to fight in their expanding imperialist wars. School reform in Chicago has shown it’s racist nature from the mass firings of veteran black teachers from schools that our students never deserved, discipline policies that force our students out of school and the hiring of young white teachers into schools that are still setup for failure.
Many of the reforms involve micro managing what teachers do while giving them less and less support, supplies, etc. Obama’s team of Rahm and Duncan has shown their true colors in the dismantling of public education and their attacks on the labor movement. The ruling class in this country wants to use these reforms to crush the spirit of teachers and control the schools for the needs of the capitalists.
Money for War, No Money for Schools!
These attacks are necessary in a system that is based on the wealth of a few and the exploitation of the many, CAPITALISM. So, while thousands of anti-racist teachers take to the street fighting for decent schools, dignity and the respect that education workers deserve billions have been spent on imperialist wars. From Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan to propping up US military bases all over the world. As long as the bosses are in power, we will face continous wars for profit –only a revolution for communism, workers power, can bring us the changes we need!
(More on the history of communists in the labor movement in next leaflet-Volume 3.)
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Chicago Teachers STRIKE against Apartheid Edcuation
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- 10 September 2012 304 hits
STRIKE AGAINST CAPITALISM!!
The Chicago teachers’ strike is a fight back against the racist conditions (overcrowded classes, segregated schools, etc.) our children face every day. Strikes allow workers to feel the power that we have as a class to stop the bosses in their tracks. The liberal Democrats, Obama and Duncan are leading the racist attacks on students and teachers in the U.S. with their “Race to the Top”. The anti-racist fight that 26,000 Chicago school workers are waging is an inspiration to workers around the world, like the striking Lonmin miners in Marikana, South Africa.
SAME ENEMY, SAME FIGHT! WORKERS OF THE WORLD UNITE!!
For better wages, working and living conditions the black mine workers have shut down the world’s third largest platinum mine. Our working class sisters and brothers in South Africa are waging a strike against the mine owners and the racist liberal African National Congress (ANC). The response of the liberal black led ANC to these workers demands was the racist police massacre of 8 miners on August 8th and 34 striking miners on August 16th.
SMASH APARTHEID EDUCATION WITH COMMUNIST REVOLUTION!!
Chicago school workers are fighting for the schools our children deserve, as workers in South Africa are fighting for the lives they deserve. The fact remains that capitalism can never provide the quality of life our class deserves. The liberals Obama, Duncan, Emmanuel & Co. just like the ANC politicians are doing the bidding of their billionaire masters. These liberals are leading the racist attacks on workers from the U.S. to South Africa. To get the lives that our class deserves we must fight to take state power away from the bosses and their puppet politicians. The working class (more than 99%) produces EVERYTHING of value in the world, yet the ruling class (less than 1%) controls it all. Under communism racism would have no place in our society. Communism, unlike capitalism, needs unity not division of our class. A communist society will utilize the potential in all workers and students to build the world the international working class deserves.
JOIN PLP!! FIGHT FOR COMMUNISM!!
