Acute accommodation crisis and high cost of living made life difficult for thousands of tannery workers at the new tannery industrial park at Savar. Affected workers told New Age that they find the government as well as the factory owners totally indifferent to solving their accommodation problem. Both the problems equally affect nearly 10,000 tannery workers for which they were least prepared, said the workers. They said that they can’t afford rented accommodations close to their working places as the rentals were double of what they used to pay at Hazaribagh.Some of the workers commute between Hazaribagh and Savar by owners trucks for transporting leather for which no fares are charged, they said.But while commuting by truck workers get drenched on rainy days, while strong smell of rawhide make the journeys quite uncomfortable, they said. Getting transported like goods is also far from comfortable, they said.The workers who travel in their own from Hazaribagh have to spent Tk 120 per day as fares, they said.On lunch each worker has to spend Tk 100 per day, they said.Due to these factors, they said, each worker’s monthly expenditure increased by Tk 4,000 to 5,000 though their wages had been partially slashed by owners citing the ground that production fell since their factories had relocated.Shahjahan Akand who has been a worker of Dhaka Hide and Skin, a tannery factory, for over 10 years said that life became tough over the last three months as his expenses increased by Tk 5,000 per month though his monthly earning remained unchanged at TK 11,500.Tannery Workers’ Union general secretary MA Malek said that the government should provide housing facilities inside the Tannery Industrial Park.Malek said that the government did nothing for the tannery workers though it provided compensations and other benefits to the owners to encourage them to relocate their factories to Savar.He said that hardship forced many workers to withdraw their children from schools as they could not afford the expenses anymore.Indeed the workers are facing problems, admitted Bangladesh Tanners Association chairman Shaheen Ahmed and said that the government should provide schools, hospitals and accommodation for the workers.
