Commerce Minister Tipu Munshi yesterday urged the garment factory owners to take measures so that no non-violent workers are harassed by police for the latest spell of unrest surrounding wage revision. “It would not be right and we do not want it,” he said at a dialogue on the recent wage debate in the garment sector, organised by the Centre for Policy Dialogue at the Brac Centre Inn in Dhaka. Factory owners filed 13 cases with Ashulia and Savar police stations mentioning the names of 215 workers and more than 1,000 unnamed ones for their alleged involvement in the recent unrest. So far, police have arrested 40 of the workers and are on the hunt for the others. However, at the same time any kind of trouble-stirring in the sector is not acceptable, Munshi said, citing the vandalism of vehicles in Uttara at the beginning of the unrest by workers as a case in point. “Maybe they were provoked by the outsiders,” the minister said at the dialogue, which was attended by garment exporters, union leaders, executives of different factories, and researchers. Subsequently, he called for the formation of a solid monitoring committee to investigate whether anybody instigated the workers or propagated rumours to engage the workers in the unrest. Munshi also suggested the garment factory owners pay the workers by strictly following the wage structure that was revised recently after nine days’ of demonstration by thousands of workers in the industrial belts such as Ashulia, Savar and Uttara. The image of the whole garment sector should not be tainted for the misdeeds of two or three factories, he said. “It is also not right that the owners will make the workers to put in extra shifts to achieve a high production target and not remunerate them for it.” Siddiqur Rahman, president of the Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association, assured that no non-violent workers would be harassed. “I can say that 99.9 percent of the workers are good and they want to work in the factories but only a few want to continue the unrest.” In today’s business world there is no chance of cheating the workers of their salaries as buyers also regularly monitors the payment sheets, Rahman added. The debate surrounding the wages of garment workers has been the same over the last 25 years, said Rehman Sobhan, chairman of the CPD. If the workers take to the streets, police arrest them, said Montu Ghosh, president of the Garment Workers Trade Union Centre. “But we need to raise our voices,” he added. Between 2013 and 2017, the prices of garment items going to the EU dropped 0.22 percent and to the US 12 percent, said Shafiul Islam Mohiuddin, president of the Federation of Bangladesh Chambers of Commerce and Industry. But during the period the cost of production increased 29.54 percent, he said. India has created a Rs 25,000 crore-fund to reduce the cost of funds for the garment businesses, said Mostafizur Rahman, a distinguished fellow of the CPD. “Bangladesh can also create such a fund for helping the garment sector,” he said. The news of the wage hike needed to be widely disseminated among the workers to prevent them from going into unrest, said Khondaker Golam Moazzem, CPD research director, while presenting a paper styled “recent wage debates in the RMG sector: ten lessons learned”. He also called for special awareness initiatives for female workers about their grades, wages and financial issues. The government can give soft loans to the land owners in the industrial belts so that they construct houses and the workers can rent them cheaply, he added.
