One year on from a violent crackdown by state actors and employers against Bangladeshi garment workers protesting for higher wages, 40,000 workers remain at risk of arrest due to repressive legal charges brought against them in the form of blank arrest warrants.
Fashion brands including H&M and Zara are refusing to protect workers’ basic rights in Bangladesh so an international campaign has launched, condemning the inaction of fashion brands and calling for 36 legal cases against worker groups and protesters to be dropped.
“Brands such as H&M and Zara have a responsibility to ensure that complaints against unnamed protesters cannot be used to intimidate workers and their representatives," says Anne Bienias, a lead campaigner for the Clean Clothes Campaign. “The refusal of brands to support union-backed wage demands despite extreme poverty, and their lack of willingness to get these cases dropped, is illustrative of who profits from the status quo and who doesn’t. Brands clearly do.”
The Clean Clothes Campaign has linked 45 fashion brands to suppliers who filed charges in 36 cases against garment workers in Bangladesh and have been pushing these brands to ensure the cases are dropped for the past year. While some brands have taken initial steps to ensure suppliers drop false allegations, a year on, all brands and suppliers have failed to follow through and not a single case has been cleared.
The Clean Clothes Campaign’s tracker shows which brands are linked to the outstanding warrants - including H&M, Zara, Next, Matalan, Levi’s, Bestseller and more. Campaigners hope this tool will shed light on the complicity of the industry and ensure brands follow through with suppliers to ensure charges are fully dropped.
The launch of this new coordinated effort to apply pressure on brands comes on the anniversary of last year’s widespread wage protests in Bangladesh. Police and the military cracked down on protesting workers who showed their dissatisfaction over the disappointing outcome of the long-awaited minimum wage negotiations. As a result of the violent police response against protesters, 4 workers lost their lives, hundreds were severely injured, and 131 were arrested.
The 36 largely baseless criminal cases are held against 40,000 ‘unnamed individuals’. Labour representatives are warning these blank arrest warrants could be used against any workers who raise concerns with factory bosses, or as a tool for settling personal or political grievances.
“In an industry where union repression is rife, getting the cases dropped is just a first but very necessary step on the way to an industry in which workers can live a decent life off their wages and in which barriers to freedom of association are taken down,” says Kalpona Akter, president of the Bangladesh Garment & Industrial Workers Federation. “We won’t live in fear. We are calling for living wages that support our families.”
Workers and trade unions in Bangladesh have put forward a list of priorities to the interim government led by Dr Yunus, which prominently includes the request to issue an executive order to have all the politically motivated legal charges being brought against workers for participation in the wage protests in 2023 dropped at once. Unions are encouraging the brands to support this ask.
TRANSPARENCY: THIS IS A REJIGGED CLEAN CLOTHES CAMPAIGN PRESS RELEASE.
