(Dhaka) Bangladesh police dispersed striking workers demanding better wages with tear gas near the capital on Saturday, while most factories supplying major global clothing groups reopened.
In the industrial conurbation of the capital Dhaka, 600 factories producing for major global clothing groups have resumed their activity, according to the police, after having been stopped for a week due to a workers’ movement.
However, clashes broke out in the industrial town of Ashulia, west of Dhaka, when 10,000 workers tried to prevent their colleagues from returning to their jobs.
“They threw stones and bricks at police officers and factories, and tried to block roads,” Ashulia police chief Mohammad Sarowar Alam told AFP. “We dispersed them by firing tear gas.”
PHOTO AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
Police officers fire rubber bullets to disperse textile workers who are organizing a rally to demand a near tripling of their wages on November 4.
A total of 1,500 police officers had been deployed there and in the neighboring town Savar, he added.
A 35-year-old woman was seriously injured when police fired rubber bullets and tear gas at hundreds of protesters in Sreepur, some 60 kilometers north of Dhaka, police inspector Ibrahim Khalil told Reuters. ‘AFP.
Imran Khan, the woman’s nephew, told AFP that she had been hit by rubber bullets in the face three times.
Workers also returned to their jobs in Gazipur, an industrial town on the outskirts of Dhaka where the demonstrations were the most violent, said local police chief Sarwar Alam.
The authorities “assured us that they would increase our salaries within a week. This is why we returned to the factories,” Rokon Uzzaman, a textile worker, told AFP. “We have no savings. How long can we continue the protest if we cannot feed our families? ” he added.
Among the hundreds of closed establishments were “the largest factories in the country, which supply all the major Western brands”, said Kalpona Akter, president of the Bangladesh Industrial and Garment Workers’ Federation, on Friday.
These factories supply brands or distributors such as “Gap, Walmart, H & M, Zara, (the group) Inditex (of which Zara is a part, Editor’s note), Bestseller, Levi’s, Marks and Spencer, Primark and Aldi”, according to Kalpona Akter.
Textiles are a key industry in Bangladesh, the world’s second largest clothing exporter behind China. Its 3,500 factories employing four million workers, mostly women, represent 85% of this poor South Asian country’s $55 billion in annual exports.
Angry workers are demanding a near tripling of the minimum monthly wage, from 8,300 takas (around $103 CAN) to 23,000 takas ($280 CAN), to cope with the sharp increase in the cost of living and meet the needs of their workers. families.
The Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association, representing factory owners, is proposing only a 25% increase.
The Primark group, based in Ireland, told AFP that it had so far “experienced no disruption to its supply chain”.
This workers’ movement comes as the political opposition has been increasing demonstrations against Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina for months, demanding her resignation before the elections scheduled for the end of January.