You may not know it, but the people of Bangladesh are hanging in your closet, folded in your cabinets, and joining you at work meetings and Friday happy hours. Perhaps you didn't know you invited them, but you did when you made a choice to buy that shirt or trousers.
Few Australians know Bangladesh is a global superpower when it comes to clothes. Production lines where mostly women and girls toil for long hours with appallingly low pay accounted for $36.4 billion worth of garment exports in the year 2015-2016. My country is the second largest garment exporter in the world after China. Much of the clothes the world wears are made in Bangladesh. Name your brand or retailer – Kmart, Target, Cotton On, Just Jeans, Big W, The Gap, Nike, H&M, Zara – the list is endless.
In the global economy, the decisions that Australians make - about the clothes they wear and how much they are prepared to pay for them - directly impact the lives and livelihoods of just about everyone I know.
Three years ago, the world watched in horror as the nine-storey Rana Plaza building in Dhaka, which housed garment factories for some of the world's biggest brands, collapsed shortly after workers started their morning shifts, trapping thousands inside. More than 1100 workers died, and thousands more were injured.
"Use your voice and consumer power to demand respect for our rights": Kalpona Akter from the Bangladesh Center for Worker Solidarity.
I was there on the front line of their struggle, working with the families of those injured or killed to get assistance and compensation; organising with workers to make demands on the Bangladesh government; and engaging with international trade unionists and human rights advocates to demand global garment brands share the blame and take responsibility.
The Rana Plaza tragedy sounded a wake-up call to the world and to global garments brands. However, I heard the alarm many years ago. It first sounded for me, personally, when working as a child in a garment factory, managers locked me and my co-workers into my shop floor when a fire broke out on another level. It sounded again when at age 16 I tried to organise a union. I was fired and blacklisted instead.
After I established the Bangladesh Center for Worker Rights in 2001, I have been responding to those alarms. Every day I'm counselling workers who were threatened or fired for standing up for their co-workers. But most worrisome is these factory fires or collapses that happen time and time again, killing dozens, hundreds and, finally at Rana Plaza, more than a thousand.
After the Rana Plaza tragedy, due to immense international pressure, two international compacts were signed: the Bangladesh Accord on Fire and Building Safety, and the Alliance for Bangladesh Worker Safety. The accord is a binding agreement that requires the international brands who are members to ensure compliance by their production factories with inspection-based recommendations to improve factory fire safety and construction. By contrast, the purely voluntary nature of the alliance's agreement with its members means that the inspection results cannot be enforced, which is a major problem.
Despite global pressure, the Bangladesh government regularly refuses registration to labour unions. Authorities turn a blind eye to factory owners who threaten, harass and even physically abuse factory workers who seek to unionise. Workers are unable to take their annual leave, maternity leave, or sick leave. And most importantly, the minimum wage of $88.40 a month simply does not go far enough to cover expenses for one worker per month, let alone an entire family.
I get asked quite often whether the solution is to not buy clothes with the "Made in Bangladesh" tags. No, continue to buy from Bangladesh. The workers – nearly 80 per cent of whom are women – need the jobs. But use your voice and consumer power to demand respect for our rights.
This is a life or death matter for us. On that fateful morning, the workers at Rana Plaza saw the cracks in the walls, and many initially refused to enter the building. Supervisors cajoled and threatened the workers hanging back, telling them that if they refused, they would be fired. None of the factories operating in Rana Plaza had a union to stand up for those workers. Facing a stark choice between losing their job and facing destitution or risking their lives, those workers took their place on the assembly lines for the last time. It's up to all of us to make sure that never happens again.
Kalpona Akter is executive director of the Bangladesh Center for Worker Solidarity. She is in Sydney next week to accept the Alison des Forges Award for Extraordinary Activism from Human Rights Watch.