Australian companies dodge textile agreement

“Just take a moment to think about it, because this was an entirely preventable industrial murder.” Textile, Clothing and Footwear Union of Australia national secretary Michele O’Neil opens with this reminder about the Rana Plaza factory collapse in Bangladesh. She’s speaking to a Melbourne Socialist Alternative meeting on 12 September about the complicity of Australian companies in Bangladesh sweatshop labour.

The Rana Plaza collapse in April drew world attention to the horrific conditions for garment workers in Bangladesh. More than 1,200 people were killed after management forced workers into a crumbling building to stitch clothes. “Many workers had to help amputate their co-workers and comrades’ limbs to be able to get out of the place”, said O’Neil.

The story is not new. Almost 2,000 workers have been killed in the Bangladesh garment industry in the last decade. Articulating a reality known to the brands that operate there O’Neil says, “It’s the cheapest place on earth to make clothing because it’s the most dangerous place on earth to make clothing.” The minimum wage in Bangladesh is US$38 a month.

Only five Australian companies have signed on to the safety accord that was put together in the wake of the Rana Plaza collapse. O’Neil explained that some companies, like Woolworths, have had the heat taken off them by making “commitments” without actually signing. Then there are others that are rabidly anti-union, like Rivers Australia.

“They blatantly talk about the fact that it is a union-sponsored or supported cause and one of the reasons why they don’t want to do it. They’ve joined with the likes of Walmart and Gap, who are the two leading lights of anti-union, anti-worker, anti-accord behaviour in the US, who are actually organising companies to have an alternative deal in place.”

But for O’Neil, a safety accord is only part of the picture. She says, “It’s very easy to talk about codes and ethical behaviour and not mention unions and not mention organising and not mention the critical life saving role that unions are about.”

“What would’ve been the one thing that would’ve prevented those deaths that day? Think about the role that an organised, unionised workplace could have played, because if you just had a few leaders that the workers had organised and had the confidence of those other workers, a few that had actually been able to say: ‘We’re not going in. We don’t have to go in. Let’s not go in’, you can see how the story might have been different.”

Speaking later to Red Flag, O’Neil discusses the situation in Australia. Although in different conditions, she argues that workers in Australia and Bangladesh face similar problems.

“In Australia what we find is that employers use a similarly long and complex supply chain and at the bottom of that supply chain you’ll find a worker working by themselves in their lounge room or in a garage or in a sweatshop.

“Frequently the companies try to set up sham contracting arrangements where they tell those workers that they are contractors and they refuse to pay them things like a minimum wage or any superannuation or any workers compensation or annual leave.”

The great bulk of these workers are women. “Both in Australia and globally our industry is full of young women, full of migrant workers, full of workers whose pay and conditions are dramatically less, whether you’re in Springvale or whether you’re in Dhaka … but I also know about this industry that they’re some of most inspiring activists and can be the most militant group of workers.”

The obstacles to organising in Bangladesh and Australia are not insurmountable, says O’Neil. In Bangladesh, thousands have struck since the Rana collapse. In Australia, “We’re trying to involve the Rivers workers here ... They don’t make here, but we’ve got the members in the warehouses – so we’re trying to globalise the links between workers.

“We’re going to be calling on you to be active in this campaign, here, as well as globally. It is a global story … and if you want to be active in it, there’s plenty of opportunities coming.”