We are all Bangladeshis

Day of Mourning reminds us all workers need the right to protect themselves through unions.

by Ish Theilheimer

Sunday, April 28, marked the International Day of Mourning for Injured Workers. In my rural community, a group of people meets every year at a historic shrine at a hilltop park to remember those killed or hurt on the job.

With all the logging and sawmills around here, our area has seen workplace accidents happen with terrible frequency.  Most local operations are not unionized. Workers are frequently self-employed contractors. Workers — and their families — can pay a heavy price for unsafe workplaces.

The local event in Wilno is organized by Diane Kutchkowski, whose husband was paralyzed and nearly killed in a logging accident 27 years ago — five weeks after the two were married. Since then, her job has been full-time caregiver.

Each year, Diane manages to gather as many as 100 people on the last Sunday in April to remember the victims of workplace accidents. Most who come out have an injured family member or friend, and many are survivors themselves.

This year's event occurred against the background of rescuers counting bodies and puling survivors pulled from the wreckage of the Bangladesh sweatshop cave-in. At the time of writing, reports show about 300 dead and thousands severely injured. This is the third major sweatshop disaster in Bangladesh in recent months.

Although the international Solidarity Center  and the Maquila Solidarity Network http://en.maquilasolidarity.org/currentcampaigns/Bangladesh track the major workplace disasters in low-wage countries, no doubt many deaths and maimings occur routinely in offshore factories that handle the dirty work of global corporations.

The Bangladeshi company involved in this latest tragedy apparently ignored safety audit measures. "Unfortunately," as Canadian Labour Congress president Ken Georgetti has observed, "Canada is visibly absent from international discussions to reform current social auditing systems, and to impose accountable reporting standards on companies such as Loblaws, which buy products from other countries."

Canada has remained silent about previous labour violations in Bangladesh, and thus is complicit in the recent tragic event, he says. Instead, Canada has enjoyed a five-fold increase of merchandise imports from Bangladesh — where garment workers earn as little as 20 cents per hour — since 2005. Canadian imports from there now total $1.6 billion per year for merchandise that might have been produced in textile factories in places like Montreal prior to globalization.

"There was no trade union in any of the companies involved in the Bangladeshi factory, so workers had no means available to protect their own safety," said Georgetti. "They were powerless to refuse company orders to re-enter the site after an initial evacuation, despite obvious signs of danger."

In many ways, since Thatcher, Reagan, Mulroney and the rise of globalization,  we are all Bangladeshis. These global trade deals, which Stephen Harper is so enthusiastically still pumping out, empower corporations to pick up and take their businesses to whereever workers’ lives are cheap and environmental protection rules or enforcement are absent or minimal.

In the US, union-busting is led by power-mad, ultra-rich zealots like the Koch brothers

They work through innumerable front groups, including the American Legislative Exchange Council. One third of all state legislators are affiliated with ALEC, and nearly half of all Americans live under legislation ALEC promoted.

ALEC’s  union-bashing laws, if imported to Canada, will have a crushing effect on the ability of workers to organize for their own protection. Such laws would turn back the clock by decades,  eliminating things we take for granted — like pensions, weekend, health care, public education, child labour laws, 8-hour days, environmental regulations, pay equity, and, yes, workers' compensation.

Many top Canadian Conservatives hold ALEC's extreme views and share its agenda. Saskatchewan  Premier Brad Wall and Ontario Conservative leader Tim Hudak are strident supporters. Canadian companies have shipped most of the good jobs offshore and delivered many entry-level jobs to virtual serfdom through the Temporary Foreign Worker program.

Even as news media report the rising toll of fatalities and injuries, the ALEC — and their many friends in the Harper and provincial governments —  are still working in concert to make us all Bangladeshis. As the labour movement has been saying for decades, mourn the dead, fight for the living.

© Copyright 2013 Ish Theilheimer, All rights Reserved. Written For: StraightGoods.ca