11/12 April 2005
In the middle of the night, a nine-storey textile manufacturing company collapses in Savar, a suburb of Dhaka. The building must have been poorly constructed, as it had only been completed a few months previously. The rescue teams who come to help don’t have any proper rescue equipment. Instead they have to search for the trapped workers using just their hands. Tragically, this results in a death toll of 61, with over 100 workers seriously injured.
But why is the number of casualties so high? In Bangladesh, there are frequently no working emergency exits at factories. The majority of the 3,000 factories that produce goods for export, such as my fleece body warmer, do not meet legal safety requirements. Most factories only have one entrance and exit, which is closed during working hours so that no one can sneak in or out. With crowded rooms, bad lighting, and poor safety procedures, is it any wonder that there are so many major accidents in the manufacturing industry? Over the last decade, official accident logs suggest that hundreds of textile workers have been killed and thousands have been badly injured, but the real figures could be even higher. And these numbers don’t take into account minor injuries, for which there are no records.
Around two million people work in the textile industry, and 90 per cent of them are young women under the age of 25. They have to work up to 100 hours a week! In Europe, the average full-time working week is only 41.6 hours long. In Bangladesh in 2010, the national minimum wage was raised to 3000 taka (around €19.80 euros/£16.00 pounds) per month. Despite this, the majority of the average seamstresses’ wages is still spent on rent. In order to support their families, textile workers must work overtime, and lots of it. However they are rarely fully compensated for the overtime they do, and sometimes they aren’t paid for it at all. Often, the only bonus is that they get to keep their job. On top of working long hours, female workers are frequently harassed and sometimes even beaten by their supervisors. This is why they keep striking. They want better treatment in the workplace, and a higher minimum wage, one that they and their families can live on. At the same time, the factory owners are feeling the pressure of worldwide competition. They are determined to keep trying to achieve the impossible: to make better quality clothing for less and less money.
15 September 2005: 1:00pm
Tack, tack, tack, tack! Men have the final word at Taslima’s factory too. The seamstresses aren’t allowed to stand up without permission from a male supervisor. They’re not allowed to go to the toilet without permission. They’re not even allowed to talk! The seamstresses are constantly being harassed – and today the supervisors are particularly angry. But why? Tack, tack, tack, tack. After a million stitches – or that’s what it feels like to Taslima – comes the long-awaited announcement of the lunch break. “Half an hour, and not a second longer!” cry the supervisors. The workers leave their desks and gather into small groups. Everyone eats and talks at the same time. A message is passed from group to group, “Everyone working on the fleece body warmer job has to have them finished by the end of the day. No one is allowed home until the order is complete!” Oh no, Taslima thinks to herself, throwing her leftover rice and vegetables onto to the floor in anger. Meanwhile, many women make use of their short lunch break to queue up for the toilet. They don’t know when they’ll get another chance to go.
Tack, tack, tack, tack . . . Taslima is back at her workstation. She’d barely started to recover from the morning’s workload before she had to get back to work. Luckily she’s still young, and has enough energy to carry on. Taslima is determined to make a success of this job: under no circumstances does she want to end up like her mother. Her mother has eight children and stays at home all day. After she’s cooked, she lets everyone else eat first, then eats whatever is leftover. Which usually isn’t much. Taslima and her sister are the first members of their family who can read and write. With help from their relatives, Taslima’s parents could buy a small piece of land where they could build a hut and her mother could have a small vegetable garden. But instead, her parents choose to farm for a living. This means they have to rent farmland, for which the landlords demand half of the yearly harvest as payment. To survive during the monsoon season, Taslima’s father goes to Dhaka or Chittagong to work as a labourer. It’s a very hard life.
Taslima is determined to do things differently. One day, she plans to take out a small loan from the Grameen Bank. This is a very unusual bank based in Bangladesh that provides low interest loans to local people. The lending criteria are simple. Firstly, they do not loan money to people who already own land, a business or a tuk-tuk. Secondly, they only loan money to women. The Grameen Bank believe that women are hit hardest by poverty, and are therefore more likely to be careful how they spend their money. The supervisor’s voice interrupts Taslima’s thoughts as it echoes from the other end of the room: “What? You want to go to the toilet again? I don’t think so. You’re just trying to get out of work!”
8:00pm
Even though the normal shift of 10 to 12 hours is over, no one on Taslima’s floor is allowed to stop working. The order for 1,000 fleeces for a German company has to be finished by the end of the night so it can ship tomorrow. Tack, tack, tack, tack . . . Yet another collar seam finished! Taslima is exhausted, she can barely lift her arms, they’re as heavy as two large jugs of water. Now and again her eyelids droop and close and she daydreams, although scary thoughts keep invading her mind . . . Thoughts of water coming flooding in from all sides, bursting through the doors and the walls while her and her family lie sleeping!
Every year, her parent’s house is waterlogged by the monsoon and half-destroyed by storms and hurricanes. Because it’s always being rebuilt in a hurry, it’s built out of easily sourced materials such as mud, straw, bamboo and plastic sheeting. Last year however, the monsoon was worse than usual. A lot worse. The flood lasted for an exceptionally long time – from the beginning of July until the middle of September. The rivers burst their banks and flooded first the low-lying land and then everywhere else. At the height of the flood, whole villages looked like small islands in a huge ocean. The streets were underwater, the factories were closed . . . It was only possible to travel if you had a boat. And it got worse: even though everyone was surrounded by water, there was hardly any clean drinking water available. It was difficult to cook meals, and all the women in the village had to share the one dry stove available.
In August the water didn’t subside like it usually did, but began to rise further. Taslima’s family quickly built a small, raised platform so that the family and their only cow had somewhere safe to sleep. They were woken one night by the water rushing into the house and the mud walls collapsing. Taslima and her siblings were left standing waist deep in water. In the morning, her family left the hut and went to live with relatives in town for weeks, until the flood subsided. During this period, the only way they could survive was by taking out a loan. This was a very expensive decision. The local moneylender adds 20 per cent in interest to their outstanding debt, every month! Even now, Taslima’s parents are using some of Taslima’s wages to help pay back the debt. Tack, tack, tack . . .
“OUCH!” Taslima is startled. She has hurt her hand with the sewing machine needle. When seamstresses are tired, accidents with needles and the sharp cutting knives happen far more frequently. “That must never, never happen again!” Taslima scolds herself. Since she’s been working at the factory, her family have been better off than ever before. Taslima doesn’t ever give leaving this job a second thought. Even when she is almost overcome with exhaustion, she wipes the tears from her eyes, thinks of her family, and keeps working.
11:05pm
Taslima and her colleagues have been sewing for 16 hours. Their only break was for half an hour at lunchtime. So far, only 889 body warmers are finished. Taslima has needed to go the toilet badly for hours, but the supervisor hasn’t let anybody leave the room since 8:00pm. Instead he complains the whole time. “You’re so pathetic, work faster!” he grumbl
es. The rolls of green, blue, grey and brown fleece are getting thinner. Taslima hopes there will be enough material left to get the job done. Tack, tack, tack, tack . . .
16 September 2005: 1:10am
The rolls of fleece have all been used up. There are only small scraps left at the cutting table. The foreman screams at the cutters, “You fools! You’ve cut the pieces too large! I’ll be taking this out of your wages!” Taslima cannot bear it. She stands up and runs along factory aisles looking for usable fleece. What would Meena, her heroine, do now? Then Taslima spots the small roll of bright red fleece. “Over here! There’s some left!” she cries. She drags the roll out of the corner.
“That’s bright red!” the cutter protests.
“It doesn’t matter! Surely Germans like red too!” says Taslima.
“Men in red fleeces? Really?” says one of the cutters, looking to the supervisor for instructions.
“I don’t care!” spits the supervisor. “Just get it done so we can all go home . . .”
So they use the red fleece. Tack, tack, tack, tack . . . In a flash there are 11 bright red fleece body warmers. No sooner has my fleece come into the world it’s packed into a cardboard box, ready to be shipped to Germany. It might have been a horrible day’s work for the seamstresses, but none of them would give up their jobs for anything . . .
6
A World of Floating Metal Boxes: A Container Ship Heading for Europe
16 September 2005
For two weeks, a red metal container has been sitting in the yard of the textile factory on the outskirts of Dhaka. It is six metres long, 2.3 metres wide and 2.3 metres high. Day in and day out it has been loaded up with boxes of clothing fresh from the factory. It takes a long time to fill such a vast space. By the time it is full, there are thousands of items of clothing inside. Along with the body warmers, there are jackets, tracksuits and pyjamas, all made from fleece. The container has acquired a number of dents and a lot of rust during its lifetime. It has travelled non-stop around the world for the last eight years.
At about 10:00am, three final boxes of fleece body warmers complete the container’s load. It takes eight workers to close and lock the container door. They don’t call up Hassan to pick up the load this time: his tuk-tuk is far too small to carry this container. Instead, it is loaded onto the back of a filthy, well-travelled lorry. The lorry will travel down Bangladesh’s muddy streets, trying not to slide off the road, until it reaches the harbour in Chittagong. There the driver will offload the container, and instead of being loaded straight onto a ship, nothing will happen to it for several days. The container will sit on the dock, patiently, while the monsoon batters it. All too often, the factory staff work themselves to death to meet the shipping deadlines, only for the clothing to sit in the harbour, unmoving, for days and days. Has the container been forgotten about? No, it has not. For one particular customs officer, the container is all he can think about. There’s something wrong with the paperwork. A section about the contents of the container has not been filled in properly, which means it will not be signed off by the Ministry of Agriculture for shipping the next day.
21 September 2005
After five days of tense phone calls, the owner of the textile factory finally comes to the harbour in person. The customs officer leaves him waiting for over an hour before explaining he hasn’t provided an important document from the Office of Foreign Affairs. The factory owner has never even heard of this particular document before. He asks the customs officer if he can step into his office so they can talk about the situation in more detail. A small brown envelope exchanges hands. The factory owner goes for a cup of tea, and by the time he comes back, all of his papers are miraculously now ‘in order’. According to Transparency International, a global organisation who campaign against government corruption, Bangladesh is one of the most corrupt countries in the world.
The Shipping Container Revolution
In 1956, the shipping container revolution began. American entrepreneur Malcolm McLean came up with a bright idea; instead of loading individual boxes of goods onto ships and trains, multiple goods could be packed into standard sized containers. These boxes would be much easier to load and unload than multiple individual units, and so the shipping container was born. A standard container, known as a TEU (twenty foot equivalent unit), is the same wherever you are in the world: six metres (20 feet) in length, 2.3 metres high, and equally as wide. A single container can hold up to 30 cubic metres of goods. Nowadays, there are also an increasing number of FEU (forty foot equivalent unit) containers in use, which are about 12 metres long.
Over the past 50 or so years, shipping containers have taken over the freight world: more than half of all goods are now transported in TEU containers. There’s an estimated 20 million of them, making around 300 million individual journeys a year. Without these containers globalisation wouldn’t exist – or at least not to this extent anyway. Ninety-five per cent of world trade is done via ocean freight. Commodities such as oil and iron are transported in specialised tankers and cargo ships, and many other goods, from raw materials through to finished products, waste and scrap are also transported via containers. In the freight industry, no one does anything without a financial incentive. ‘Baksheesh’, is the magic word. It is understood across the whole of Asia and Africa, and is the financial grease that gets you out of tight situations.
22 September 2005
Six days after its arrival, the container is finally lifted by crane and moved down to the dock, where the container ship Dhaka had dropped anchor. The Dhaka, which can carry up to 250 containers, is called a ‘feeder ship’. Feeder ships are the postmen of the container freight world: small and able to travel through shallow water. As the Dhaka only has a depth of 4.5 metres, she can pass through the majority of the shallow rivers on the Asiatic coast. Even at low tide, she can leave the harbour in Chittagong and head down the Karnaphuli River to the Bay of Bengal.
The Dhaka heads south and always stays close to land. Looking out from the ship’s bridge, you can see a long white ribbon along the coast: Cox’s Bazar. This sandy beach is 125 kilometres long, making it the longest unbroken sandy beach in the world. But there are rarely any tourists enjoying it. Holidaying in Bangladesh? No way. When Westerners hear the word Bangladesh, all they think of is floods and people starving.
25 September 2005
Three uneventful days pass by. The weather has been good, there have been no incidents on board the ship, and the coast still stretches out across the horizon. Somewhere in the distance behind the Dhaka is the border between Burma and Thailand. Despite the hassle-free journey, the mood on the ship is tense. The closer the Dhaka gets to the Strait of Malacca, the more ill at ease the captain and his crew become. This isn’t an easy route to travel through, especially for small and medium freighter ships like the Dhaka. The Strait of Malacca is pirate territory.
All ships wanting to make their way from the West (Europe, Africa, the Far East, India) to the East (China, the Philippines and Japan) have to travel through this narrow stretch of water to reach the South China Sea. Hemmed in by Malaysia and Indonesia, the Strait of Malacca is almost 1,000 kilometres long and at points, only 25 kilometres wide. Approximately 50,000 ships travel through this narrow strait every year, and half of all pirate attacks happen here. Most people imagine pirates as being consigned to history. But that’s not true. Instead of using sailing ships and flying Jolly Roger flags, they prefer inconspicuous fishing boats or small speedboats. Their attacks are fast and brutal. Everyone on board the Dhaka is sweating with anxiety, especially the captain. He has been attacked by pirates once before. The scar on his left hand is a constant reminder of that horrible day. He was badly beaten, and forced to open the ship’s vault by men armed with guns and machetes. Every small boat that sails past makes his heart beat faster.
After 10 hours or so, the tense atmosphere finally lifts. It is the middle of the night when a glittering theatre of light suddenly appears in fro
nt of the Dhaka. Where, moments before there was only darkness, suddenly there are hundreds of columns of light. The sound of helicopters and car horns carry across to the ship on the breeze. There is the scent of rain after it has evaporated from warm streets. This is unmistakably Singapore, the small city-state at the most southern point of the Asiatic mainland.
Singapore was built as a centre for world trade by the British over 250 years ago, and today, Singapore has the largest container harbour in the world. This is where the axes of world trade cross paths: from the Far East to Europe, from the Far East to Southeast Asia/the East, and from the Far East to Australia. Around 20 million containers pass through this port each year, and that number increases annually. That’s about 63,000 containers every day. A harbour is only capable of moving this much cargo by being exceptionally well organised. Singapore itself is renowned for being a very orderly and well-run city. For example, it is illegal to drop used chewing gum on the streets, and smokers may only partake in their favourite habit in specially designated glass booths. Everything runs like clockwork here. Within five hours the Dhaka has been unloaded.
27 September 2005
The container from Bangladesh holding the fleece body warmers only has to wait 21 hours before a crane loads it into the depths of a huge freighter. The World Star has dropped anchor in the dock. It’s one of the world’s newest and most state of the art container ships: at 312 metres long, it can hold up to 8,400 containers. The Dhaka was only delivering to a single destination – which in shipping terms is a fairly straightforward process. It’s a completely different matter when you have 8,400 containers to deliver to 12 different destinations. Not only must the containers be unloaded correctly at all 12 harbours, but new containers must be loaded on in their place.
Made on Earth Page 5
