While many in the U.S. are consumed with the war in Iraq and the coming elections, it's vital to remember that other struggles are still silently raging on. Some of the world's greatest injustices occur in relative silence and some of the policies with far-reaching global impact are passed with minimal public input. We are slowly becoming aware of the importance of global economic policy, but few citizens know the difference between the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund or the World Bank. Yet these institutions and the agreements they help to form dictate the geography of poverty and decide the difference between civil rights and barriers to trade.
Election year in the United States has made many familiar to the idea of choosing between the \lesser of two evils"" for short-term gain. Bangladeshi garment workers are facing the same dilemma, except they will not have the ability to decide between their evils. Presently there are some 1.8 million garments workers in Bangladesh, 85 percent of them young women and girls. They toil in horrific conditions making as little as 15 cents an hour for 12 hours a day working for large U.S. corporations such as Disney and Wal-Mart. They cannot afford decent housing, are verbally and sexually harassed on the job, are beaten or shot when they try to organize and, with their only money going to food they, are not able to save.
One would not think that things could get much worse or that the global system could abuse these workers any further-but they can and it's going to. The Multi Fiber Agreement is an obscure but powerful trade agreement dating back to the 1970s that set a series of international quotas on textile production. Different countries have import and export quotas, and these quotas have created large garment industries in countries that it would not otherwise have been financially viable to produce in such as Bangladesh, Mauritius and Nicaragua.
The MFA is currently set to expire in January 2005, and the expected reaction is that most corporations will continue on the global race to the top and bottom, respectively, and move all production to China and Vietnam. Expiration of the MFA is going to roll back many of the small but important worker victories that have begun to occur in the ""free"" trade zones of developing nations and cause financial and humanitarian disasters in the countries set to lose the most jobs. The big losers, those who are moving from one evil to another-from wage slavery to unemployment-will include Mexico, Central American countries, Indonesia and the country expected to be hit the hardest-Bangladesh.
Over the last thirty years Bangladeshi society has shifted from agrarian to one highly dependent on exports, specifically the garment industry. MFA expiration is going to create massive unemployment and Bangladesh has no other major industries to absorb the loss. The country has been used on a global scale in the same way female garment workers are used by the factories. By age 28 women's eyesight and motor skills are destroyed and they are out on the streets with no pension plan and no savings. They leave worse off by far. Bangladeshi labor has been used and sucked dry, yet the country has not ""developed,"" and following the MFA expiration they will be left worse off.
The workers in the ""winning"" countries are not really winning either. Conditions in China are similar to those in Bangladesh with an added dose of repression. Wages in Bangladesh in actuality are slightly lower than in China but workers in China have no legal right to organize.
MFA expiration and the impending humanitarian and economic crisis it's going to cause are representative of greater inequalities within the current economic system. It is currently considered an acceptable part of free trade to protect brand names. For example, if a country uses the Nike swoosh without permission, the WTO can threaten it with sanctions. However, any regulations protecting human rights of workers or dictating companies provide retraining or compensation when they leave a country are considered illegal barriers to trade.
Bangladesh is the third-largest apparel exporter in the world to the U.S. Many of the major companies operating in Bangladesh are U.S. companies. In the short term we, as U.S. consumers, have both the power and the responsibility to demand that corporations protect workers' rights and that some plan be created to protect workers in the post-MFA world. In the long term we must monitor these silent but important economic policies and demand that workers' rights be placed above the rights of corporations.
