DHAKA: Bangladesh has set up a panel to raise the minimum wage for millions of garment workers, a minister said yesterday, as tens of thousands protested over poor conditions highlighted by a series of disasters.
“We’ve set up a minimum wage board for the garment sector. We did it in view of the workers’ demand to hike their salaries,” textile minister Abdul Latif Siddique told AFP.
A typical Bangladeshi garment worker takes home less than $40 a month, a wage that Pope Francis has condemned as akin to slave labour. Their minimum wage was last raised — by 80 percent — in November 2010.
The panel will include union representatives as well as factory owners, Siddique added. “There is no doubt the salaries will be hiked,” he said. The announcement came as the death toll from the country’s worst industrial disaster climbed to 1,126, 19 days after a nine-storey garment factory complex in a suburb of Dhaka caved in and buried hundreds of workers.
Workers at the country’s garment-manufacturing hub of Ashulia on the outskirts of Dhaka left their factories en masse yesterday morning to demand an increase in wages.
“Up to 30 factories suspended production for the day as tens of thousands of workers refused to work,” additional police chief of Dhaka, Shyamol Kumar Mukharjee, told AFP.
They also demanded the death penalty for Sohel Rana, owner of the collapsed Rana Plaza complex, who was arrested at Bangladesh’s main border crossing with India after a four-day manhunt last month. He is accused of forcing labourers to work on April 24, the day of the collapse, even though cracks appeared in the building a day before. Rana, a low-level official from the ruling Awami League party, is also accused of breaking construction laws by allowing factories to operate inside a commercial building designed for shops and banks.
The workers blocked a key highway for nearly two hours but no major violence was reported,
Mukharjee said. AFP
