Labor leader from Bangladesh brings case to Providence

April 3, 2011 The Providence Journal

By Mark Reynolds

PROVIDENCE — A small group of workers’-rights advocates chomped on pizza and engaged in lively conversation Saturday afternoon, just before a 38-year-old Bangladeshi labor leader attracted their attention.

The organizer, Babul Akhter, had the ashen expression of a man who faces a death sentence.

His story was about his own plight and also about the suffering of Bangladeshi garment workers, including hundreds who have been burned alive in factory fires over the past four years.

Akhter told the small group of Rhode Islanders that he faces a possible death sentence back in Bangladesh, where authorities have falsely accused him of participating in a bombing campaign and taking weapons from the police.

Four of the 11 criminal charges stem from a criminal complaint filed by a factory conglomerate that makes clothes for Wal-Mart, JC Penney and Sears, according to Akhter.

“All of the charges were brought against us just so they could shut us up and keep us quiet,” he said, speaking through a translator.

The Bangladeshi government arrested Akhter and two other labor leaders in August 2010.

Akhter said he was released after pressure was leveraged on Bangladeshi authorities by members of the U.S. government, including 19 U.S. senators and representatives.

He said he appears in a Bangladeshi court seven days each month as required, and he doesn’t know when the system will embark on a six-month legal process that’s expected to determine his ultimate fate.

He isn’t waiting quietly.

His visit to Providence Saturday was part of an international campaign that has set out to improve wages and working conditions for laborers around the world, including Bangladeshi garment workers who make as little as 20 cents per hour.

Since 2006, more than 400 workers have died in more than 200 individual factory fires in Bangladesh, according to one of the campaign’s leaders, Liana Foxvog, of the International Labor Rights Forum and SweatFree Communities.

Akhter and other labor-rights organizers say it’s time for workers around the world to secure the same legal rights accorded to American garment workers in the aftermath of a fire that killed 146 people, including some 13-year-olds, at the Triangle Shirtwaist factory in Manhattan, on March 25, 1911.

One hundred years later, labor leaders cite shocking parallels between the 1911 fire and blazes in Bangladesh, including a December fire where locked factory doors kept people from making an escape.

In 1911 and in December 2010, workers jumped to their deaths from the windows of factory floors, they say.

Akhter, who is program director of the Bangladesh Center for Worker Solidarity, said he wants companies such as Wal-Mart to continue retailing clothes made in Bangladesh. But the workers of Bangladesh need rules that will require safe working conditions and decent wages around the world.

“We need a salary that will allow all of us to survive,” he said.

Saturday’s event was held in a North End union hall and organized by Rhode Island Jobs with Justice.

Foxvog reported that the City of Providence took an active role in the global fight against poverty wages and dangerous working conditions in 2006.

That year, she said, the City Council passed an ordinance that required suppliers to identify the factories that produce uniforms and other apparel bought by the city.

The ordinance also called for the formation of a committee that would ensure that the ordinance was being followed and that the manufacturers were complying with fair labor standards, Foxvog added.

The committee was never formed, she said.

Akhter, who has a 4-year-old daughter, is expected to fly home to Dhaka on April 9.