disparity or conspiracy by ZK

Imagine that you are a garment factory worker who makes living on a day to day basis. You live in a slum raising children who often get sick due to malnutrition and poor hygiene. You leave home, in the dark, before sunrise and come back, in the dark, after sunset. Sick or healthy, you work 15/16 hours a day and are not fairly paid. The prices of essentials have gone through the roof over the last few years, while your wage has stayed where it was four years ago. You and your children are eating less and less every day. You cannot afford a doctor anymore.

You see more and more high rising buildings and pricy cars; shining with all the glories of their owners. The glares of summer sunlight reflecting from those shiny buildings, cars and shiny faces of their owners blind you. You are locked inside the factory from dawn-to-dusk because your employer does not trust you. When fire catches up in any such factories dozens of people like you are burnt alive. You know you may be the next. You come home at night to find no electricity or water. Your night is nightmare.

You see launches sink under the water and dozens like you die. You see buildings collapse and dozens like you die. The owners, whose endless greed caused the misery, go unpunished because they have connections. Day by day, hour by hour, minute by minute you are losing your flesh and blood, while the rich are accumulating fat from what you are losing. You see the politicians are fighting like hungry wolves over your body. They are in endless blame game, while you see no hope, no end to this misery. Today’s politicians are beyond your reach, they live in the fantasy lands. They can buy your votes for money; they care for money only, not you.

Those who are cooking-up conspiracy theories should look around the world. Today’s laborers are more aware of their rights. Latin America has moved more to the left, causing endless headaches for American capitalist. India has ousted its right-wing, who cared only for the city middle class when poverty-ridden farmers were committing suicides. Left has own a landslide victory in sates like West Bengal or Kerala. Indian poor has hope for change through electoral process. Where the hope is lost the poor have to fight back. Like China, where the government had to put down thousands of protests over the last few years. With a controlled press, most of them go unnoticed by world media. Don’t forget the “French Revolution” yet. Bangladeshi working class has apparently lost hope. They don’t see any change in luck through electoral process. They don’t see any benefit from regime change or they fear that “election engineering” will rob their verdict.

When income disparity goes through the roof social unrest is inevitable. In case of Bangladesh the worst human development in record has added insult to the injury of disparity. Please refer to “Human development catastrophe since 2001”, Daily Star, November 1, 2005 and the latest UNDP report of human development trend. After a healthy 2.4% annual growth in human development in 1996-2000, we are now having the lowest in record 0.9% growth. When our nearest neighbor was having about 6% GDP growth in late nineties, Bangladesh was experiencing similar rate. By now India has experienced double digit growth, while Bangladesh is stuck where it was then. Meanwhile, the prices of essentials have doubled in few years. For the widening gap in poor versus rich please see “Rich-poor gap widens”, Daily Star, May 15, 2005. The report cites the Poverty Monitoring Survey Report 2004 of the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS). The report showed that rich had experienced a dramatic rise in income (more than 13%), while poor households saw about 4% reduction in income. Please also see “Inequality and poverty in Bangladesh”, Daily Star, October 22, 2005.

In America, the paradise of capitalism, you cannot get away without paying overtime. In the heaven of capitalism you will see federal government imposing minimum wage, cities with higher living costs have even higher minimum wages. You cannot keep your employees captive like pigs in a farm, as the readymade garment factories in Bangladesh do. You cannot get away causing hundreds of deaths, only because the victims are poor. In Bangladesh, you can.

That is why laborers defy death. They have to fight for their rights; they have to fight to survive. Nobody else is doing it for them. They are not only the garment workers as the conspiracy theorists claim; they are all working class people. They are fighting for electricity in Kansat or Shanir Akhra; for fair salary and overtime in Gazipur, Ashulia, Savar, Dhaka, Rangpur. They are garment workers; they are stone breakers; they are farmers. The first spark was Kansat, now the blaze is everywhere. This blaze will not extinguish as long as the fuel is there, as long as the suffering of deprived people continues. Conspiracy theory is a conspiracy to deprive the destitute.

Bay Area, California, United States