12 years ago today the Rana Plaza building collapsed in Dhaka, Bangladesh. A tragedy, a brutal murder, a corporate massacre that could have been avoided. The majority of the victims were women and children. 1134 died and 2500 were injured.
Labor rights, inspection, safety and decent living and working conditions were violated. All to ensure production at a high rate, so that we could continue to consume as much as possible and at full speed here in our western countries. All this has a lot to do with us, even if it happened far away, even if we were unaware of the working conditions there, even if we don’t want to know, even if we look the other way.
Let’s not approach this from a distance, the clothing that was and still is produced there is part of the colonial extraction-production circuit commanded by large corporations such as Benneton, Gap, Walmart or El Cortes Inglés. In fact, when the accident occurred, PRIMARK stated bluntly that another production model was not “sustainable” for them. Many of the companies involved have refused to sign the Bangladesh Accord, evading their responsibility and acceptance of what happened in order to pay the corresponding compensations.
This is not a matter of the past. The global garment industry relies heavily on the labor of women, who make up as much as 80% of its global workload. Buyers, for the most part, take their production abroad: where plunder is still alive and well through low wages and poor conditions. This is a reality that is reproduced in different ways in different corners of the world. Exploitation there, precariousness here. Also in Euskal Herria the struggle for fair conditions in the textile trade has a woman’s face, while the multinationals continue to accumulate millions.
Union and social pressures from the Rana Plaza collapse in 2013 brought an apparent commitment from the brands, but the reality is that labor harassment, physical and sexual violence, union repression, CO2 emissions, contamination of aquifers…. continue.
Transnational corporations relocate production to where labor is most exploitable. In a continuous process of accumulation, the capitalist market reinforces the inequalities that structure social relations, such as colonialism, heteropatriarchy and racism, and is incompatible with the urgent relocation of the economy.
Today we invite you to reflect on our European model of consumption. Our privileges are based on the exploitation of other peoples and shape supremacism that impoverishes and kills women. We cannot allow women’s lives to continue to be the price to pay for the greed of the bosses. Let us break with this cruel expression of the sexist violence.
On the eve of May Day, today more than ever, we vindicate internationalist feminist trade unionism as the substratum of our struggles against profit over life and against the countless violations practiced by big business, which throughout the world have violated our bodies and territories.
*Thanks to all female trade unionists committed to internationalism and to the women of Setem, Mugarik Gabe and the World March of Women of Basque Country for the work to make this reality visible for years.
Amanda Verrone, Elixabete Etxeberria and Maddi Isasi, members of the International Secretariat and Feminist Secretariat of the LAB union.
