Bangladeshi workers battle cops and factory owners' hired thugs. Three die, children beaten by police.

What sort of human being takes this job?

Bangladeshi factory workers, many of them women and children, have been waging a ferocious struggle over the years against the global corporations that make billions of dollars off their backs.

Class war raged Sunday as workers fought pitched battles against the police and employers' gangs that protect the factory owners. Some three million workers, mostly women, are employed in the Bangladeshi garments industry with some 4,000 garment factories that export more than $10 billion worth of products a year, mainly to the United States and Europe. Workers erected barricades in the streets and “pelted the police with stones” according to reports. The workers are fighting to get the government to implement a new minimum wage. Working conditions for Bangladeshi workers are among the most exploitive in the world

The industrial working class is very strong in Bangladesh as globalization has changed the class nature of society as one political commentator explains: "This generation of garment workers is much more literate and politically aware than their predecessors. They have grown up in the slums not the villages and know that they need to be united and to demonstrate in the streets to realize their aims." Guardian UK

The police attacked the strikers with tear gas, water cannon and sticks as children also joined the workers. Despite Bangladeshi law banning children under 14 from working, they are to be found throughout the factory complexes. Anyway, when you can’t eat, you don’t give a damn about child Labor, you work. British capitalists had 7 year-old children working 700 feet underground in their coalmines so nothing should surprise us. Children work in the mines of Bolivia and in factories throughout the world where dictator’s rule and organization is weak. Here in the US children worked in the factories as well and picked cotton in fields all day long too. *

According to a survey by the Bangladesh Factory Inspection Department and published by the International Trade Union Confederation last week, almost 15% of employers did not pay their workers on time between January and May and others didn’t pay overtime,

Three workers died in Sunday’s clashes as, according to the Associated Press, “Thousands of workers attacked factories and smashed vehicles at the Chittagong Export Processing Zone. The zone houses about 70 foreign companies that mainly manufacture garments, shoes and bicycles, and employ about 150,000 workers.”

The customers for the products these brothers and sisters (and their children) make include Wal-Mart, Tesco, H&M, Zara, Carrefour, Gap, Metro, JC Penney, Marks & Spencer, Kohl's, Levi Strauss and Tommy Hilfiger. The tragedy of all this is that the working class globally has the power to stop the exploitation of these workers, at least the level of it, and also to increase the living standards of the workers who work in places like Wal Mart and the Gap. We have the numbers and most workers recognize that if we stick together across national borders we can beat these bastards.

The problem is solidarity has to be organized and a clear strategy and tactics developed. Workers’ leaders throughout the world refuse to take this path because most of them have a narrow national consciousness but also because they have no fundamental disagreement with the factory owners. They believe they are the rightful owners of the factory and that capitalism is the only possible economic system; if the Wal Mart family, the CEOs of the Gap and JC Penny and the owners of the factory would just be fair and not so greedy. Surely ,w e can make capitalism nice.

Look at that child in the picture; people that run the Gap, Wal Mart and other major corporations are responsible for that. They get rich off it and they live in the US.  And they call suicide bombers extremists and terrorists.   It makes me want to go to Bangladesh and be part of it all. But we have a task before us here in the US too. The employers’ political parties are taking from us wages, conditions and benefits that took 150 years and great sacrifice to win; the same is happening all over the world and the same people are doing it to us. Having pretty much decimated the private sector Union members in the US with the assistance of the heads of these Unions, they are now intent on eliminating Union rights for public sector workers, including the right to strike. How can they organize the 85% of US workers not in Unions when they won’t even fight for their own members?

The Bangladeshi workers fighting their bosses are our allies in the global struggle for workers’ rights. We cannot win without international solidarity. And with it we can drive the capitalist offensive back but will not stop there. We can build a democratic socialist alternative to the nightmare that is capitalism. Take a long look at that Bangladeshi child in the picture and tell me it’s not time.

* A good short story about teenage factory Labor and its effect is Jack London’s, The Apostate