Bangladesh: garment workers force a wage board into existence

According to Al Jazeera, Bangladesh has set up a committee tasked with revising wages (a "wage board") as garment workers protest in several industrial cities. Their demand fits in a sentence: that pay should keep pace with the cost of living, which is climbing. The dispatch gives no figures, no timetable and no membership for the committee. So we do not yet know what it might decide, when, or with what real weight given to the workers themselves.

Everything else is our reading. And it starts with a simple observation: nobody sets up a wage committee because one morning the brands woke up with a moral awakening. It exists because people stopped sewing and went out into the street. The concession was wrung out, not offered. The word "committee" has the handy property of turning anger into a file, and a file into a delay.

What are these workers asking for, at bottom? Nothing exotic. A wage is supposed to cover what it costs to reproduce the labour force: housing, food, raising children, coming back the next day to the machine. When prices rise and pay stays put, the line is crossed: you work the same hours, but the share of the day that returns to the person doing the work shrinks. It is the mechanics of surplus value, without any need for a cruel boss: the system is enough. The clothes, meanwhile, keep flowing toward shop racks whose price tags say nothing about this arithmetic.

This is where the global supply chain does its job. The brands are in Paris, Stockholm or New York; the factories are in Dhaka or elsewhere; and responsibility circulates at the speed of a subcontractor. Each link refers the question of wages to the next one along. Strikes and demonstrations have the brutal advantage of travelling back up the chain: they force someone to be named.

Trade unionists know, and the Marxist tradition has long reminded us, that this struggle over the price of labour is necessary but not sufficient: it treats the effects, not the wage system itself. Yet it teaches something else too: solidarity, trust, the habit of counting one's strength. And the debates over what is tolerated or not as a picket, as a gathering, as "disturbance of public order", are always debates about how much pressure authorities are willing to grant workers. The open question is whether Dhaka will let the street weigh on the committee, or whether the committee will be charged with snuffing it out.

Our own country, which likes to present itself as a model, should refrain from lecturing: here too, the cost of living is invoked to explain why we must wait. Over there, workers are not waiting. They are right to look twice before going back home. (our translation)