The revolutionary overthrow of the Hasina regime, sparked by the students and their courageous protests, have opened the floodgates for a fresh wave of class struggle in Bangladesh. The revolution surges forward!
Workers have borrowed and adapted the militant methods and slogans of the students in the fight against the bosses. While Hasina has gone, her system remains. Every boss and factory owner is like a ‘Little Hasina’, brutally oppressing and exploiting millions of workers. Now, workers are increasingly using the hard-won democratic victory of 5 August to fight these despots too.
Just a week after Hasina fell, we made a prediction. We said:
“For the working class, ‘democracy’ is not some abstract thing. Rather, it is a means to an end – a means to win better wages and conditions, shorter working hours, and a dignified life. Millions of workers will seek to use their newfound democratic freedoms, won on the streets, to press their demands, and to lift the unbearable yoke that capitalism places around their neck.”
Already we are being proven correct. The fall of Hasina, far from being the end of the revolution, marked the start of a new chapter. Ordinary people have begun documenting and sharing their struggles on social media and small press outlets. There is a wall of silence in the mainstream press about the militant action of the workers’ movement.
Economic conditions in the country remain dire. They have worsened enormously in the past few years, feeding into the anger that eventually brought down the old regime. Debt spiralled above the $100 billion figure for the first time last year as the economy has slowed. And towards the end of the regime, the looting of state assets and capital flight reached epidemic proportions. Hasina is not the only one who has fled the country. Many other capitalists linked to her regime have simply stuffed suitcases full of cash and left the country, leaving factories idle.
Meanwhile, workers have seen spiralling prices of basic foodstuffs and fuel in a country where more than 37.7 million people experience ‘food insecurity’, and wages for largely female garment sector workers is as low as $80. Even these wages are now going unpaid in many parts of Bangladesh as a result of the chaos caused by the capitalists’ mismanagement.
Mass struggle erupts
Scenes of workers queuing for eight to nine hours outside banks to access their wages have become commonplace. Garments workers claim that the internet connection is active before their salary enters the bank accounts, but after the money enters the bank accounts, the internet cuts out and they are unable to withdraw their cash. But the workers are fighting back now.
Garment workers at Searock Apparels Ltd in Gazipur have not been paid their wages for three months. The owner locked out the workers and, in response, the workers have occupied the Dhaka-Mymensingh highway for several days. The students have shown: collective, direct action pays. In fact, it is the only thing that pays, and the workers have learned this lesson well.
380 workers at Synovia Pharma PLC have not been paid wages for 31 months. They organised a sit-in outside the company headquarters on 13 August. The workers have been living in inhumane conditions as a result of this and they have also been struggling for trade union rights.
On 14 August, unemployed garment workers in Tongi began protests by blockading the roads – an increasingly common method of struggle – demanding jobs and equal employment rights between men and women.
Garment workers at Anowara Dress Makers Ltd. in Chittagong also occupied the road outside their workplace on 15 August, demanding unpaid wages. Meanwhile, about 3,000 cotton mill workers at Naheed Cotton Mills Ltd. in Tangail occupied the Dhaka-Tangail highway on 16 August, demanding an increase in wages.
Significantly, in a number of places we’ve seen workers directly occupying the factories. Just as the mass mobilisations of students and the oppressed masses posed the question, ‘who runs society, the masses or Hasina?’ when they mobilised in their millions in recent weeks, so these workers are posing the question, ‘who runs the factories, the workers or the Little Hasinas that own them?’
Workers at Opso Saline Ltd in Barishal, for instance, held a work stoppage and occupation inside their factory on 15 August. These workers demanded better pay and conditions, but also trade union rights. The recent revolution is rightly being hailed as a democratic victory. But for the working class, democratic rights mean firstly the right to organise and fight for their class interests.
Workers are organising themselves and taking the fight against their bosses into their own hands. Even where they have no trade unions, workers…
Read More: Bangladesh: the workers begin to move | Bangladesh