Bangladesh

Faced with appalling living and working conditions, with miserable wages and price rises in basic necessities like rice, thousands of textile workers in Bangladesh have launched massive and very determined struggles. In June there were bloody confrontations with the forces of order.

All over the planet, the working class is being subjected to increasingly unbearable levels of exploitation and poverty. And in the countries which the bourgeoisie hypocritically calls ‘developing economies' the workers are treated as no more than cattle. For several years, these wage slaves have been resisting more and more.

Two weeks since Cyclone Sidr hit Bangladesh the death toll has been estimated as at least 3,500, but the Bangladeshi Red Cross estimates that it could climb to 10,000. In any case the ruling class don't yet know. This is a disaster on an almost unimaginable scale: more than 2 million people displaced and without shelter, untold numbers left without food or water for days, among 5 million affected in all...

Last December there was a wave of strikes and other protests across Egypt (see WR 302, 304) which resulted in the government conceding annual bonuses equivalent to 45 days wages. However, this did not put a lid on workers' struggles, which have continued ever since.

From 20 May to 6 June 2006, nearly 1.8 million garment workers of Bangladesh concentrated in industrial areas in and around the capital Dhaka engaged in a series of simultaneous massive wildcat strikes that took on the proportions of a mass proletarian revolt.

During May and June this year, several tens of thousands of garment workers in and around Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, have struck against conditions of barbaric exploitation, confronting brutal police repression which has left several workers dead and many injured.