Your Clothes Are Made In Bangladesh

With the Christmas Season consumers always purchase clothes for gifts after all who doesn’t want to be trendy or fashionable? Everyone in their own way wants to be both of those things.　People must manufacture these garments we all covet yet we never seem to realize or think about who they are, where they live or the wages they paid for their labor.
Bangladesh is one of the biggest producers of the clothes purchased from such retailers
as Gap, Abercrombie, H&M, Tesco, JCPenny, Marks and Spencer, Kohls and Levi Strauss all import clothes from there.

According to a global survey released on June 19, Bangladesh garment workers are the world's "most poorly paid," with about $24 or Tk.1,662.50 monthly pay. The garment sector accounts for about 80% of the total share of exports and earned $12.7 billion in 2008-09. This was about 14 % of the country's GDP.

On July 29, a new minimum wage for garment workers in Bangladesh was set at Tk.3,000 a month ($40), a rise of 80% on the Tk.1,662.50 ($24) agreed in 2006. Following this announcement, angry workers demonstrated all over Dhaka, vandalising shops, setting fire to cars, wrecking machinery, and even attacking the upmarket shopping area of Gulshan Circle. The workers are demanding a minimum of Tk.5,000 (about $70). But our government did not pay heed to it. It should be remembered that exploitation of workers never does good to any industry.
Workers get $1.66 an hour in China, 56 cents in Pakistan, 51 cents in India, 44 cents in Indonesia, and 36 cents in Bangladesh. This is an overestimate: anyone on the new minimum of Tk.3,000 will be earning little over 12.5 cents an hour for a 60-hour week.

Merry Christmas keep buying those clothes so you can be trendy, look good and fit-in just don’t bother worrying about those manufacturing them or the lousy wages they make. Because their poverty is out of sight out of mind and you just can’t be bothered.