Editorial
Realising RMG workers' demands
Violence cannot be an option
THE continued unrest in the RMG sector is highly disturbing, all the more so when the sector is struggling to emerge from near-debilitating incidents in recent times and is at the phase of recouping its image, including getting the US to rescind its decision on GSP.
The main issue revolves round the workers' pay, and there is already a wage board working to fix the minimum wage. We had disagreed in this very column with the suggestion of a twenty percent pay hike for them. The pay and allowances must keep in view the cost of living.
We should not overlook the fact that our garment workers are not only the lowest paid in the country they are the lowest paid in the world too. And given the recent chain of events, with the Rana Plaza disaster still fresh in our minds, we suspect that the workers are being made pawns in a wider political game, as we saw being done in a so called RMG workers' rally on Saturday.
A large number of factories have been damaged in the last few days, and a good many of the factories had to shut down because of workers' unrest. But we find it hard to believe that workers would deliberately destroy an establishment that provides for their livelihood. And if there are outsiders who are vandalising factories then the law enforcing agencies must nab them.
We empathize with the demands for workers' pay hike, but violence cannot be the means to realise those.
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