On Sunday 27 September 2015, Amirul Haque Amin will be presented with an international human rights award in Nuremberg. Amin has been fighting for workers’ rights in Bangladesh with admirable courage for over 30 years.
Amin is the President and Co-founder of the National Garment Workers Federation (NGWF - National Union of Textile Workers), the largest trade union in Bangladesh. The organization, headquartered in Dhaka and founded in 1984, is committed to the rights and dignity of workers in the garment industry of Bangladesh. It also has offices in Chittagong, Savar and Tongi.
Head of UNI Commerce, Alke Boessiger said “This award is a well-deserved recognition of Amirul’s fight to protect workers’ rights in Bangladesh. His courage and activism on a local level, together with the other member unions of the IndustriALL Bangladesh Council, have been fundamental in the creation and successful application of the Bangladesh Safety Accord.”
Amin has been working for over 30 years to defend the rights of workers in the textile industry. His interest in helping them organise into unions began in his student days. Whilst studying at the University of Dhaka in 1981, Amin was also involved in a local union, the Dhaka City Tailoring Workers Union (the textile workers union for the city of Dhaka).
Amin has campaigned for better working conditions in Bangladesh, in particular fairer pay and a safe working environment. With his union, Amin brings the workers’ demands, like fair remuneration to the government, foreign companies or directly to the factory owners.
Since the 1980s, there has been progress on various issues, including being entitled to maternity leave, a paid holiday on May 1 and the introduction of an (albeit low) minimum wage. However, there are still many problems.
One major problem is the frequent and absolutely devastating fires and collapses of factory buildings. The most terrible event of this kind was the collapse of the Rana Plaza building in Dhaka on April 24, 2013, in which there were 1,135 deaths and over 2,000 injuries among the workers. To make matters worse, many fashion companies still have not paid any compensation to the victims’ families into the Rana Plaza Compensation Fund set up by the ILO.
Even before the Rana Plaza disaster, the NGWF repeatedly asked big fashion companies to sign an agreement on fire protection and building security. In fact, an agreement to cover these issues was drafted in 2012, but the majority of companies refused to sign them. Fighting for workers’ rights in Bangladesh is often extremely dangerous - activists not only risk being fired, when they take a stand against horrible working conditions; but they are frequently harassed, threatened, arrested and even killed.
