The Nine-year-old Garment Worker

I thought trimming sounded easy and it was, except I hadn’t counted on the hours spent sitting on the concrete floor without a backrest and the cutter digging into my thumb and forefinger.

It was back-breaking, it was finger-numbing. It was particularly rage-inducing. Not because it was painfully hard work but because children like Meem hunched over hour after hour, squinted at the threads, cleaned one collar after another, one cuff after another, one arm piece after another until the piles were depleted.

Then other piles arrived — some larger than the previous ones but almost always larger than Meem.

Raveena Aulakh from The Toronto Star worked at a Bangladesh sweatshop for a week under the guidance of her nine-year-old boss, a girl named Meem, who started working 12-hour shifts at the sweatshop to help support her family after her mother stopped working and her 15-year-old construction worker brother left the family to live on his own. The story is a good glimpse into some of the working conditions at Bangladesh garment factories.

Bangladesh garment manufacturers recently agreed to raise the minimum wage for workers after a week of protests, but the industry hasn’t yet agreed on the amount. Garment workers are asking for a living wage of $104 a month — twice what they receive now (Vietnam’s garment industry pays their workers between $80 to $112 a month).

Photo: Maciej Dakowicz

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