Dhaka, Bangladesh

March 2016—Three years after the accident, the hellish noise of the collapsing Rana Plaza building still echoes in Nazma’s head. It’s worst at night.

Standing in her home, a one-room hut, Nazma says, “I bought this for myself with compensation I got [for the accident].”

“A pleasant little house,” I answer. She looks at me with surprise. “Furniture,” she corrects me. “I bought furniture for this room.”

I look around. Two metal beds, a closet and a mirror.

Nazma (who, like the other Bangladeshi garment workers interviewed, preferred not to use her last name for fear of employer retaliation) lives in a rented room with her husband and five children. Nila, 8, the youngest among them, is in fact Nazma’s niece. Nila’s mother didn’t survive the Rana Plaza disaster.

A several-yards-high concrete statue stands in the spot where, in 2013, 1,130 textile workers died in the ruins of Rana Plaza and 2,500 were injured. A few days before the accident, workers noticed cracks in the eight-story commercial building. The shops and the bank on the lower floors were immediately closed, but the owners of the upper-level garment factories instructed workers to come in. On April 24, 2013, the building collapsed during the morning rush hour. Nazma escaped; her sister did not.

The statue’s fists—male fists—emanate worker power. But most of the workers in Bangladesh’s textile industry, the second-largest in the world, are women. They comprise up to 90 percent of the country’s 4.2 million textile workers.

Syed Sultan Uddin Ahmmed, assistant executive director of the Bangladesh Institute of Labor Studies, says that most of the women come from rural areas where, traditionally, there was only one option: to marry. In his opinion, the textile industry brought enormous social changes to Bangladeshi society.

“Sometimes girls and women didn’t even dare to think that they would ever cross the borders of their village,” he says. “Now, they go to Dhaka. Before, their brothers would send them dresses for celebrations. Now they’re getting clothes for their brothers. Now they’re sending money for medicine for their fathers and mothers.”

Anowara, another Bangladeshi textile worker, has more ambitious goals for her children. “They have to finish school,” she says. “I don’t want them to spend their lives behind a sewing machine, like I do.”

She and her husband work in a textile factory with 12,000 workers. Their two children, ages 5 and 6, are at her parents’ place, in a village in northeast Bangladesh, approximately 650 kilometers away.

Anowara would prefer to live in the tight-knit community where she grew up, but “there are no possibilities there to earn a living if you don’t have land,” she explains. She has been in Dhaka for three years.

“I don’t regret that we came,” she says. “But once we’ve saved enough money, we will go back. With the help of our parents, we will buy a piece of land and will start a farm. I hope I will also be able to buy myself a sewing machine.”

Her workday is at least 10 hours long. When there are large orders, it gets even longer. In a month, she earns—including overtime pay—$89. The rent is $39 and food costs about $32.

Ahmmed is certain that Bangladesh needs the textile industry. Out-of-work textile workers can’t find new employment easily, amid fierce competition for other low-wage jobs. That’s why he is concerned about Western consumers’ boycotts of fashion labels that use factories in Bangladesh.

Instead, he wants developed countries to apply diplomatic pressure on governments and clothing manufacturers. He says this could ensure safe working environments and living wages for workers everywhere—not just in Bangladesh.

“Multinational corporations are ruthless in their greed,” he says. “The very moment when our country will stop ensuring enough profit, [corporations] will simply move the production sites to other Third World countries, which are not yet under the suspicion of the critical Western public.”

Fearing that higher wages and better working conditions will drive away corporations, governments and factory owners cooperate to suppress independent unions. The leader of a small independent union of textile workers in Bangladesh, who prefers to remain anonymous, says he has been arrested several times in connection with labor organizing.

An experienced and highly trained textile worker, he says he cannot get a job due to his activity in the union. Years ago he worked in South Korea, along with many other migrant workers from Bangladesh. The wages there were higher, but he got deported after urging his co-workers to unionize.

Did anything change after the Rana Plaza accident? According to union leaders, safety has improved at the larger factories that supply global brands—at least in the areas of the workplace that foreign buyers can see. The minimum wage was raised to 5,300 taka, a little less than $68 per month. Workers say this is still too low and went on mass strikes in December 2016 to demand $187 or more.

Yet even the more modest increase may be driving companies away. One of Bangladesh’s largest clothing buyers, H&M, recently expanded to garment factories in Ethiopia and Burma, where wages are lower. The Swedish multinational made $2.1 billion in profits in 2016.