Garment workers have been voiceless for years, forced to endure long days for next-to-nothing wages without benefits or safety protections. Manufacturers like Walmart and European clothing giant Primark abuse the system to keep costs down and the price of their goods cheap. And they fear people like Kalpona Akter.

Akter was profiled in a recent Salon article. She's a leader in the burgeoning Bangladeshi labor movement, a movement that's gained steam since the Rana Plaza building collapse a half year ago - and the Tazreen fire before that - called attention to the atrocious working conditions of Bangladesh's garment workers.

Her story is tragic and compelling:

Yeah, I worked at a young age, like when I was 12 years old - so clearly it was a sweatshop factory. A 14- or 16-hour shift was common, like 23 days in a row.

Fired at 16 for trying to unionize the workers at the plant she worked in, her organization - the Bangladesh Center for Workers Solidarity - fights from the outside in. She's been harassed, arrested, and charged for crimes she didn't commit. She lives in constant fear of the threat of physical harm. And with good reason: an organizer under her, Aminul Islam, was found murdered last year, with signs he was tortured.

But she refuses to give up or leave:

More or less why I can’t leave is because of my commitment that I will make changes. I know there is a fear [for my safety]. If it is not extreme, I will not do that. But, if there were a condition that I were to leave, I would leave with my colleagues and my family — not without them.

Flawed corporate conventional wisdom says that places like Bangladesh are needed to keep our economy humming, to keep prices low for American consumers. This is untrue according to Akter:

Some people look at the situation in Bangladesh and they say Bangladesh is a poor country, anything that improves the safety for the workers there is going to cost people their jobs, or mean that people get paid less, and the workers, by taking those jobs, are voting for the jobs to be that way — that they’re making a free choice to do those jobs. That is not true. That is not true. Workers are forced to do these jobs. It is true that we don’t have alternative industry. But it is not true that these factory owners and these corporations cannot pay more and make things better. They’re making these people — they’re forcing them — to choose these jobs. Definitely these jobs will not go anywhere if they raise the wages or improve the conditions, because Bangladesh is the world’s cheapest paid country, and in this moment there is no competitor that we can say “this country will take our jobs” or “that country will take our jobs.

The issue is not so much keeping prices low for all of us, but keeping corporate profits high for CEOs and shareholders on the backs of Bangladeshi workers. Akter's first-hand account of her experience in the factory - the deprivations, the abuse - paints a vivid account of the human toll.

Is the 'always low' price of Walmart really worth the cost?