Posts Tagged ‘workers’

vacations

According to the Center for Economic and Policy Research,

The United States is the only advanced economy in the world that does not guarantee its workers paid vacation. European countries establish legal rights to at least 20 days of paid vacation per year, with legal requirements of 25 and even 30 or more days in some countries. Australia and New Zealand both require employers to grant at least 20 vacation days per year; Canada and Japan mandate at least 10 paid days off. The gap between paid time off in the United States and the rest of the world is even larger if we include legally mandated paid holidays, where the United States offers none, but most of the rest of the world’s rich countries offer at least six paid holidays per year.

In the absence of government standards, almost one in four Americans has no paid vacation (23 percent) and no paid holidays (23 percent). According to government survey data, the average worker in the private sector in the United States receives only about ten days of paid vacation and about six paid holidays per year: less than the minimum legal standard set in the rest of world’s rich economies excluding Japan (which guarantees only 10 paid vacation days and requires no paid holidays).

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Workers in Bangladesh have managed to shut down more than 300 garment factories in protest over pay and working conditions after a building collapse killed more than 1,100 people.

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Muhammad Yunus believes we can fix the problems of the garment industry in Bangladesh by establishing a minimum international wage for the industry.

This might be about 50 cents an hour, twice the level typically found in Bangladesh. This minimum wage would be an integral part of reforming the industry, which would help to prevent future tragedies. We have to make international companies understand that while the workers are physically in Bangladesh, they are contributing their labour to the businesses: they are stakeholders. Physical separation should not be grounds to ignore the wellbeing of this labour.

I’m certainly not against raising the minimum wage for Bangladeshi garment workers. But it’s at all clear to me how that would have prevented the death of more than a thousand workers in the Savar building collapse, much less justify Yunus’s claim that ”We would put a special tag on each piece of clothing. The tag would say: “From the happy workers of Bangladesh, with pleasure. Workers’ well-being guaranteed.”

What if, in addition to having a higher minimum wage, Bangladeshi garment workers actually had a say in how their factories were organized, how they were built, how they bargained with domestic and foreign contractors, and so on?

Than that special tag—”From the happy workers of Bangladesh, with pleasure”—might actually have some legitimacy.

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