The life of a farm laborer in Bangladesh

Beyond bondage
A BBC documentary

http://www.thedailystar.net/2003/08/29/

The BBC Bengali Section has been broadcasting a special series of radio
programmes on the ILO Declaration of Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work. These principles are: freedom of association and right to collective bargaining, freedom from discrimination, child labour and forced labour. Over the last three weeks, the BBC has focused on each of these principles portraying the present reality through 'a day in the life' of a worker. This is the final instalment in the series written and produced by Masud Hasan Khan

Somer Sheikh didn't have much time. It was nearly 11 o'clock in the morning and he was already late for his second job. The lush greens of Rampal in Munshiganj district was submerged under knee-deep water thanks to a flash flood. The farmers worried whether they could save their vegetable plots and farmhands like Sheikh were in high demand.

In a single day Somer Sheikh would tend young cucumber vines, weed out cauliflower plots, fertilize potato fields and do a hundred other chores. If he was lucky, he would earn between taka eighty and one hundred. Then again you don't have flash flood every day and farmers begging for your service.
Normally it's the other way round.

For contract labourers like Somer Sheikh, life means not looking beyond
today. He has a large family to feed on a competitively low wage. The
farmhands keep undercutting each other. Some days, he can't find any work. He has no real savings, just a shed above his head, a bowl of rice and 'the counting of days', to quote him. "When you get paid before the sweat of your body dries up, you feel lucky," Sheikh says, "Some of the land owners don't pay you promptly, and you coax them, cajole them and sometimes fight with them."

Is Somer Sheikh a bonded labour? The well-accepted definitions of 'forced labour' or 'bonded labour' do not suit him properly. He is not like the members of Tharu community in Nepal, or the serfs toiling for the zamindars in Pakistan or, for that matter, the underprivileged Dalits in India. So where's the manacle that chains him to the very ground he tills?


Here are a few telltale signs that might provoke some thoughts:

1. He has no real freedom in choosing for whom he should work.
2. He works long hours.
3. His wage depends on the mercy of his employer.
4. He cannot change his profession (due to a lack of skills).
5. He has bad debt over his head, often owed to the village landowner and moneylender.
6. He is forced to depend on his employer for his basic needs, like food,
shelter, clothes and medicines.


This invisible bondage links the village to the city. Take, for instance,
the children who work in the book binding shops in Banglabazar, Dhaka. Jamal Khan is only 14 and works as many hours every day in a dingy book binding 'factory'. As a trainee he earns nothing except his daily food and a place to sleep. He's been there for eight months. It's hard work, he says, his whole body aches after carrying big piles of printed papers from downstairs to upstairs all day long. "When I came here to work, people were kind to me since I knew nothing," he says, "but life is now harsh."

Jamal Khan's ustad (trainer) Sabuj Mia himself started as an apprentice.
"Often we work for eighteen hours a day, but we don't even get a fair wage. There are no other benefits and no savings for the future." "When we grow old, we'll become useless," he says. Sabuj Mia came from a village in Narsingdi district eighteen years back. He is still here.

Those who can, make it to the cities in the hope of changing their lives.
But for many, their dreams remain unfulfilled, says Shafi Khan a journalist
in Kurigram district. He says Kurigram has more than its fair share of
impoverished people who work as day labourers.

"During the four-month harvesting season, some one hundred and fifty
thousand people trek from Kurigram to different districts suffering from a
shortage of labour. Once they return home and their earnings are spent, they start borrowing from the local money lenders", he explains, "If they
default, the labourers and their entire families pay off the debt by working
for free in the land owned by the money lenders." "When I ask how do you manage?" Mr. Khan says, "their typical answer is: Allah provides."

But who speaks up for the rights of the labourers such as Somer Sheikh or Sabuj Mia? None, says Nazrul Islam Khan of the Bangladesh Institute of Labour Studies. The country's labour laws allow trade unions to work only within 'institutions', he explains, "We cannot organise the farm workers because we cannot prove that they are employed in a certain institution. We cannot prove for whom, or for which institution, these vast number of agriculture labourers work."

Improving the lives of these workers depends largely on the country's
overall efforts to eliminate poverty, observes journalist Afsan Chowdhury.
The concept of freedom for those working in the tea gardens, rice fields or in small factories primarily means the "freedom to eat", and not yet the
"freedom to move" from one workplace to another. For them, the situation remains the same, he says, "we have to make them believe that there is a life which is different and better than theirs".


Masud Hasan Khan is a producer of the BBC Bengali Section.


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