Vol. 77/No. 8      March 4, 2013

This accelerated process began more than three decades ago with garment and other light industry in China, spurred by the expanded use of market methods and foreign capital investment.

More recently some of these industries have been shifting to a number of other Asian countries, where capital is being drawn to cheaper sources of labor. The trends have been given some impetus by rising wages in China as a result of workers’ struggles there. At the same time, the class struggle has followed wherever capital creates new industrial centers.

U.S. menswear retailer Jos. A Banks Clothiers Inc. has moved some manufacturing from China to cheaper locations in Asia, such as Indonesia. “The garment business always moves around the developing world,” CEO Neal Black told the Wall Street Journal March 13. “It brings jobs, those people become skilled and then move on to products like electronics.”

“So many foreign companies are competing for workers we wish the population would double,” Larry Kao, general manager of MedTecs, a Taiwanese company, which produces surgical suits at its 4,000-employee factory in the central lowlands of Cambodia near Vietnam, said to the Financial Times Jan. 13.

Four Seasons Fashions Ltd. is looking to move elsewhere after 20 years in China. “In Bangladesh the average monthly salary for garment workers is only around $70 to $100. If I produce here, price is much more competitive,” owner Rosa Dada told the BBC Aug. 29. She said wages in her factory in China have now reached $400 to $500.

In 1977 there were eight garment factories in Bangladesh. Today there are 4,500, employing 3.6 million workers, most of whom are women. The growth of the industry is at the center of capitalist development in Bangladesh, today comprising 80 percent of its exports, second only to China.

After large protests in 2010, the minimum wage was raised from $20 to $37. In June 2012 workers demonstrated for a further increase of 50 percent. For five days they clashed with police who used tear gas, rubber bullets and water cannons. All 300 factories in the industrial zone of Ashulia, on the outskirts of Dhaka, the capital, were shut down.

Cambodia: Garment workers strike

Social changes developing in the wake of capitalist expansion include an uprooting of the material basis for traditional dependent and home-bound roles of women.

About 90 percent of Cambodian garment workers are women from rural villages, uprooted from life in the countryside and thrown into large production centers primarily around the capital Phnom Penh and along the Thai border. Remittances to their families sustain an estimated 20 percent of the country’s 14 million people.

Over the past three years a number of strikes have taken place. The government raised the minimum wage from $50 to $61 a month in July 2010. Two months later 200,000 workers went on strike demanding $93.

In May last year 5,000 workers at Singapore-owned SL Garment Processing Ltd. walked out of its Phnom Penh factory demanding a raise of monthly wages to $91, an increase of $30. They have a nominal eight-hour day six days a week, but are often required to work their day off, do 16-hour days and get no sick pay.

Today wages in the industry have risen to $110-$130 a month compared to $85-$100 three years ago. Food and rent in Phnom Penh can be up to $80.

One feature of the recent and rapid expansion of capitalist industry in parts of Asia—and historically other less developed nations where this occurs—is its concentration, the size of the enterprises themselves.

The average size of garment factories is 1,000 workers in Cambodia and 800 in Bangladesh, with many having thousands working side by side.

Indonesia is Southeast Asia’s biggest economy and has grown rapidly over the last decade. During 2012 there were dozens of major strikes, centered mainly on demands for higher wages and a ban on hiring temporary workers. Hundreds of thousands of workers participated in a national strike Oct. 3, the first such action in nearly half a century. In November thousands of workers rallied outside parliament protesting a new social security law that will require them to pay for health services.

Factory workers earn an average basic salary of $120 a month. Following protests, the new governor of Jakarta, the capital, agreed in November to raise the minimum wage from $158 to $228.

On Feb. 6, hundreds of workers rallied outside Jakarta City Hall, pressing the governor to force companies to pay the new wage, which many bosses have refused to do.

Malaysia’s first-ever minimum wage was just implemented. The government of Thailand raised the minimum wage in seven provinces last year by as much as 40 percent.

Meanwhile, electronics giant Foxconn, with 1.2 million employed in China, announced Feb. 2 that unions will be allowed at its factories and elections will take place at all of them during this year. The company has faced ongoing battles and skirmishes with workers since 2009.  
 
 
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