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INTRODUCTION

Bangladesh is home to around 6,000 garment factories, which make the industry the second largest apparel manufacturer in the world just behind China. The garment industry as a single sector adds the highest amount of foreign currency[416] to the gross domestic products (GDP) of the country.[417] This sector alone earned more than US$24 billion out of the total export revenue of US$30.17 billion of Bangladesh in the fiscal year 2013-14.[418] However, a Harvard conference lately reveals that India has surpassed Bangladesh by occupying the second position in the aftermath of the recent fatalities in the garment industry that appear to have affected customer loyalty, contributing to this downturn.[419] The industry employs an estimated four million people; about 90 per cent of these are women who come from impoverished, uneducated and untrained backgrounds and who are often teenagers.[420] They have found this work in a demographic scenario where 32 percent of youths in the potential labour force are either unemployed or underemployed as revealed from the latest population census of the country, which took place in 2011.[421] Taking advantage of such an awful dearth of job opportunities, garment owners can do almost anything they want to do.

Hence, the workers are to work in an exploitative environment that includes safety risk, low salaries, sexual harassment, and both physical and verbal abuse.[422] Employers ignore the safety requirements assumingly with a belief that the law is confined to the books and people are willing to work regardless of safety hazards. As a result, the number of workplace deaths and injuries continues to grow day by day with virtual impunity being granted to the wrongdoers leaving no redress for their victims.[423] The unprecedented fire at Tazreen Fashions Ltd in November 2012 and the horrific collapse of Rana Plaza in April 2013 that claimed more than 1,000 lives and caused serious injuries to many others have galvanised the agonies of garment workers in Bangladesh as discussed in Section IV below.
According to the US Committee on Foreign Relations, ‘[w]hen the Tazreen Fashions factory burned down, it was the worst garment factory accident in Bangladesh’s history. When Rana Plaza collapsed, it was the worst garment factory accident in world history.’[424] The Committee adds that ‘Bangladesh’s garment sector may not be able to withstand another tragedy on the scale of Tazreen and Rana Plaza’.[425]

Despite it being a valuable sector of the national economy, the garment industry until recently received little attention from neither the Govern­ment of Bangladesh (GOB) nor the profit-hungry importers of the developed world, who play on ‘cheap labour, low production costs and a huge eager workforce’.[426]

An organised religion plays a pivotal role in developing personal values and human behaviour, thus it impacts on different aspects of businesses that are run by people who are generally faithful to a religious belief and practice.[427] Islam is probably the single religion which is declared and acclaimed to be not merely a way of worship for the life hereafter, but a complete code of life encompassing ‘an entire legal, economic, social, political, and commercial system’ for its believers called Muslims.[428]

As regards the legal system, Bangladesh in practice belongs to the common law family as a former British colony and presently over 88 per cent of its populace are Muslim.[429] The labour law currently in force in the country was enacted in 2006 and amended in 2013 after the aforementioned destructions following enormous pressures from the developed nations and international bodies including the United Nations Organisation (UNO) and International Labour Organisation (ILO). Nevertheless, the labour law still remains flawed, which has been analysed elsewhere.[430] This chapter is concerned with the right of workers to have a safe workplace and corresponding duties of their employers prescribed in the Islamic Law (Shari’ah).[431] The objective of this writing is to show that the provisions of Shari’ah correspond to the labour rights as recognised in the prevailing law of the western world that are explicitly protective of workers’ safety.

The owners of both Tazreen Fashions and Raza Plaza are Muslim,[432] and most of the workers died and injured are supposedly Muslims as the country’s demography implies. Therefore as a Muslim, both the employees and employers (owners of the factories) are subject to the Islamic dictates at least religiously and ethically, if not legally. This research thus endeavours to examine the safety right of the workers and corresponding obligation of their employ­ers under the principles of Islamic law, and concludes that the latter evidently failed to comply with their religious obligations to protect the former in addition to their failure under the municipal law.

As the discussions progress, Section II demonstrates the justification for this research. Section III briefly explains the legal concept of corporations and the notion of their social responsibility as recognised in Shari’ah. Section IV discusses the concerns for workplace safety or occupational health and safety (OHS) focusing on the principles of Shari’ah, whilst Section V concludes this chapter.

In discussing the OHS under the principles of Shari’ah, brief refer­ences to the relevant provisions of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights 1948 (UDHR), the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights 1966 (ICCPR), the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights 1966 (ICESCR), the Universal Islamic Declaration of Human Rights 1981 (UIDHR) and the Cairo Declaration of Human Rights in Islam 1999 (CDHR) will be made in order to demonstrate the inherent strength of Islamic principles which have come into being much earlier than the man-made instruments for protecting workers.

II.

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Source: Hosen Nadirsyah (ed.). Research Handbook on Islamic Law and Society. Edward Elgar Publishing,2018. — 474 p.. 2018
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