Rihla #26 The Human Rights of the Bangladesh Garment Workers

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In Bangladesh, occurred the building collapse of an old garment factory. More than one-thousand workers died there are still finding bodies in the rubble. These workers worked in an illegally expanded building and was very dangerous to work in. After the collapse, these workers' right are finally being acknowledged. For garment workers, the minimum wage was raised by eighty percent and are allowed to form traded union without permission from the factory owners. I do agree in which these rights were violated. According to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the 23^rd Article stats that, "Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work and to protection against employment." Yet because this is in the optional Declaration of Rights, no country has to follow this set of benefits. But since the workers had the right to choose where to work, I feel that if they didn't like the conditions, they should not have started working there. I understand that there are probably many people in poverty and garment factories are a big business, but I am not taking a side. I believe that if the workers wanted to have better working conditions, they should have protested. To summarize, the workers had the right to chose where and how they worked, but they did not exercise that, and the workers did not have the right to provide an unstable environment for these people to work in.

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