Labor Resistance to Pro-market Economic Reforms in Bangladesh

Abstract

Pro-market economic reforms enjoy less social support in most developing countries, including Bangladesh. Labor response to reform policies, in particular, has been quite unfriendly and often violent. This article analyzes labor resistance to pro-market economic reforms in Bangladesh in the decades of 1980s and 1990s. It explores the underlying causes that spurred labor resistance to market-oriented reforms, examines the successes and failures the resistance achieved or recorded and arrives at the conclusion that the spate of labor resistance in the industrial sector in the 1980s and 1990s had the potential to halt or roll back the reform program but it did not succeed due to a host of factors, including workers’ disunity, ideological divide between various trade unions, lack of organizational structure, control of pro-reform national political parties over their respective trade unions, the diminishing influence of leftist trade unions in labor politics and the lack of an alternative leftist political agenda in Bangladesh politics. The leftist failure to organize workers and launch a collective movement against pro-market forces apparently promises a better future for market-oriented reforms in Bangladesh.