Content created by Virtual Intern Mira Yu

Starting at the age of 12, Kalpona Akter worked long hours in Bangladesh’s garment factories as a child laborer after the death of her father. Despite enduring abuse and retribution for organizing fellow garment workers, she persevered and is now one of the most high-profile union organizers in the global garment industry.

Akter has engaged with various international organizations including United Nations agencies to bring greater respect to garment workers in Bangladesh. As the Executive Director of the Bangladesh Center for Worker Solidarity (BCWS), she testified in the U.S. Congress before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. That testimony helped frame legislation against slave-labor conditions for apparel manufacturing. Through BCWS, Akter has relentlessly campaigned for fair wages, factory safety, and the right to form labor unions and collectively bargain. The Bangladesh garment industry is the second largest in the world and nearly 85% of the workforce are young women looking for economic empowerment through the garment industry. Akter said that the poverty-level wages quickly destroy their dreams of economic empowerment.

Akter was selected to participate in an International Visitor Leadership Program (IVLP) in 2007 with labor leaders from nonprofit organizations around the world to understand the labor movement in the United States. The IVLP helped her create a worldwide network of individuals and organizations. At one point, a group of Bangladeshi migrant workers faced imprisonment in Jordan. She connected with a fellow IVLP participant from Jordan who provided legal services and helped the workers negotiate a safe return to Bangladesh. Akter credits her IVLP network for making that possible. Nearly ten years after her IVLP, Akter received Human Rights Watch’s Alison Des Forges Award in 2016 for her courageous activism to protect the dignity and honor of others.

Kalpona Akter’s activism is personal and she works towards economic freedom for Bangladeshi garment workers and to bring them dignity and a living wage, one factory at a time.