Bangladeshi workers attacked by ghosts

You live in a country without a government.

You earn $25/month.

The price of rice is increasing, but your wages aren’t.

And if that wasn’t enough, now ghosts are attacking you at work on your bathroom break.

From Bangladesh’s New Age newspaper (9/13/08):

The ghost panic

The so-called ‘ghost panic’ in factories first surfaced after a section of workers vandalised Diganto Sweater’s factory in Gazipur, following rumours of the deaths of a few workers as a result of ‘ghost attack’ in a toilet of the factory.

… Five workers of Diganta Sweater claimed that they saw ‘witches’ before they fainted inside factory’s toilet. They were taken to a nearby clinic where physicians found that none of them had sustained any injury.

What the Doctors are saying

‘They fainted because of weakness. I found that their blood pressure and heart beat was too low,’ said Abdur Rahman, chairman of Sheba Diagnostic Hospital.
He said his hospital treated, on an average, 100 garment factory workers suffering from anxiety-related illness every month.
‘Poor garment workers suffer mainly from malnutrition and anxiety, which make them weak and vulnerable to nervous breakdown,’ said Rahman.

What the supervisors are saying

‘Most garment factory workers lead sad or stormy domestic lives, which affects their behaviour in workplaces,’ Mohammad Hanif, who supervises about 3,000 workers at Shapla Garments, told New Age on Friday.
‘They are too weak because they cannot manage to eat regular meals either because of time constraint or because they simply fail to make both ends meet with whatever wages they get after such strenuous labour in the factories,’ said Hanif.
Most workers have to work for 10 to 14 hours a day and do not even get a chance to sit idle for a minute, he added.

The article goes on to describe some of the ghost attacks and how some are trying to remedy them with exorcisms.

A tip to the Bangladeshi garment industry: Less exorcisms, more food.

While it’s easy to make light of this situation - “simple, uneducated folks think they’re being attacked by ghosts in the bathroom, ha, ha” (heck, even the article calls them “mostly uneducated”), the reality in which this news tid bit exists is truly terrifying.