Twelve years on the tools, and 1.5 lakh taka of wages never paid

This mason came to Dhaka from Dinajpur in 2007 as a teenager, working first as a mason's helper, and has worked in the Housing Society area of Mohammadpur since; over twelve years he has never received about 1.5 lakh taka of his wages. The account here is the workers' own, not a contractor's books - the Desh Rupantor reporter built the story by talking to masons and labourers about what they were owed. They say that in most cases the labour-supplying contractor and the foreman together pocket the wages and disappear, and one of them put it bluntly: eighty out of every hundred contractors cheat on the money. The daily wage is 550-600 taka for a mason and 400 for a helper, but only the 100-taka food allowance is handed over; the rest is held by the contractor and settled every two or three months at less than half. A worker in Dhanmondi had about 30,000 taka held back, along with 30 others caught the same way; after a long fight some of it came back, but not all of it. Workers in the report were cheated of anywhere from 30,000 to 2 lakh taka, and a 2017 BILS survey put construction workers at roughly 40 lakh nationally, at least 18 lakh of them rod-binders and masons.