Nearly half of 2,274 members of garment exporters’ lobby BGMEA have not paid up the workers with just a day to go before the deadline ends for the payments they promised and the government set.
As many as 1,088 firms registered with the Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association had not cleared the payments until Wednesday, the BGMEA said.
Earlier in the day, hundreds of workers took to the streets in different parts of Dhaka over back pay defying the lockdown imposed to slow the spread of the coronavirus outbreak.
It came around three weeks after the government announced a Tk 50 billion bailout package for the exporting sectors, mostly readymade garment factories, to pay the workers.
The 1,186 factories that have paid the workers are mostly the large ones.
BGMEA claimed its members have paid more than 1.9 million workers, which is 78 percent of the over 2.4 million.
Generally, the factories pay the workers within the 10th of every month, but considering the pandemic that forced cancellation of orders of billions of US dollars, the owners told the government that they would clear the payments by Apr 16.
As hundreds of thousands were yet to get salary of March, protesters also gathered and demonstrated in Savar, Gazipur and Chattogram, and police had to intervene for negotiations.
BGMEA President Rubana Huq said 80 percent of the workers would get wages by
Apr 16, and the rest by Apr 20 or ”some days later”.
The owners will have to apply for loans with 2 percent “service charge” from the government bailout package within Apr 20 for the payment of April, she said. The lockdown started on Mar 26.
“We will try to get the application deadline deferred,” Rubana said.
The BGMEA president said the owners could not work properly towards the payments with the banks operating for limited hours and the transport system shut down.
“Besides these, there was no export in the past 15 days and so no new export documents could be submitted to the banks,” she explained.
“The buyers have cancelled orders worth $3.15 billion and the owners now have to take liabilities of $1.96 billion raw materials,” the leader of the $34 billion industry added.
The Bangladesh Knitwear Manufacturers and Exporters Association or BKMEA is another step behind BGMEA.
The BKMEA oversees payment of only 952 factories out of 2,283 members.
It could not say how many have paid the workers.
Source: bdnews24.com
