Business Desk :
Results of a survey of Bangladesh’s garment workers have shown a massive shift towards paying workers digitally in May, followed by a slow decline in the share of digital payments in subsequent months.
SANEM, a non-profit research organisation, in collaboration with Microfinance Opportunities, has been conducting a series of surveys on the garment workers of Bangladesh.
The surveys are part of the Garment Worker Diaries Project, which has been ground-breaking in its approach to improve transparency in global supply chains and in its attempts to help people better understand the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the lives of garment workers, said a press release.
The project is aimed at collecting data on the working conditions, income, expenditure, and financial tool usage of workers in the global apparel and textile supply chain.
The main objective of this project is to aid informed policy-making and brand initiatives, with regular and credible data collection and analysis, which can have a positive impact on the lives of garment workers.
The latest developments of the project are regularly published through blogs and reports on its website. An analysis of monthly data collected from April 2020 to October 2020 was conducted to study the “Factory Wage Digitization Trends” in Bangladesh.
Phone interviews were conducted with a pool of 1,377 workers – over three quarters of whom were women – from factories in the five main industrial areas of Bangladesh: Chattogram, Dhaka city, Gazipur, Narayanganj, and Savar.
The interviewees were asked to report the name of the factory that currently employs them, the payments they received and whether they were paid in cash or digitally.
The study divided the factories into two categories – “brand-facing” and “not brand-facing.” A factory is categorised as brand-facing if it is listed on a brand’s supplier list or is listed as a supplier to a brand on the Mapped in Bangladesh or Open Apparel Registry websites.
Mapped in Bangladesh is a digital map of the RMG industry that provides a detailed database of export-oriented RMG factories all over Bangladesh that have core RMG processes and are listed as members of major associations.
Similarly, the Open Apparel Registry is a source map for identifying apparel factories and their affiliations.
The analysis also showed that there was a considerable difference in the behaviour of factories on an individual level: some were digitised before May, some digitised temporarily while others never digitised.
