THE World Bank and the International Monetary Fund under their separate lending programmes to boost the country’s economic growth asked the government to improve labour conditions and ensure workplace safety in the sputtering apparel industry, as per report of local dailies.
The latest stance of the multilateral lending agencies intensified the pressure on the government to overhaul the entire culture in the garment industry after similar concerns with specific conditions had been imposed on the government by Western nations and global brands following a series of industrial disasters in the sector, the worst being the Rana Plaza collapse that killed more than 1,100 workers, mostly women.
An IMF mission that concluded their fifth review at the end of last month asked the government officials to ensure structural safety in garment factories, broadening the ongoing inspection drive to all running export-oriented apparel factories to identify faulty and risky factory buildings, sources said. Besides, the IMF in their draft memorandum also asked the policymakers to ensure unionisation in all garment factories and to complete the recruitment of 200 factory inspectors.
The WB also outlined specific conditions to be met by the government for overall improvement of the factory standards and ensuring workplace safety.
The document of the Bank suggested raising Bangladesh’s workplace compliance to international standard, auditing factories by BGMEA in three phases, beginning with the riskiest, closing down the risky factories and to relocate their operation to safer places expeditiously.
Furthermore, the lending agency underlined functioning trade unions in all factories and establishing a welfare trust for workers.
It is obviously essential for Bangladesh to clean up its garments sector — if the conditions under which workers work are not improved it would mean that both the US and the EU would impose restrictions on our exports to their regions. This would decrease our macroeconomic performance as our balance of payments would deteriorate as buyers in these regions would have to pay higher prices for our apparels — thus lowering their demand for our products and making their retailers go to other regions like Africa or East Asia. It would also decrease the external value of our currency resulting in higher levels of inflation as import prices for essentials would also go up.
It is unfortunate that the World Bank or the IMF cannot force the Western retailers to not squeeze our industry for every last penny—as this, along with corrupt practices in our banking sector, decreases their profits while simultaneously increasing the costs of production. Thus, for the very survival of the RMG sector the factory owners should comply with the recommendations of WB/IMF otherwise they would be the first victims and the national economy be the eventual loser.
