THE readymade garment workers of Bangladesh earn poverty-level wages and they continue to work for long hours but get little money while both the government and the industry fail to protect their interests, according to a study of Fair Labour Association, a US-based workers’ rights organisation.
The study titled: ‘Toward Fair Compensation in Bangladesh: Insights on Closing the Wage Gap,’ found that not a single garment worker among the more than 6,000 whose wages were studied earns even close to a living wage of Tk 13,620. The report found the workers’ average wages to be almost 50 per cent higher than the legal minimum wage (Tk 5,300) which is just above the World Bank Poverty Line of Tk 6,784.
The FLA conducted the survey in 18 RMG factories and found that the units set production planning based on assumed overtime while workers earned a lower net wage and worked longer overtime hours. According to the report, average wages of RMG workers sit just above the World Bank Poverty Line but still significantly below all the living wage benchmarks, with workers on average earning Tk 2,507 (around $30) per month more than the legal minimum wage.
We know, the factory owners have to face rising costs in the form of energy, finance, and communications prices while on the other side the buyers keep squeezing the prices further downwards. This combination of events can’t be a recipe for increasing their real wages.
The reality is that more factories will go for machine production replacing workers if costs become too high. For Bangladesh this will be a serious blow towards our aim of reducing employment, so any such move will have to be discouraged. Most importantly, our RMG workers should be uplifted from poverty-level wages.
