Behind the scenes of the garment industry in Bangladesh. And the challenge of making even a modest change
In the fashion industry, a company selling a T-shirt in the UK for EUR 4.95 may spend only 95 cents on production in Bangladesh, yet it will still see to it that ‘corporate responsibility’ is written large in the headlines of its sustainability reports. How can this be?
From a feminist perspective, it is curious how in order to perform idealised gender/class identities women and men must buy cheap fashion items from primark and H&M, which are produced by low-paid factory female workers exploited by working on less than minimum wage.. This I believe is a fair starting point for any gender/class analysis of the power relations through which global commodity chains are structured. Not to mention elements of race and imperialist (as well as neo-imperialist) attempts to control and manipulate international trade links and destroy industrial sectors of poorer countries.
The rise of the export-oriented Garment industry has been a major result of trade liberalisation in Bangladesh. Major Oxford street retailers including Wal-Mart, Tesco, Sainsbury’s, H&M, Zara, Carrefour, Gap, Primark, Marks & Spencer, you name it, all import clothes in bulk from Bangladesh, in return for some of the lowest labour costs in the world, often below minimum wage, if they are paid at all. The pressure to supply mass produced garments to foreign buyers via cheap labour is even higher during times of global economic crisis when prices on the international market are falling.
Yet, the bad image these retailer chains have received through many ethical consumption boycott campaigns does not always portray the full picture of this very complex issue. Following my meeting with major buyers based here in Dhaka, I have learned that both Tesco’s and Sainsbury’s have commitments (tho not sufficient), to the social welfare and advancement of their workers and have integrated social compliance schemes and established workers’ training academies. While this is by no means sufficient and that they could do much more to pressure their suppliers to meet social labour standards in the factories. While many of them have endorsed our project they have not showed any greater commitment or desire to be futher involved with implementing it.
Yet an important point to stress I think is that rather than boycotting these big clothes chains, not knowing how this may or may not affect the workers at the bottom of the supply-chain, it makes more sense to stop buying unregulated (seemingly ‘ethical’) ‘vintage’ sweatshop clothes sold at Camden Market. Saying that, I still intend to keep boycotting Primark and Tesco’s as much as I can for the sole reason that information of social conditions in their suppliers’ factories simply isn’t available to consumers at the other end, and in many cases they are horrifying.
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Women garment factory workers
Bangladesh’s garment exports, mainly to the US and Europe make up nearly 80% of the country’s export income. The country has more than 4,000 factories employing between two and three million workers. The industry currently employs 1.5 million workers, the majority of whom are women, approx. 80 %, many working in hazardous social conditions. It has been a major source of employment for rural migrant women in a country that has increasingly limited rural livelihood options, and where women migrants have been largely excluded from formal work in the cities. Women workers offer cheap, and easily exploited, labour force that allows the Bangladeshi garment industry to compete in the global market. While studies have shown that women’s employment in Bangladesh’ export-oriented garment industry has narrowed the gender gap in many spheres including participation in labor force, social prestige, control over income and decision making, there remains widespread gender discrimination in wage rates and social working conditions.
One the one hand, the garment export industry has directly benefited women from the poorer section of the rural population through employment opportunities. This has reduced marginalisation of women who were previously excluded from formal sector jobs. Dhaka’s factory garment workers are enabled to contribute to their own and other family members’ basic needs. Remittances from garment workers also created redistribution from city to countryside and helped to raise the status of women in their families and communities. To some extent this has created a more visible significance of women as economic contributors to their families and have reduced social gendered pressures for them to marry early. To some extent it has also reversed traditional gender norms of women’s sole responsibility for domestic work as their work in the garment factory has encouraged their husbands to share the burden.
However, these women are a source of exploited labour and work intensely for a period of time and then move on, only to be replaced by a continuous supply of young women from the country side. The health risks of the low-skilled work and conflictions with married/family life tends to make the garment industry unsustainable for them over the long run. In perhaps a clumsy way it could be said that women are employed in the export-oriented industries to exploit the comparative advantages of their disadvantages – such as the low price of their labour, their lower bargaining power, and their docility compared to male workers. Studies indicate that garment workers, particularly female garment workers, generally are young (average age 19), unmarried, with little education or training (and thus little prospects of promotion), no prior work experience, of rural origin and from poor families. Thus their work will necessarily result in gender imbalances if precautionary measures are not undertaken.
This is indeed why one of the main objectives of the project my research team for development economists Christopher Woodruff and Rocco Macchiavello from the University of Warwick, is eliminating these gender imbalances arising from women’s employment in export-oriented garment industry.
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Women garment factory workers in Bangladesh
Current statistics show that female line-operators can earn approx- 60 % of their fellow male line-operators salaries, as the men tend to have the advantage of being employed in more technically skilled jobs whereas women are stuck in low-skilled jobs due to their relatively low level of education and training. In turn, women suffer the worst from poor working conditions because they hold low-skilled jobs where occupational hazards are greater due to overcrowding, poor ventilation and inadequate fire-prevention measures – in a meeting with Mr. Zahangir, a very committed Social Compliance Manager for Sainsbury’s in Dhaka told me that there are frequent cases of female workers being trapped in factories during extra hours at night where no chiefs/supervisors are present and many die from unprevented fire accidents. Moreover, as opposed to male workers, women are mostly employed in assembly-line oriented factory work, they have to seek permission for breaks, which the male supervisors often deny and whose authority the female operators are generally reluctant to disobey.
The most detrimental, and most tabooised, social impact of women’s employment in the export-oriented garment industry of Bangladesh is sexual violence and abuse, which the female workers at the bottom of the assembly-line work-chains are a particular high-risk group. Dhaka Police reports have shown that whereas, female garment workers account for only two to three percent of the total population of women in the metropolitan area of Dhaka, whereas they account for 11 percent of rape cases. Besides the exploitative nature of their work, workplace and supervisors/chiefs, this is partly due to their unsafe long commutes home to the poorer slum areas where they tend to reside. These rape cases make suicide rates among female garment factory workers shockingly high.
The key aim of the project that bilateral funders, my research team and I am coordinating here in Dhaka is to demonstrate that in order to successfully compete in the global apparel market, Bangladesh has to translate its comparative advantage of women’s cheap labor into sustainable competitive advantage. This will require skills-development, training, education and promotion of workers in the garment industry, notably to the disempowered female workers at the bottom. The purpose of our project is encourage factory owners to let their female Garment factory line workers join a bilaterally-funded and developed training program to become supervisors, which will then lead to their promotion, wage increase and reduced working hours – protecting both their labour rights and their socio-economic empowerment.
While this project seems like a very positive proposal, which should be regarded as harmless and only a minor intervention for facorty owners, we have been met with much ressistance during factory visits in Dhaka so far and only have a low number of 25 factories onboard. ‘Selling’ the project to these hot-shot bling-bling macho Directors has proven quite a challenge – and for me as a white female ‘salesman’ I have very little authority or say. As one Director shouted back at me: “if you train our female line-operators then they won’t obey the male chiefs in our factory anymore, and we won’t be able to control them this would be anarchy!”.
Driving through the countryside of Dhaka’s long roads of never-ending lines of factories, all with signs “we have no child labour” (no mention of female exploitation of course), can without much exaggeration compare to being on death row. A dead-end task.
What’s worse is that to convince the factory owners about their benefits in joining our project we need to use sly marketing-sales “ADDED VALUE” strategic language – always emphasising the productivity/efficiency/competitiveness-enhancing outcomes of the training program and how it will improve their reputation for major buyers like Tesco’s and Sainsbury’s. We enter their shiny offices all suited-up and smiling, try to establish a ‘business relationships’ with them while they serve us cookies and coca cola and brag about how great a company they are and how happy their workers are – whereas we have no clue what happens behind this scene after we leave the factory. I always have a hole-in-the-stomach feeling when I look into the windows overlooking the assembly lines where the workers all keep their heads down with emotionless facial expressions.
Nevertheless, I keep convincing myself that trying to appear to be ‘on their side’ when engaging with the factory directors instead of shoving a ‘social compliance and labour rights’ manifesto in their faces is a more effective way to approach the issue. These factories smack the door whenever they hear the slightest mention of “human rights”. In the middle of a meeting two factory co-directors started talking amongst each other in Bangla: “Bah, this is just another of those bloody human rights organizations who want to evaluate our workers well-being, they are only a danger to our business” – fortunately my Bangladeshi team co-worker was there to translate to me afterwards.