Bangladesh’s $18 billion garment industry provides opportunities for millions of poor, illiterate women. It also places their lives at risk, as demonstrated by the collapse of the building outside Dhaka that killed more than 800 workers. Touted as a symbol of empowerment by Sheikh Hasina, the country’s female prime minister, the garment business is the only road out of grinding poverty for many. “If you look at industrial history, for better or worse, this is what an early industrial revolution looks like,” says Pietra Rivoli, a professor at Georgetown University and author of The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy. Bangladesh is “still a desperately poor country, and we shouldn’t minimize what a job with a steady paycheck means to a poor woman.”
The garment industry has offered a rare glimmer of growth in a country once described by former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger as a “basket case.” In 2005, global trade agreements limiting the number of garments individual countries could export to the European Union and the U.S. started to expire. The World Bank predicted Bangladesh’s garment exports would wilt under an onslaught of cheap Chinese goods. Instead, Bangladesh’s exports tripled between 2005 and 2010 and are expected to triple again by 2020, to almost $50 billion a year, consultant McKinsey estimates. The secret is low wages. Average monthly pay in 2009 for workers in Dhaka was $47, vs. $235 in Shenzhen and $100 in Hanoi, according to the Japan External Trade Organization. By 2010, Bangladesh had about 5,000 garment factories, second only to China and more than in Indonesia and Vietnam.
Garment makers “are undercutting each other over $2 billion to $3 billion of new business each year,” says Kasra Ferdows, a professor of operations management at Georgetown who has advised retailers such as Zara. “It creates a dog-eat-dog business, where a lot of people on the margins will cut corners.”
For Pakhi Begum, the garment boom couldn’t have come at a better time. In 2008 she and her husband, Jahangir Fakir, ran out of money. Living in a rural district called Khulna, Fakir had struggled to make a living, and Dhaka offered escape. Both got jobs in the garment industry, at a company called Hallmark Group. Pay was low, and the hours stretched into the night. Four years later, Hallmark was investigated for financial fraud. Its owner pleaded guilty, and it was shut down.
Pakhi (like many Bangladeshis, she goes by only one name; begum is an honorific) ended up at Ether Textiles. At least six days a week, on the fifth floor of Rana Plaza, where Ether was a tenant, she would hunch over a sewing machine up to 14 hours a day, making jeans and shorts. Unbeknownst to Pakhi, the building was illegal, its owner a gun-toting politician who had obtained permits from the mayor, instead of the building authorities, to build the glass-fronted factory complex on a swamp. Despite efforts to reach them, executives from Ether Textiles weren’t available to comment on working conditions.
By 2011, about 12 percent of women in the country between 15 and 30 years of age worked in the industry, according to a study by Yale University. Pay was 13 percent more than in other industries, and factories favored women, who were seen as better at sewing—and more compliant. Perhaps most important to Bangladeshi women, the Yale researchers found, was that the dream of getting better jobs (secretarial or even managerial) within the garment industry was motivating more girls to pursue their studies.
Yet working conditions did not improve and wages remained flat from 2000 to 2010, according to a survey conducted by War on Want, a British nonprofit. Some 70 percent of the 988 workers surveyed had been verbally abused by their bosses, and more than 40 percent had been beaten. With mostly female employees overseen by male managers, sexual harassment was commonplace: A third said they had been touched inappropriately. Punishments for not meeting quotas included being forced to stand on tables for hours. A third of those surveyed said they were threatened with further humiliations, such as undressing in front of co-workers. More than half of the women interviewed were not allowed to take their legally guaranteed maternity leave of 100 days. The majority worked until the last weeks of pregnancy and were often fired when they left to give birth.
Source: businessweek
