Compliance with The Ready Made Garments Factory Workers’ Demands Essential in Bangladesh Perspective
by Every year during the festival periods in Bangladesh Garments factory owners play a tug of war between Government and the workers. Some reasons are mere excuses, some are management inefficiencies. For a good industrial environmetn and global competitiveness, all parties needed to be satisfied.
Compliance with the Ready made Garments factory workers’ demands essential in Bangladesh Perspective.
Prepared by:
Md. Rezaul Karim, Assistant Professor, Southern University Bangladesh
The demands made by Ready made Garments factory workers’ leaders regarding payment of the workers’ wages for August (in full, festival allowance and other dues,) were to be made- a week before Eid-ul-Fitr, indeed deserve immediate attention on the part of the authorities concerned. According to the news reports, the leaders also demanded introduction of low-price shops for Ready made Garments factory workers, hike in their minimum wages, and an end to elimination of workers ‘without satisfactory reasons’. Besides, they have threatened to launch movement if their demands are not met in time.
As experts have commented on these issues many times that Ready made Garments factory sector tops all the industrial sectors of the country in terms of employment generation and export earning. As many as 4,500 readymade garment factories and their linkage industries and trading enterprises across the country involve millions of people, while this sector alone accounts for over 76 per cent of the country’s total export earning every year. Hence, a congenial atmosphere is a must for the sustenance of this crucial sector. Nonetheless, such an atmosphere requires good industrial relations between the employers and the workers of the sector. Regrettably, workers’ unrests that turn at times violent are a perennial problem in the Ready made Garments factory sector as the workers thereof are generally low-paid and deprived of trade union rights, albeit endorsed by the country’s constitution and the relevant conventions of the International Labour Organization. Allegations have it that a good number of Ready made Garments factory owners have predilections to keeping the workers’ wages as dues for months using tenuous excuses and resorting to repressive measures in order to quell the aggrieved workers’ protests. Worse still, successive governments, regardless of their political inclination, remain more often than not biased towards those errant owners.
Meanwhile, the situation aggravates during two Eids, i.e. Eid-ul-fitr and Eid-ul-Azha, as a section of the Ready made Garments factory owners apparently try to make grounds to not pay festival bonuses to workers. Unfortunately, on the eve of Eid-ul-Fitr this year as well, they appear to highlight their alleged ‘bad business’ in the backdrop of ‘fresh global recession’ and delay in getting incentives from the government to legitimize their probable failure to fulfill the workers’ demands. Be that as it may, the inability, if not unwillingness, of the readymade garment factory owners to respond positively to the workers’ demands, let alone pay their wage for August in full alongside festival allowance, is in no counts acceptable, as apprehensions are there that it could lead to workers’ unrests, deepening further the crisis of this sector. The government needs to realize that as the manager of the state it is responsible to ensure workers’ rights on the one hand and good industrial environment on the other. Thus, it immediately needs to take effective steps to make the Ready made Garments factory owners compliant with the workers’ demands in time.
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