Apparel Online Bangladesh Magazine October Issue 2018 | Page 54

SUSTAINABLE BD THE LATEST NEWS HAVE YOUR SAY For the latest news on apparel and textile, make sure that you visit https://apparelresources.com/top-news/ Write to Apparel Resources, B-32, South Extension-1, New Delhi (110049), India or email: [email protected] Women RMG workers in Bangladesh deserve a better deal! Approximately 80 per cent of the garment workers globally are women. If China has more than 70 per cent of female garment workers, Bangladesh, which trails China as the second-largest apparel exporter globally, has 85 per cent female workers employed in its garment manufacturing industry. Despite the fact that garment production has overwhelmingly been women-driven since the onset of mass manufacturing, women workers who are highly-valued for their dedication, work ethics and sincerity, more often than not are victims of gender inequality and violence as well! As per a new study conducted by Shojag (Awaken), a coalition of Bangladesh Legal Aid and Services Trust (BLAST), BRAC, Christian Aid, Naripokkho and SNV, 22 per cent of female garment workers in Bangladesh apparel industry face physical, psychological, and sexual harassment at workplace or on the way to/from the workplace, but 67 per cent of them refrain from seeking support from bodies like Violence Against Women Prevention Committee at Workplace due to lack of trust. What’s more, 86 per cent of the respondents reportedly mentioned male supervisors as the main perpetrators. The baseline study by Shojag has been carried out between March and June this year among 382 female garment workers from Savar, Ashulia and Gazipur areas, the findings of which were made public recently. “Any type of violence, mental, verbal or psychological, is a crime and is unacceptable,” observed Jason Belanger – Bangladesh Country Director of SNV Netherlands Development Organization, which is a part of the coalition. Even though the High Court Division of the Bangladesh Supreme Court had issued guidelines in 2009 on sexual harassment, but there seem to be not many takers of it. As per Mahbuba Akhter, Deputy Director (Advocacy and Communications) of BLAST, most of the factories were not complying with High Court’s directive to make complaint committees in workplaces functional. Of late, there have been many such reports pertaining to workplace violence and gender-based discrimination. Recently Human Rights Watch has documented sexual harassment in garment factories of Cambodia, Bangladesh, Burma, and Pakistan and found that abuses were rife, legal protections did not exist or were weakly enforced, and efforts to audit factories or monitor for harassment were ineffective. Things are no different in supplier factories manufacturing for the big brands either. Based on interviews with about 250 workers in 60 Walmart supplier factories in Bangladesh, Cambodia, an