Stories Beneath Needle: Understanding Ready Made Garment Workers of Bangladesh

In Bangladesh, around 4 million garment workers are working in more than five thousand garment factories all around the country. Most of the factories are situated in Dhaka and Chittagong divisions in Bangladesh along with the membership of BGMEA (Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exports Association) and BKMEA (Bangladesh Knitwear Manufacturers and Exports Association). Among these garments, there are compliant garments that follow the code of conduct of workers’ rights, and the rest of them are non-compliant garments that often violate the code of conduct of workers’ rights. In this particular scenario, workers’ have different experiences in their workplaces, which has significant impacts on their lifestyle.<br><br>This study explores to understand garments workers' lifestyles briefly, through conducting qualitative interviews with 55 garment workers (32 workers were female and 23 workers were male) from 40 different garments in 6 different groups. In this report, we discuss the several areas of workers' life, which represent the scenarios of all garment workers, with the support of the literature review, and the analysis of quantitative and qualitative data. We identified the challenges and qualities of workers' daily life, and suggest a possible tool that might make their life easy and better.<br><br>We examine five keynote areas of workers' life as social connectivity, financial stability, technology integration, job environment, and healthcare. The notable findings are:<br><br>• The majority of the workers don’t have a significant educational background; especially, female workers are lagging. These workers are migrated from low-income regions such as northern and southern regions of Bangladesh.<br><br>• Workers have very good social connections with neighbors, co-workers, house owners, shop keepers, and local mobile financing agents.<br><br>• Workers have a very low income, starting from BDT 8000/month (equivalent to USD 94.22) with numerous areas of expenses, including kids’ education cost, monthly expenditures cost, house rent, etc. On the other hand, they struggle to save money on monthly basis with such expenses for<br>lacking proper management of their salary where sometimes they make loans for expenses.<br><br>• The adaptation of technology usage is very less in proportion to the availability of technology. They all are familiar with and have access to both feature phones and smartphones, and usage of basic calling applications is common.<br><br>• Workers often struggle in getting a new job because of the traditional recruitment process. Apart from that, workers of non-compliant garments have several negative experiences while workers from compliant garments have very friendly and comfortable experiences in their workplaces.<br><br>• The majority of the workers are not aware of personal healthcare and they avoid spending money on visiting doctors during their illness.<br><br>To date, no such study explored these dimensions to understand the workers' life in a particular sector. This study comes up with a question that, do we able to support workers to get a better lifestyle? The findings of this report motivate us to suggest and design an easy user-friendly Bengali crowdsourcing platform that might reduce the basic daily complexities of the workers.