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Excess Work Hours Among Garment Workers in Bangladesh, Part Two

As the European Union continues its work to define, codify and enforce due diligence directives in international procurement, certain aspects of manufacturing suppliers’ business practices will likely start being scrutinized in novel ways. In this week’s blog we look at the issue of the relationship between excess work hours and forced labor, leveraging the strength of the Diaries methodology to ask workers questions that speak to the policy dialogue that is on-going in Europe and integrating their answers with the data we track weekly.

We find that most garment workers, already stretched thin working excess hours just to earn a decent living wage, couldn’t turn down the offer of overtime hours even if they wanted to. And we find that the less choice they say they have the more likely they are to have worked excess hours. These results are troubling, and we hope policy-makers and brands selling in Europe will take notice.

As always, you can send any questions you have for MFO, SANEM, the workers or about the project to questions@workerdiaries.org.

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