This week’s Garment Worker Diaries blog updates the project through the end of January 2021. In January, garment workers in Bangladesh worked more hours and made more money than in any other month since the COVID-19 pandemic began. And, these numbers largely track with the numbers we were seeing during this same time in 2019 and into 2020.
We realize this could imply that everything is going great for garment workers…we aren’t implying that. What we are saying is that the workers in our representative sample are as employed and earning as much money as they normally would. No one disputes that “as usual” is very far from ideal on a number of metrics (work hours, pay, illness, food insecurity, educational spending for children, and housing to name a few things we track).
Next week we are going to do our due diligence and zoom in on the factories in our study sample to see if there is any distinction in employment resiliency between those factories that are brand-facing and those that aren’t (we define brand-facing in this week’s blog). This will hopefully inform the current discussion about whether it is just “Tier 1” factories (think: larger with more money) that are managing to stay afloat compared to “Tier 2” and “Tier 3” factories (think: smaller with less money). It could be the case that workers in Tier 2 and 3 factories are not experiencing life as usual, and if that’s the case we need to find out.
We also hope you’ll check out our most recent #OpenDiaries post on Instagram. We asked garment workers what job benefits they wish they could demand, and how many of them have health insurance. And remember, you can always submit your own questions you’d like us to ask the workers. Just send an email to [email protected] to reach the workers.
