In this week’s Garment Worker Diaries blog, December 2020 Update, MFO updates the study through the end of December 2020. The good news is that the data we have received from our respondents in Bangladesh indicate that garment workers there finished the year healthier, less hungry, and working and earning more than was the case during the beginning of the pandemic this past Spring.
However, calls are still mounting for the Bangladeshi government to ready itself for another round of stimulus funding for garment producers as a buffer against still-lagging apparel orders. We don’t yet know if the readymade garment sector will face a second production crisis, but we’ll continue interviewing garment workers to find out what the word is on the ground.
While 2021 might provide some kind of return to normalcy, there are still challenges to progress in the new year, such as the gender wage gap, which we discuss in this week’s blog. Beyond anything, MFO hopes that 2021 allows us all to get back to the work of ensuring fairer wages, better treatment, and more supply-chain transparency for garment workers everywhere.
If there is anything in the blog that we did not cover and which you’d like to know about, please write us your thoughts at questions@workerdiaries.org. We can also pose questions directly to the workers themselves if there is anything specific you’d like more information about.
