What?

How do garment workers in Bangladesh first get started in the industry? Who introduces them? And how do they select a new factory to work at when the time has come to move on?

We developed this set of special questions with one of our partners and today we’re bringing you the answers. 

And this is just a reminder that if you or someone you know would like to submit a set of special questions to us, the channel is open and garment workers are ready to share. The questions can be broad or very industry-specific, like these questions were. We’d love to partner with you to develop a questionnaire which can help bring more aspects of garment workers’ stories to life.

Please feel free to email Dani Ortega (danielaortega@mfopps.org) back if you’d like to explore the potential of the Worker Diaries channel.

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

We’re happy to share with you a guest-written blog for this week’s Garment Worker Diaries update from Bangladesh. Our partner in the field, the South Asian Network on Economic Modeling (SANEM), offers up an interesting perspective on the newly proposed national budget for Bangladesh: What do garment workers know about budgets? Do they feel that the effects of national budgets positively impact their lives? And how wide of a social safety net do garment workers think the government should cast in times of crisis and joblessness?

For those who would like to read or share a Bangla-language version of the blog, please find it here.

This will be the first blog penned by SANEM under the current GWD initiative and we look forward to sharing more of their writing with you as the months go on.

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

This week’s Garment Worker Diaries blog is the second part in our focus on how COVID-19 lockdowns in Bangladesh might be affecting garment workers there.

Last week we looked at whether or not there had been any impact (in terms of travel time, cost, method of transport) on garment workers returning to work in the cities from their villages after Eid al-Adha while in the middle of a national lockdown. This week we stay within the cities to discuss workers’ feelings of safety in their factories; whether commuting within cities has been difficult; and how economically secure workers feel as COVID-19 and lockdown-induced uncertainty roams.

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

Our weekly Garment Worker Diaries surveys come in two parts: routine questions asked every week to help us establish baselines and spot trends; and special questions posed either by ourselves or asked on behalf of other stakeholders. Special questions are meant to help us better understand some specific aspect of garment workers’ lives. With a few dozen enumerators needing to interview 1,300 garment workers each week, it’s imperative that the length and format of each survey be appropriately crafted. That also means special questions only get to take up so much room in each survey.

This week’s blog uses survey data which come from special questions meant to specifically gauge how pandemic lockdowns in Bangladesh are affecting garment workers in everyday ways. We have been and will keep devoting room in our surveys to these types of questions so that garment workers can directly inform us of the challenges they are facing, without needing to go through or wait for any 3rd parties to do it.

This week we focus on holiday travel for Eid al-Adah. It seems that for those garment workers who commuted to the village and back in observance of Eid, a bit of a premium was paid in money, convenience and personal space.

We’ll keep sharing these updates with you as quickly as the data allow.

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