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What financial inclusion obstacle are we supporting low-income people to navigate? What financial capability are we attempting to enable or develop? What – gives you access to MFO’s select publications organized around the content of a financial education curriculum or training manual. You can also gain access to the full set of Global Financial Education Program materials here.
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Lockdown Effects on Garment Workers in Bangladesh, Part 2
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
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Buses, Microbuses, and Rickshaws During COVID-19 Lockdowns
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
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Workplace Contracts, Part 2
We’re returning to the subject of workplace contracts and conditions in this week’s Garment Worker Diaries blog. This week we focus on contract terms, workers’ concerns about dismissal, and their concerns about the health and safety of their workplaces.
In addition, we’re following up on our blog from last week with an update on the current COVID-19 situation in Bangladesh. Two disturbing findings from our interviews last week are that more than half the workers felt uncomfortable going to work during the lockdown (remember, the lockdown ended early for the RMG sector) and, also, more than half reported not being given a mask to wear at work.
We will be tracking these data over the next few weeks and will be trying to turn them around in as near-real-time as possible so that you get the most accurate depiction of the scene in the RMG sector in Bangladesh, directly from garment workers themselves.
As always, please send any questions you have for MFO, SANEM, the workers or about the project to questions@workerdiaries.org
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Lockdowns and COVID-19 Surge: What Would YOU Like to Ask Garment Workers?
This week’s Garment Worker Diaries blog post sees us taking a step back from the data to frame the discussion we’ll be having over the next few weeks about COVID-19 lockdowns in Bangladesh and their effect on garment workers.
Bangladesh has recently been one of the harder-hit countries in terms of the spread of COVID-19, and it also has one of the lowest rates of vaccination among countries globally. Garment workers themselves are being vaccinated at very low rates.
Amidst full lockdowns, partial lockdowns, factory production restrictions and the ever-evolving public health directives, it can be easy to lose sight of the people most affected by uncertainty. Even though some times are more uncertain than others, the Garment Worker Diaries methodology demands that we listen to low-income and marginalized communities in uncertain times and “normal” times. That’s what we’ve been doing in Bangladesh for the past four years. This way, we get the full story, directly from workers.
While we wait for that story to unfold in the coming weeks, take a moment to think about the workers returning to work in factories. They will be busy making our clothes while the pandemic is in full flight throughout Bangladesh.
Please remember that you can always submit questions for the workers by writing to questions@workerdiaries.org
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What I Learned from the #OpenDiaries Campaign
The Garment Worker Diaries blog posts are back and this week we’re spotlighting the #OpenDiaries social media campaign as told to us through the eyes of one of the campaign’s co-managers, Evey Gutierrez, our outgoing communications intern. We’ll miss Evey being a part of our team. She has helped lay the groundwork in Bangladesh for what we hope will be an important and ongoing component of all worker diaries initiatives in every country.
What Evey points out and what the #OpenDiaries campaign has helped us to understand is that allowing workers to share their own words and their own images with the recipients of their data brings vitality to what would otherwise be a one-sided discussion. The purpose of Worker Diaries and the #OpenDiaries campaign is to establish a conversation between workers and other stakeholders. We can ask the people who make our clothes what they think about climate change, or about whether they find joy in their work, and those people can and will answer us. They can also prompt us to think about their work and life situations in different ways with the questions they invite us to ask and the photos they send us.
If you haven’t seen our most recent #OpenDiaries post yet, we encourage you to scroll through the slides to get a worker’s perspective on garment industry solidarity. We also encourage you to follow us on our Worker Diaries Instagram page to make sure you never miss a post.
Thanks to everyone who has followed us so far and submitted a question (you can always submit more questions by writing to questions@workerdiaries.org). Thanks to Evey for helping to establish such an important conversation. And perhaps most of all, thanks to the workers for sharing their lives with us and continuing that conversation.
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