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In this week’s Garment Worker Diaries blog, Update on Garment Workers’ Health: Menstrual Health, Family Planning, and Covid-19 Vaccine Awareness, MFO focuses on women’s menstrual health and family planning.

Additionally, we present survey data from a new set of questions we are asking respondents concerning their awareness of a COVID-19 vaccination. Going forward, we will be asking respondents every week whether or not they have received the vaccine, and reporting the results back to you as regularly as we can via social media and our blog series.

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.

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.

In this week’s Garment Worker Diaries blog, Revisited: COVID-19 Precautions in Bangladesh’s Garment Factories, we take a look back at the COVID-19 precautions factories were enacting in the early days of the pandemic, and compare those data to the results from another set of survey questions we just posed to workers in December.

Based on the workers’ observations, factories have relented somewhat in their enforcement of COVID-19 safety related practices over the past seven months. Garment workers too seem slightly less attuned to COVID-19 precautionary culture.

We also asked garment workers some new questions in December we hadn’t asked them in May, which included gauging their fear of losing their job due to COVID-19.

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.

In our first Garment Worker Diaries blog for 2021, Boarding the Digital Lifeboat, we focus on the support, and perceived support, that garment workers in Bangladesh received last year as their wages were digitized. In the Spring of 2020 the COVID-19 pandemic convinced the Bangladeshi government to send out monetary assistance payments to garment-producing factories, which would be passed on to workers. Among other factors, social distancing requirements obliged that these payments be paid out digitally, keeping workers from having to stand in line in close-quartered factories to receive cash payments. The Spring of 2020 would have marked the first time most of these workers received a digital wage instead of cash.

Businesses and governments can do a lot to ease that transition, and to instill trust in new processes. Our data suggest that there were support systems in place, but that perhaps the systems were not comprehensive enough to reach all workers; or, that the systems were not convincing enough to win the buy-in from all workers.

In a time when further government support for the garment industry (paid out digitally) may or may not be needed, there are important lessons to learn here about how factory managers and government officials can ensure that workers both acknowledge the assistance they are receiving, and are able to feel empowered to take part in a new way of life.