What?

Here is MFO’s latest post in our Garment Worker Diaries blog series on workerdiaries.org: Half a Year of COVID-19: What’s Next?

With six months of COVID-19 permeating daily life in Bangladesh, what we want to know is whether garment workers are getting by, or just barely getting by. That is the topic of this week’s GWD blog.

While many variables such as employment and wage rates are trending positively and upward, we’ve noticed that just this past month a slightly higher rate of workers reported household illnesses, and a slightly higher rate of workers reported factory-related employment issues, such as factory closures.

We are in the middle of a critical time for both data collection and analysis. The next few months and into early next year will add crucial chapters to this story. Please read the full blog and check back with us next week for more updates on the lives of garment workers. And especially, do let us know if there is anything about garment workers themselves that you’d like us to ask them. You can write your questions to us at info@mfopps.org

Here is MFO’s latest post in our Garment Worker Diaries blog series on workerdiaries.org: Employment and Factory Status Update

In April 2020, much of the RMG sector in Bangladesh shut down. The workers participating in the GWD study reported very few hours worked during that month.

The basic story workers are telling us is that by far May presented the most work-related challenges, indicating that factories themselves were also at their most strained in that same month. Subsequent months show the negative effects of COVID-19 dissipating rather rapidly however as workers reported far fewer instances of employment issues.

While the situation is not gloomy, neither is it rosy, as the rate of worker-reported employment issues ticked back up again in September. The remaining months in the year will tell us far more about what if any lingering impact COVID-19 has had on the industry.

Please check out the full blog and let us know if you have any questions, comments, concerns or ideas. And especially, do let us know if there is anything about garment workers themselves that you’d like us to ask them. You can write your questions to us at info@mfopps.org

Here is MFO’s latest post in our Garment Worker Diaries blog series on workerdiaries.org: Digital Wage Experience Revisited: What Have Women Workers Learned?

In May 2020 MFO and SANEM asked women garment workers in Bangladesh about their experiences with digital wage payments, and we asked them the same questions again in September. Because we are talking with the same workers each week, we are able to look at how the women workers switched their responses from May to September. In order to understand what women garment workers might have learned about digital finance, we matched up all the women who answered our questions in both months—457 in total.

This tactic is a little different for this week’s blog because we focus on a specific subset of our respondents to see how their behavior has changed over time. In addition to drilling down into the data we apply some demographic analysis, another new approach for this blog series. The analysis produces some very interesting correlations between education, age, and acquisition of digital skills. However, we note that further analysis is needed to see exactly which demographic variables might be at play.

Read the full post to get the whole story!

Since May 2020 MFO has been publishing a blog almost every week with updates from our Diaries interviews with 1,300 garment workers in Bangladesh. The blogs cover a wide variety of topics including:

• Wage digitization,
• Health of workers,
• Impact of Covid-19 on various aspects of their lives
• Financial tools

You can find a list of the blogs from May to September below. Also please visit our dashboard to take a deep dive into the data we have collected.

Wage payments and digitization

• Alleviating Digital Headaches
• Mixing it Up: The Co-existence of Cash and Digital Financial Services
• Gender and Wage Digitization
• Eid Bonus Payments
• Shift to Digital Wage Payments from April to May
• Who got paid in April

Health

• Health Checkup on Garment Workers  

Impact of Covid-19

• Migration and Remittances During Covid-19
• Two months in: the impact of Covid-19 on workers
• Three months in: back to work in the time of Covid-19
• Four months on and business as usual during Covid-19/
• Working Through the Pandemic, Five Months In
• Covid-19 Safety Measures in the Factories

Inside Garment Workers’ Households

• Another Look Inside Garment Workers Households, July 2020
• A Look Inside a Garment Worker’s Household, April to June 2020
• Household Gender Dynamics

Financial Tools

• The Cost of Credit
• An Analysis of Remittances