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As the European Union continues its work to define, codify and enforce due diligence directives in international procurement, certain aspects of manufacturing suppliers’ business practices will likely start being scrutinized in novel ways. In this week’s blog we look at the issue of the relationship between excess work hours and forced labor, leveraging the strength of the Diaries methodology to ask workers questions that speak to the policy dialogue that is on-going in Europe and integrating their answers with the data we track weekly.

We find that most garment workers, already stretched thin working excess hours just to earn a decent living wage, couldn’t turn down the offer of overtime hours even if they wanted to. And we find that the less choice they say they have the more likely they are to have worked excess hours. These results are troubling, and we hope policy-makers and brands selling in Europe will take notice.

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

In mid-April the Bangladeshi government quietly increased the legal workweek for garment workers in Bangladesh to 72 hours per week, up from a previous legal maximum of 60 hours per week. The new limit allows for eight hours of regular work for six days a week, plus a total of up to four hours of overtime work per day. For many garment workers in Bangladesh, a 72-hour workweek is simply the reality they have become used to, in part because the wages they earn during a regular 48-hour workweek are not enough to subsist on.

The Bangladeshi government’s response to this situation is an acknowledgement of the fact that an ever-increasing share of workers in the RMG sector in Bangladesh are working excess hours. This confirms what workers have been telling us during their weekly interviews, when they report how many hours they worked in the previous week—again showing the value of the Diaries as a way to understand what is going on in the RMG sector in Bangladesh. 

This week’s blog documents the rise in the share of workers working excess hours since August 2020 and serves as part one in a series which will focus on this trend. Coming on the heels of our Living Wage, Living Planet series (Part One and Part Two), we believe these work hours data further demonstrate that the current way the global apparel supply chain operates is unsustainable.

As always, you can 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 brings the project up to date in Bangladesh through April 2022.

Ramadan was last month, and many garment workers ended their observance by taking leave from their factories to get a head start celebrating Eid al-Fitr. There was also additional income from advance payments in April, which meant that some of the quality of life indicators we track saw their best measurements in at least the past two years. We also saw increased transfer activity as workers took money home for the holidays to give to their families.

The equation seems simple: better pay for garment workers equals better lives.

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

This week’s blog forms the second part of our “Living Wage, Living Planet” series. In part one of the series, we focused on the link between a living wage and a living planet: if garment workers were paid more, then they could work less, thus contributing to a greener, safer world through reduced carbon emissions via their jobs in garment factories. This shift to higher pay and fewer hours would also hopefully coincide with brands transitioning on their own towards more sustainable garment manufacturing practices.

In part two, we get into the details and reveal just how much more garment workers in Bangladesh would need to be paid just to have a minimally decent life. Part of living a decent life would mean they could also stop working excess hours at their factories, which is currently the only choice they have if they want to earn just enough to eat, pay rent, and buy life’s other essentials.

The open space between workers’ current pay and what our calculations suggest they ought to be paid is very wide, but we don’t think it’s an impossible gap to close. All of us living on this planet have a part to play, and different stakeholders have different roles. Garment workers have done their part by sharing their data with us. It’s our turn to take the next step.

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